Jobs I did this year and some musical collaborations

Today I want to let you folks know what has been slowing my ongoing projects.

To do that, I need to tell you about my jobs.
Starting the year 2011, I had a part time job with the University of Bradford which I did for about 3 months. I was the teacher's assistant during lab sessions for the 2d animation module. That was an excellent opportunity for me to meet with the majority of first year students and get to know their work. I helped the class with anything technical Flash cs4, also helped with constructive feedback on animation when asked to give such.

My other job with university was as an open day assistant. That basically sounds like advertising university to people who are thinking of signing up for it. But what it really was - assisting people in their decision to pick a university
; answering questions about accommodation, on going modules, chances one might get to get industry jobs. The tuition fees have tripled this year thanks to the UK government.If you want to work in USA though as a CG artist, then you really do need the diploma to get the work visa.
Education is a topic by itself, which I am going to postpone for some other time.


Then in March this year, I got a job with Cogworks Studios !
Work there continued to end of June- almost half a year. Unfortunately I cant post anything done there because of the disclosure agreement.I did the graphics and animation on two iphone games, using inkscape,toonboom studio and then Adobe Illustrator.




Some time during that period I applied for an intern ship at a couple of places. One of them- Disney Interactive invited me to an interview. A week after that I got a call confirming that the position is mine. There were over 100 candidates from the uk and only two placements.
From what I gather, the thing that gave me advantage over the other candidates was not so much the showreel and the cv as much as my game pitch and ideas.
Signing the one year contract ,I found a disclosure agreement with the size of a book. You will understand if I don't write (or say) anything about my work there. :)

So all I can do now is write about past projects. Here are some of the ones from this year- before starting work at Disney.




The sound assignment
For this assignment I worked with Thomas Mcfadden. The task was to put together an animatic with sound and music. Tom made the animatic. I made the music and helped with the sound effects. What you'll hear is the result of a couple of hours in the uni's sound lab. The music is really an improvisation- stuff made at the spot. They have a bunch of really nice one octave M-audio keyboards there, hooked to mac computers with garage band and Logic.

Tom has an excellent sense of humour and voice acting talent. He's doing all of the characters btw. You might see me doing some cartoon project with him next year ;)

And while on the subject of Music, there was another project that I took part in. A group of final year students from my university just finished an xna game, called

Steamsunk:

They needed music for it. So this time I decided that I want to work with a friend on it. I got Preslav Jordanov assigned to the project. I really needed him to take charge of this one, because I didnt understand the music software really well. He's also more into guitars, while I personally prefer pianos and rpg music. My contribution to this was in adding more progressions to the track, also the boss battle bit.

If you would like to hear more of my music, there is an online gallery where i keep most of the melodic doodles.
http://soundcloud.com/blurymind