Inspiration for animation fans, students and professionals
Vivienne To speaks at SIGGRAPH Sydney
Vivienne To is a concept artist and illustrator currently working at Animal Logic in Sydney.
She spoke at a recent Sydney SIGGRAPH event and stunned the audience with her brilliant portfolio and inspiring story that led her from student to professional artist.
One of the coolest ideas Vivienne came up with while studying at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts was to make her own “art of” book.
In her mind, she always aspired to be in an “art of” book for an animated feature film, so why not create one while she was a student.
The result was a fantastic sixty page book, and helped her land jobs working on movies such as Sucker Punch, Legends of the Guardians and what was then known as Justice League of America.
Here are some of her key insights:
Everyone worries they’ll be discovered as a fraud
Doubting your own ability at the start of your career is normal.
In fact, it could be healthy.
Vivienne was careful to work as quickly and as hard as she could in her junior roles to help ensure future work.
Being creative on someone else’s schedule is hard
When you’re a student – you can create whenever you like.
Once you turn pro – you can’t wait for the muse to show up. You put your head down and get to work.
Taking all the subjects you didn’t like in art school is great preparation for doing all the unglamorous jobs when you get hired.
Push an idea too far – and then back off
Vivienne was convinced it was much better to take a concept design to its extreme first, and then come back if you need to.
In her words, you didn’t want to leave a design wondering whether you could have made it more expressive, or more caricatured, or more dramatic.
Do what you can to do good work with good people
When asked whether Vivienne had done work for free, she replied that she had in her early career, but that she always tried to applied a rule to the jobs she’d accepted.
- Is the work good?
- Are the people good?
- Is the money good?
If you can’t answer “yes” to at least two of those questions, then you should carefully consider your next step.
Overall, it was a great night.
Can’t wait to see more of Vivienne’s work and how it translates to the big screen.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Phil Willis on March 4, 2011 at 7:51 am, and is filed under Inspiration. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
