Starting at AnimSchool

In the end of last year I took all of my half baked university animation projects that I could use and gave them some polish. Here is the demo reel that was compiled out of them and submitted to Animschool:


todorImreorov- Animschool application video
4 or 5 hours after I submitted this, I was accepted in the 3d character animation program.

Now you may ask yourself- why did I apply at another animation school when in fact I just graduated from The University of Bradford - 3d computer animation bachelor degree- with a first class honors in 3d animation? I even got an award from the university- for excellence in education.

The reason is simple. The University of Bradford is an excellent place, where you get to learn many of the aspects of the entire pipeline of 3d animation and cinema/media theory. You can not however specialize in one thing- that being character animation - the thing at the end of the pipeline. 

The University gave me the materials to do so on my own (the library and the software), but not the time -

 in every single 3d animation class we had to model the character, build the rig, optionally texture, build the background,etc etc. Leaving a week or two for animating. 

Final year was also full of too many projects to tackle. That was partly my own fault too.

So I came out of university with a lot of half baked animation shots and the SODA TRIP project- half finished as well. I didn't get to learn and practice a lot of the theory that I still need in order to consider my animation showreel worthy of a good job application.

Some old progress on the Soda Trip project - cartoony character texturing.
Note that Soda Trip is still under development - as a hobby project!

Animschool is a prestigious online course, ran by Dreamworks, Disney, Blue sky, Pixar and other big studio animators. It's a school that doesn't let you graduate if your showreel is not at a level that makes you employable. They have strict quality control and reputation - with complete focus on animation. No rigging or modelling (for the "animate characters" course, they also have a separate "build characters" course too).

From now on I am going to be placing my focus on graduating from Animschool with a better animation showreel. You will start to see more animation work related posts in the future. I know that recently I have been posting a lot of general 3d and even game/software design related stuff.
Yes, the name of this blog is animation diary after all. :)

Here are some of the other prestigious online courses for 3d character animation:

Animation Mentor- The oldest of 3d animation courses. Founded by Pixar animators.
IAnimate- Highly competitive course with a lot of good rep. This was a close call for me. They have a great "game animation" class that focuses on animation for video games.

They are all excellent choices. I went with Animschool out of a hunch really. It's probably best to research them yourself and see the differences before picking one. Please don't ask me for opinion on which is the best. They are all really really good, but also expensive and not that easy to get into. Also I can't really compare them without being in all. This is a highly subjective matter.

And finally here is something I made while playing with Renoise DAW. It's a small music piece made for fun and to learn Renoise.

Welcome to my diary

Hi there. My name is Todor and I am studying Computer animation at Bradford university.

I have chosen this course for obvious reasons probably. It is simply the artistic process that fascinates me. I want to be a part of such a process,or be a driving force behind it. This certainly does not mean that my ultimate goal is to work at Pixar or something like that . I just want to work and love that work,because it is interesting. Be it a computer animation or a video game.

My professional background is a fairly short one. Before this university,I used to work at a small Studio back in my country. I got the job as a flash animator,because a friend's uncle knew that I'm good with software. So I went there and they gave me a short storyboard and the library for the production.They made me sign a contract. Two weeks later I knew how to use Flash cs3 and my first 3 minute scene was ready. The production supervisor at the studio first devastated me with his frame-by-frame review of what-was-wrong-with-it and then just praised it for being well played,timed and animated. In the following months I found out how great it is to work with a team of people and how well is that job paid. I found out how to create my own animation libraries, do much more for less time by reusing and remixing,rearranging keyframes. This involved almost no drawing, it was just moving the puppets,telling them what to do,lipsync and so on. At the end of the year the work dried up. My parents saw that I can earn by using my head and decided that I should study animation professionally. So here I am, trying to fit in. Maya is pretty new to me.

I always loved the idea of the digital puppet and the control that the animator has. It is my dream to move to 3d- 2d flash is restraining and not as powerful. Maya must be my new toybox now.

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things that I've done professionally :

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2008-2009- worked for Asikart studio as a flash animator. Mainly used Flash cs3 and Photoshop cs3.I wasn't supposed to draw anything- only animate.All the animations that I made were my own- I could never get the ones from the chara library to fit the storyboard.The character libraries that I had to work with were a complete mess.I had to spend a lot of time fixing and rearranging it,cutting limbs and moving symbols...It was made by some Chinese studio and even the layers were unreadable.. I got my paychecks at the end of each episode or branch of episodes- Scoyo and Bio- two german productions for kids learning interactive animations...I think that you can google scoyo.

2009- Before applying for university, I went to a classic animation course (dont let the name fool you- it was drawing on paper mostly) for a couple of months, which helped me better my drawing skills and have some fun with my old boss Robert Popov.

2009- I made series of illustrations for the cover of a book by Alistair Hayes- "The Salmon Road" . This experience helped me understand the shortcomings of CMYK colour mode and the importance of keeping colours in gamut range.

I got payed 100 euros for my work on the book cover. The book is not very popular, but it is still a published book.

2007,2009- freelance- worked as a website translator- translated tourism-related websites, while being careful not to mess up their html/php tags. I used to get a lot of paychecks through paypal. Some of the money that I earned from this job and other part-time works,I saved for the laptop and wacom tablet that I bought. I bought it myself- no mommy,no daddy heheh

2004-2007 - worked on the development of vector linux. You can see my nickname in the installer's credits- "blurymind" . I worked as a beta tester,packager and graphics design (custom icons,themes,application buttons..) This one was of course voluntary ...

Links

my Flickr Photo stream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8837376@N07/

My deviantart:

http://blurymind.deviantart.com