Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Art is to conceal art - Sam Sutherland

Sam Sutherland is an intern at SGS. He's spending his summer with us from Max the Mutt.

Sam is a nice guy with a lot to offer. He is learning fast.

Here's his blog of animation and art - http://sam-sutherland.blogspot.ca/





Friday, June 15, 2012

Jackson He - He can animate

Drawn by Jackson He

Here are weekly journal entries from Jackson He. When Jackson came in and sat down to meet, he was very nice and congenial. He had confidence to speak clearly about his goals and his experience in animation thus far. If I remember he started animating in high school. I liked that. Watching Jackson's reel I was impressed with his animation. He has put a lot of hours into understanding the fundamentals. The more time you put into understanding animation the better you  will be. In Jackson's case this is true.

Oh I found a link to Jackson's animation from 2010 - http://bovoi.blogspot.ca/

(Jackson! post newer work!)

Journal entries from Jackson He -

Week 3:

Symbol animation is hard. Half the work is just keeping track of where everything is, 'cause there's like 50 symbols all placed inside other symbols and it's all cray up in yo head lyk dat. It's a lot more complex than traditional animation, but once you get a hang of all the little technical stuff, then it's a lot faster. Joel's been helping me along with it (he's my supervisor/mentor). Sometimes I feel like I bug him a little too much but sometimes you just gotta live life on the edge like that. Joel and Kurtis helped me setup dual monitors last week, so obviously my productivity doubled. The bathroom's here smell like salted sunflower seeds. It's perfect.


Week 4:

Luke just had a kid. I think I finally got the hang of symbol animation, and now I'm just trying to get faster. Joel, Rich, and Kurtis have been helping me out a lot. Rich is really tall, I can see why they made him animation supervisor. Smiley Guy Studios is working on a web series named Teleporting Fat Guy. It's been commissioned by Smosh, which is cool. I'm hip and youthful which is why I know who Smosh is. Overall it's been pretty laidback here. It's a really casual environment with a flexible work schedule and really cool ceiling lights. I also got to sit in on a script reading/story meeting this week. It was exactly like the group meetings I had to do for my third year film, so it's awesome to know that that project really paid off in terms of a real-world simulation, except we had gratuitous amounts of pizza. I wanted a 7th slice but no one else was getting anymore and I didn't want it to be awkward. Then Joe went for another slice, and I took the chance to get my 7th. Timed that shit perfectly. Thanks Joe.

Sometimes I peek between the desks to see what the other intern is doing. He doesn't know it though. He doesn't know I look at him. 


Thursday, May 17, 2012

One good intern deserves another

Smiley Guy Studios has had about 10,000 interns come through it's halls over the past 10 years. Well, maybe we've had 30 interns in the last 10 years... That's still a lot. We wanted to start posting the wonderful things they do during their internship and have them share their journey. We've had interns from high schools and a number of animation schools.

I'll start with our latest high school intern Will Hunter (who made his own blog while he was here). Will was going to the Toronto School, John Polanyi Collegiate Institute -

http://hunteranimation.blogspot.ca/

Will animated a whole bunch of animation. He also did a whole lot of drawing and designing in flash and refined his use of tools like flash and photoshop over his stay with us.
Below is a character he did in Flash and the bg was done in Photoshop. Go to his blog to read his story and see his animation!

Some of Will's process

Will's final art