Kevin was at Framestore since graduation and is now a cloth
simulation artist over at Bluesky. We both graduated the same year but he's
been able to climb the ladder much faster. Here's an interview I had with him.
Andrew: Could you walk me through your hiring process at
Bluesky? How long did it
take from the time you applied, to the interview, and
awarding of a
position? Did you do anything special with presenting your
portfolio? Were
you nervous when they called you for an interview? What was
your initial
reaction when Bluesky awarded you a position? Did you apply
specifically for
cloth simulation artist or were you going for another
position originally? I
noticed on your Youtube channel, it's mostly crowd
simulation, particle, and
mel scripting reels! Do you also have a cloth simulation
reel hidden away?
Kevin: The hiring process with Blue Sky was rather out of
the blue. A recruiter found my reel and resume link online. He was acting like
he wasn't sure where but out of all the places I put up links and my reel it
had to have been found at youtube/vimeo.
But after submitting my resume and ncloth / nucleus related
work to Blue Sky, through that recruiter, it took maybe a week or so before
they set up an interview and got me in there the week after that. (figure about
2 weeks to get my work in to the date of my interview. Mainly because there was
a nasty snow storm and kinda destroyed wed-friday of the first week.)
I was asked by the recruiter to put up a single page related
to the job I was going for. The page had some stills from a few vids including
ncloth and a few youtube vids that I would be able to show real easily.
Definitely a good idea to make things streamline and sleek for people to view.
As for being nervous, I've had such good luck with getting
contacts and getting call backs that I don't know that I've ever been really
nervous. Even when I meet "famous people" has happened only a few
times. I don't really care, they are people like any of us, and the last thing
they need are more people falling head over heals at the sight of the
person.... not like I'd do that anyway. Can't think of anyone I might do that
to, maybe les claypool, stephen hawkings, and Michio Kaku(a great physicist
teaching at NYU right now.)
I got in and showed my other reels to Stich (Keith
Stichweh), my lead, and he watched it all, told me to say some stuff about my
work as it showed (too much to say in only 2 minutes hah). He got a few of the
guys in to ask me questions about my work, then put me on the spot and showed
everyone in my dept. That was pretty cool, but was afraid of what after math
might occur from all my stuff just being put out there in the open. Had a little
bit of a waverly voice, but not really that nervous, kinda more like all these
great 3d guys and I didn't know where I stood compared to them, thinking, hey,
this is Blue Sky after all. Turned out I had something I could add to their
dept.
As for hidden nclothness, my newest reel has one bit of
ncloth but nothin crazy. I had shown a few screen shots from my friends thesis
that I set up snow on the ground so as the characters would walk they would
press in the snow and that was all ncloth. I also told them about some RND
stuff I couldn't show because it was locked down at Framestore because the
movie Salt is yet to come out.
Andrew: How is it like working at Bluesky? Did you have to
do any training or
test when you started, or were you thrown right into fire?
Was the learning
curve a difficult hurdle to overcome coming straight from
school or was it a
smooth transition? What are the work hours like, and how is
the work
atmosphere? What are some of the neat things you have learnt
from other
artists that you have worked with or seen?
Kevin: Blue Sky is a blast, although the major crunch work
has yet to really hit, the work I have is setting up sims and then having like
30min-an hour to play ping pong or pool. It gets really tiring, I must tell ya.
Ha.
Well, the first week there was getting used to the pipeline
and an hour training once a day till I got used to all the tools. Everyone here
is so knowledgeable it was well worth it to expand my knowledge base.
The training was a definite help to a smooth transition into
the burning hot kitchen at the time, that since has cooled to luke warm.
But I can't really mention what neatness I learned. But I
can say everyone has a diverse knowledge base and can contribute a lot in their
own areas, and have in situations.
Andrew: Are there any learning resources or tips you can
give to students who
want to become a cloth simulation artists when the school
only offer 3d
training in all the fields except dynamics?
Kevin: Uhhhhhhhh, hmmmmmm, cloth sim takes a lot of time to
get processed, soooo ... learn to have patience with the definite need to rerun
sims of the same thing multiple times, hah. Frankly, just try to jump into
messing with settings on the ncloth shape and you can begin to see what the
different settings do.
But that is what my school was like, character / animation
driven. That they'd rather a nice story rather than a cool looking design and
feel. There were some specialty classes, but when you go up to a teacher and
ask "Should I take your class?" for them to tell you "You know,
if you took my class, it might just be a waste of your time, you already know
more than what I go over in the class." That was from a teacher by the
name of Vic Fina II, a true generalist, modeling, animation, FX, dynamics
My teacher, Vic, who I wanted to take that class with was a
great resource, having worked at CBS, NBC, CNN, and now hes at the John Stuart
show now as the resident lower third, any graphics really at all guy. I would
go to him to ask about dynamics and we would go into a lot of ideas, both of us
learning off each other and the other like ... two students that were willing
to learn things outside of the curriculum. (Both of which are now staff at
Psyop and Rhino FX in NYC, great commercial companies)
Andrew: Tell me a little bit about yourself, about your
life? Where did you go
to school, and what classes did you study? What challenges
did you face, and
what helped prepare you to become the artist that you are
today? Roughly,
how many hours a week did you spend polishing your skills to
reach the level
you are at now?
Kevin: This question is a book in and of itself. I'm not an
average learner. I didn't meet the standards of my public school system for
reading(since I would rather be on the computer playing games or writing
stories and what I called poetry) and was forced into these classes to wax me
into reading more but it just pushed me more and more into my computer work at
home. Starting web design when I was about 6 and level design for games like
Doom and Duke Nukem 3d when I was 4-5. Which from that point turned into Bryce
around age 8 or 9 before my parents bought me Ray Dream Studio 5 when I was
about 10-11. That is when my crazy creations started turning into virtual life,
filming things and trying to overlay 3d with video (pretty poorly I might add,
having no patience for what I later found out was rotoscoping, but what do you
expect I was a middle schooler). Then into highschool I took a set of classes
in a Communications University Program, getting to use Final Cut Pro, Pro
Tools, and everything broadcast and non. This was a great help to me, cause
there was a film appreciation class, a public speaking class, philosophy class,
and a few others that made it worth wild outside of just film and sound.
It was early elementary school that I started to begin to
love math, to indulge myself in web scripting like html and java script.
Anything logic based filled me with joy. I would play Myst for hours upon days,
then got sick of it, moved to riven, got sick of that, moved to other MUDs and
MOOs (respectively, Text based RPGs, text with images based RPGs) and odd other
RPG / RTS(mainly starcraft, WOO! Starcraft!! hah) / Adventure games (Exile,
Uru, D'ni). Then starting flash and actionscripting around age 11. Php and
mySQL databases around 16-17. Doing freelance work since I was 13 for websites.
A multitude of games and movie stories that have yet to come to fruition but I
still strive to complete.
But even with the ill will toward reading, after going
through my public school system I had found out once hitting college that my
school system went over FAR more things than many many other school systems in
america (from the people I've talked to). Needing to reread books in college
that I read like junior year in highschool. It was as tho most of america stops
where I was in sophmore year of highschool but as seniors.... it's kind of sad
and made me understand why people from other countries think that americans are
dimwits with no sense to even give respect to fellow men and women of the
world. Many of my friends made similar assessments of their peers in college as
well. I guess that is a reason they say there are good public school systems in
New Jersey. Anyway, I digress to the point of your question.
I went into the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan NYC from
2005-2009 for a BFA in Computer Art; initially interested in modeling and
perhaps animation having no real cocept of what was out there in this computer
art field.
I was pretty much the only one doing 3d graphics in
highschool and was far more interested in physics than art. But I was
enlightened by the problems faced by riggers and FX artists from homework and
classes in SVA; I also had no clue there was scripting in 3d, so I took to that
like knats to someone standing in a field on a summer evening.
Why I chose art over physics alludes me now more than ever,
welllll sorta. Initially I thought it would be more money quicker, but there
are so many jobs that pay so well for physicists. Bahh, the thrill of logic
problems, scripting workflows, particles / dynamics(the two closest things to
real physics, yes, ncloth is just settings, no real physics work there) and
coming up with awesome rigs I guess is the only things I can say now as a valid
reason for being in 3d. This answer has pissed people off before, who's hearts are
filled with everything 3d, sorry if you feel this way as well.
As preparation for my career choice, I used to overstep my
bounds in classes. To a point where teachers almost and straight didn't like
me. I'd do my own thing to mix it into homework. I thought it was pretty sweet,
and only two teachers really thought it was cool what I was doing(Vic didn't
like it, but took my insanity to heart and graded my work as it was rather than
based around the assignment it was, Vic is soo cool). My thesis teacher liked
my story ideas the first year but the second year began to dislike my work
quite a bit, that I wanted my thesis to be entirely scripted, a particle and
dynamic driven thesis. But he wanted a story. But I stuck to my guns and it got
me an internship with Framestore 2 days after graduation (with the help of one
teacher that I'll get into later in this email); then from there, even more
work with them and many other companies now.
I would be working every day on new ideas. Try to come up
with new things that look cool, that act with a life of their own, or tools to
speed up workflow no one else has made before. I tried my best with what I knew
to make the neatest stuff I could. Every day you learn something new, and I
would make a point off learning something even if I slept from 9 am to 6 pm
because I didn't sleep 3 days prior. For an hour span, boy, sophmore and junior
year I'd catch myself doing my own work rather than school nearly 4-6 hours a
day minimum. In a week I'd spend 70-80 sometimes maybe 100+ hours some weeks
pure work. Literally not sleeping 3 days straight a multitude of times
throughout school; living off of Chapotle burritos and energy drinks. Among
some stuff I shouldn't mention, heheh.
Andrew: What inspired you to specialize in rigging,
scripting, and fx? Do you
have any other ambitions or did you always know that you
wanted to do that
when you were in school? Were the professors able to teach
you what you
needed, or was it mostly self taught?
Kevin: Ya know, they taught us young to read all the
questions before answering the first one ha, I'm sure some of this was answered
above.
It was the logic problems. Figure out how to make this that
or the other thing because an animator is going to need it to do this in this
situation or that in the other situation. But that love of math was a good base
for physics. But that is a story alone. My phyics teacher in highschool didn't
like me much (also my math teacher, but again, another story) but he would
teach us like we were morons because it wasn't the AP (advanced placement
class) that I was forced to take because of class conflictions with that
communications film/audio program in highschool. He would teach us an algorithm
to do one thing and I would realize there was a far simpler algorithm to find
the same answer in half the steps. He wouldn't mark me down but I can't tell
you how many times I saw "Please use the math we learned in class to solve
for variables in the problem."
But in college, I got a great base from every teacher in each
field. Making sure to take teachers of every kind in the industry to widen my
knowledge base as much as I could. I wanted to know everything to be the best
TD I could and will be. Oddly enough not taking a single rigging class beyond
basic IK/FK switches from Vic, which I later figured out better switches on my
own. I was going to take a rigging teacher, but some reason I dropped out of
that class, something about getting given answers to a problem just doesn't
bode well with me.... yeah I know, stupid, but was talkin with my friend in the
class, realizing I covered most of what he was doin on my own anyhow. Latices
to make squash and stretchable eyes, expressions to run math, nodes to process
as equations. Stuff that is basic in math, but not for artists I guess (not
all, but some artists obviously)
Andrew: Aside from portfolio pieces, is there a reason that
you enjoy helping out
others with their short films? I really appreciate that your
helping me out
on my short film!
Kevin: Haha, no prob man. Well, I've always enjoyed helping
people. I'd help many people in my classes in college just because if it was
something I didn't know already, we'd work it out and find a solution.
So if by helping you I may be able to show you something you
didn't know about rigging, it makes me feel good that I'm helping you expand
your knowledge base.
The way I see it, people that don't help those who need
help, don't help because the tricks they hold are all the tricks they know. But
if you can take tricks you have and turn them into something new and unique for
more than one situation, then to show something a technique is simply a small
part of a huge picture.
Andrew: Is there a project, company, or director that you'll
want to work with in
the future?
Kevin: I know nothing about movies, tv, radio, commercials,
broadcast, what ever. Should I even be in this industry? Probably not. Everyone
in my dept talk about movies and tv shows and I'm sitting here reading this
awsome book on Superstrings, Super Gravity and The Theory of Everything, a
really cool book on sub atomic particles and it goes into the history behind
theories along with the mathematics that I've been trying to find in these
commoner books for a while. I may not be in physics, but I will keep my hobbies
as they always were. (These books are one reason my physics and math teachers
didn't like me in highschool.)
I guess what I'm trying to say is probably ILM because they
have one kick ass RND dept there, that and imageworks has a pretty sick RND/FX
dept. Although my dream may be comin true at Blue Sky, they might be moving
more RND/FX stuff to the cloth dept because each dept here wants to do what
they specialize in and cloth is a bunch of TDs from riggers to dynamics to fx
to modelers/animators. Not to mention all of us program/script in this dept.
Andrew: Who are some of your favourite FX artist, and
riggers? Do they have any
website or showreel online?
Kevin: I dunno, Miguel Salek from Psyop is pretty sweet at
his houdini work.
But really, his work is simple but many layers of simplicity
makes something beautiful, amazingly beautiful. The reason I say its simple is
that Spencer Lueders from Framestore NYC taught me sooo much about Houdini. He
taught me for a semester in SVA and got me a job with Framestore working along
side him doing Houdini for a Tylenol commercial and for the movie Salt doing
smoke, particles, dynamics, and more Houdini stuff. He knows his stuff, not to
mention he was the guy testing out Houdini while he worked at Side Effects, so
he knows that program pretty much inside and out. Which is now allowing me to
possibly move to a crowd simulator spot in Blue Sky using Houdini to simulate
the crowds, which isn't too hard remembering what Spencer taught me. (He
doesn't have a reel yet, and he even mentioned while I was at Framestore that
he needed to make one, that it had been yearsssss and he still didn't have one.
But you have definitely seen his work around.)
I haven't seen to many riggers that have done work that I
couldn't figure out some way of doing what they did (besides a few things that
required the API to write a plug in for, which I'm yet to get into, but will be
soon). I hope that doesn't sound like boasting; but I've tried long and hard to
get my rigging skills up to industry standards and beyond.
But this doesn't mean people like James Dick, Andy Walker,
and Theo Jones aren't great, Rigger, TD, TD respectively, at Framestore NYC. I
learned a bit from them, but they were also cool enough to let me do my own
methods to get jobs done, as long as the project met its deadline, everything
was golden.
But like I said, I don't know this industry, there are
people out there that are great riggers, but the names escape me.
Andrew: Looking back, would there something you would change
with your demo reel
to better meet their expectations? Do you have any tips for
students, and
industry professionals who have their hopes to break into
the animation
feature film business?
Kevin: Well, if you see my fall 2009 reel and my spring 2010
reel, those were the changes I wanted to make. I guess looking at the 2010
reel, I want more transitional videos taking you from piece to piece. Or maybe
some sort of particle based environment that builds up into each peace in a
hologram style effect of some sort. But for me to say "I wanted to adds
betterz workz!@!$%!" would be futile in that I will always be adding newer
and I would hope ultimately better work.
Don't get down if someone says they don't like your work,
because there will always be people who say that. One, because maybe they are
simply better than you; two, you could still be progressing in the field and
don't have the experience yet that they would want to see; three, that you are
better than they are and they feel threatened by this and make themselves feel
better by putting you down.
My friend does the latter of the three often. Man he was
making fun of Avatar as much as he could, I simply responded, your skills can't
hold a flames to the people at weta. Man that pissed him off, and retaliated
with "and you think you could have made any of those rigs or
effects?" I said "yes, most of them", knowing full well there
are quite a few intense rigs in Avatar, but he did the classic "yeah
whatever" and shut up.
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