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Ask Us Anything #AMA





Every Thursday we're opening the studio doors and answering all of your questions. Technical, industry, fandom or otherwise - drop your question in the comments below - and we'll hop to it. (We're fielding Q's on Facebook, Twitter and G+ too, if that's easier!)

Ask away!

First up this week:

Going by the Meomi book 'The Octonauts and the Whitetip Shark', you can see they're big fans - especially Kwazii!

Liz Mac Bradaigh asked Hi, what advise would you give a 15 year old who is very interested in going into animation when he leaves school? He has just finished Junior Cert.

Our 2D Illustrator Derek Horan advises:

Draw like crazy!

It's never too early to start a portfolio and discover 'your' own style. There are great resources available online for inspiration, you can check one of our earlier blog posts for some of our staff favourites.

Our Episodic Director Shane Collins would advise to:

Keep drawing and writing! Design characters, design sets (colour and Black & White), go to the zoo and draw the animals as they move trying to capture their motion and form in a quick sketch. Write short story ideas that you would like to make as a short animated film, pick one then storyboard the film idea.

Don't worry about learning digital software just yet, it’s the creativity and art that a college will look for first off. You can bring your creativity into the digital world (2D or 3D) when in college, the college will teach you how to use the software.

Our Lead 3D Animator Ciaran Dempsey writes:

Having some knowledge of rigging is really useful. It’s not a requirement, and you don’t need a great knowledge of it, but it can be really useful when it comes to identifying problems in a character rig rather than just soldiering on with something that could easily be fixed, saving time down the line. It’s also handy for when suggesting improvements by just knowing what kind of things are possible, and the knock on effect of requesting a change to a rig.

If you're just starting out in 3D though, it might be best to start more as a generalist until you find the area you enjoy most, then focus on that.

Our Lead Pre-Visualisation Artist Richard Keane writes:

It’s definitely good to know a bit of everything at the start, particularly if you don’t know exactly what field you want to end up in. Major studios generally hire for specific roles so it's best to pick one area to specialise in and aim to become the best in that field.

Sometimes you can get lucky and get hired as a generalist but if you want to become an animator normally these are hired specifically for that skill set and not expected to know rigging etc -  but obviously that’s a plus point on your CV when hiring.

Maria Mitina, asked Hi, I would be interested to know about your 2D and 3D pipeline. Which modelling/animation software you are using, which rendering software? Network rendering solutions? Which 2D software is used for compositing? If this is not confidential. This information may be helpful for people who are considering trainings related to particular graphics packages and for developers to know which programming/scripting languages to look at. Thanks a lot!

We had John Griffin from our R&D department field this one:

We are using Autodesk Maya for our 3D pipeline and Flash for the 2D pipeline. For 3D rendering we use Mental Ray and for compositing we are using Nuke and After Effects. 

Hope that answers your question!

And that concludes this morning's AMA, join us again next week for another session!


Anahita Tabarsi

Anahita is Brown Bag Films' Marketing Director, Digital & Social and drinks more than five coffees a day...

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