End of Year Update!!!!

[QUOTE=Larry L.]:D

We combined a 6 ? week trip to Europe to include: the animation festival at Annecy; sketching, drawing, and painting in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg; exploring by train all those countries; meeting the Vilppus in Sorrento, Italy; teaching at the IFS in Cologne Ð and working on OUR WORLD.

Larry, could you drop a link to your "Our World" project, I have been looking but I have not been able to find anything.

2005 was quite a significant year for me too.

Last August, my wife and I made the move to Canada. A new life in a new country! Before that I was working for one of the major animation studio in my home country as an animator as well as a Flash technical consultant and an instructor teaching traditional animation artists how to use Flash. I loved that job very much, and I felt very sad leaving it and my old studio behind, but moving to Canada was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

I am currently working on a Flash series for a studio in Vancouver. It did not take me long to land a job right away when I first got here in Canada, so in a way I feel quite lucky and grateful everything turned out well for me.

Thanks for everybody out here for the discussions and advices. Happy New Year to all!

I got nothin'.

To recap everything:

I scrapped plans to make a comic from my character "Fly Guy." It was a money pit. A few people told me it was a good way to get my character out there visually for less cost than animation. It was bad advice.

Frederator began taking pitches for their cartoon compilation series, "Oh Yeah!" Cartoons back in April. I found an artist in May who started June 1. By the end of July, I had two sketches and no emails.

I started a dialog with Jabberwocky after admiring his stuff. He agreed to draw sketches for me to pitch to Frederator. His final tally was more than three times the original number discussed.

I pitched, we got feedback, and decided the feedback was positive enough to give it a second shot. Jab changed the design of the characters to a more-easily animated style and redrew most of the 40 sketches. My kids and I, along with some music samples and free SFX off the 'net, created a soundtrack for checking the length of the cartoon, then I took the sketches and made a rough animatic.

I have a second appointment and a repitch scheduled for January 5th, and I'm kinda just hangin' out until then.

I also have email addresses for a couple of other key people with different companies (that I am unable to divulge because of a promise to their source, so please don't ask). I honestly expect good news from Fred, but I'm prepared to move forward either way.

its been an interesting year. i started off with the plan to move into a new office before this year was out and we achieved that by mid year. We had a hard time with staff, our lead animator was an alcoholic and it became very difficult to work with him to the point where he showed up randomly.
so i had to let him go and it was make or break, but we decided to fight it out and found some newer people.
moved into a new much bigger space, but my partnership fell through (which was a boon) and i was left to deal with the business and creative side alone.
so it was a very rough few weeks in July,but we decided to stick it out and made two shorts which have gotten good reviews, one episode for a different producer who liked the work.We finished an episode of our own concept and are working on two shorts right now.the team size kept moving up and down at one time we were touching 12 full time and 5 part time and now we are somewhere like 8 full time and 4 part time.
so things look ok. There have been small victories which have been balanced out by loss of people. i dont have any plans to go into production on my own even though i have the funding tied up. Because our pitch isnt working out for us. So for now the decision is to just continue with shorts and look for service work. Original series length production is out for now.
we got in touch with a solid Montreal based director who spent best part of this month helping us improve things.
phew.

well, I am still working at the same studios (in the big boat like building, if anyone remembers). Throughout the year we had everything from happyness all the way to loud arguments!
we became more solid as a team, a pretty darn good team if you ask me, but unfortunately we lost one of our precious members (we were a team of 5, everyone is precious), nothing like being told that you're going to be a dad to make you wake up and leave a badly payed job and look of a proper contract.
"Midsummer Dream" was finished and did very well in the portuguese box-office (unfortunately, not so well on the Spanish one). We also worked on a full dome trailer, that looks amazing but, we don't have an intelligent enough to see the pottential of this project, and since august we've been working on a short called Belinvicta, a overly complicated project for such a tiny team... however, we all must confess that it does look great!
Nonetheless, we're still being badly payed and getting abuse from our crap producer, and being totally ignored by his superiors who cannot see how bad he is, our pay checks are always late and no one ever either explains why or apologises for it. actually, we were told that we were really lucky because we were meant to only get half of our wages this past month. Lovely, isn't it?
Because of this and the fact that portugal is basically collapsing, I've been trying to get a job elsewhere, but no one seens to be interested in my work, I don't know if it is because it isn't up to scratch or because I'm foreign, maybe it is a mixture of both, who knows?...
But I won't give up, i'll get there somehow!!!
Hope that 2006 brings you all happyness and may all your dreams come true!
P.S: Sorry for the rabbling :D

But I won't give up, i'll get there somehow!!!
Hope that 2006 brings you all happyness and may all your dreams come true!
P.S: Sorry for the rabbling :D

Hang in there Fazendinha, keep networking and you will find that better job.
Oh, and I like you new avatar.

I started going to the art academy in S.F. this past fall to bring 3-D animation into my repitoire. (fingers crossed). Not much to report on this subject. I have wonderful prof.'s and great students. Animation wise... I have been doing some storyboarding (which I love) but not much animation. Storyboarding is so fast... I heart storyboarding.

Well.. this year i`ve started a new short film in flash. Since the first one did pretty well around here... and i made it like an experiment. I will be recording all sound again and putting it together soon. I hope it will look and hear better this time.
And the second short is comming along really nice.

In the other hand, i`m doing a game in flash, an adventure game.

So... i hope this will get me somewere in the near future.

Regards
Juan

I got nothin'.

Doesn't look that way to me. You're out there swingin' taking a chance at getting something going. That's huge. Plus, you've got a second Frederator pitch scheduled. There are few that can say they've had one, let alone two.

Better to try to do something great and fail than to try to do nothing and succeed...

I started animation this year....

lol :D

Doesn't look that way to me. You're out there swingin' taking a chance at getting something going. That's huge. Plus, you've got a second Frederator pitch scheduled. There are few that can say they've had one, let alone two.

Better to try to do something great and fail than to try to do nothing and succeed...

yeah. u kidding mate. your out there. most people dont even get near making up their mind to do what you are doing (second time around even)
hurray.

L_Finston and Wontobe, thank you for your support, it means a lot!!
Here's a link to my showreel, that seem to be working (keep your fingers crossed) http://miaumau.no.sapo.pt/showreel_web.wmv

Man did this year fly by! I can't believe it's almost over. Well I had another birthday and didn't come near to what I set out to do for this year. I didn't get to work on any of my projects that I wanted but I ended up switching my priorities around. I started the year animating on "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends" at Cartoon Network. That was a blast. Great show and an even more amazing team of artists. I also went back to school to learn animation at AnimationMentor.com. That was and continues to be a mind blowing experience for me. I've never learned so much about animation before in my life! I've got to make some great friends with both students and mentors alike.

I also got to take a break and hang out with my wife in Germany for two months. It was perfect timing for me to take a break from work and just be able to focus on my school work as well as animate a ruff little short that Pascal pushed me to do. That was a lot of fun and got a bunch of my creative juices pumping.

After getting back to the states, I changed studios and was brough on as a Lead Animator at Renegade Animation animating on "Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi." Another great studio with an awesome cast of characters. I've worked with the entire animation staff before. Most of us worked together on "Kid Notorious," and some I worked with before in the internet days as well as went to school with. So the adjustment was pretty easy, and Darrell and Ashley, and the rest of the Renegades have also made me feel like a welcome part of their family.

So all in all, a very busy year. Didn't do exactly what I wanted to get done, but often what we want and what we need aren't always the same. :)

I hope you all had a great 2005 and I wish you all an even better 2006!

Aloha,
the Ape

ALOT of changes this year for me... professionally and personally. I'll stick with the professional theme for your sake though.

I went from Animator/Writer to Animation Production Manager to Network Manager in course of about 6 months. Funny thing is I'm still production managing, animating and writing too... just not sleeping anymore.

Fox bought out our company, including our myspace division. We're now known as Fox Interactive. I'm watching the merger happen as we speak. That's been pretty interesting... witnessing a big corporate merger take fold.

I'm currently writing for a straight to video preschool series with a cohort of mine. We're also waiting to hear back from Film Roman on a couple of projects we pitched. Won't be countin those eggs before they're hatched... since we all know how pitching goes in this town ;)

Happy New Year everyone!

-MM

Uhhh, 2005 I changed from a live-action production company to an animation company and moved again. I actually wanted to study animation this year, but I felt, such as I'm not prepared enough, so I started to learn 3D, did some stuff for some TV productions, learned compositing programs and started with my first own film ;)
Plans for 2006: Finish my film as good as possible and beeing accepted at university, and that everything goes on at work like it is! I love it!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Whew. This year flew by and dumped me out the other end before I even knew what happened. Kind of like a crazy fun spiral slide that's been polished by a thousand pairs of Osh-Kosh-B-gosh's to a high mirror finish that dumps you out so fast on your keister that you're not sure how you ended up sitting in the dirt, but you can't wait to catch your breath and do it all over again. Anyway....

I saw three films I worked on go to the theaters: Star Wars: Episode III (Layout Artist), XXX: State of the Union (Layout Artist/Matchmover), and King Kong (Layout Artist/Matchmover). 2 of them seem destined for the Oscar Short list (or at least have potential as SW and Kong have both made the long list). I also got to work on Beowulf as a previs artist with some of the most talented artists I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

Star Wars was fun to work on, I got to be a 'lead' layout artist on the opening space battle, work on a number of other sequences, and teach a number of other new layout artists the ropes. XXX2 was a bit of a stinker, but surprisingly fun to work on. I got more creative input on the screen (with reguards to the camera and blocking in particular) than I did on any of the other films that came out this year (I worked on the train and 'jumping off the bridge' sequence, absurd, but hey it's a movie, and only slightly less absurd than a giant monkey punching huge lizards:)). King Kong gave me the incredible opportunity to work in New Zealand along side an incredible group of international artists on a film that seems to be Oscar bound (at least for VFX). I would go back to New Zealand at the first opportunity. Best of all, I'm now in the enviable position of having to choose which footage I don't want in my demo reel.

I got to do some 'doodles' and even managed to finish a very short film while working full crazy overtime.

Now I'm back in the states, enjoying some time off and waiting for resume/reel packets to filter their way through HR departments and hoping for others to come knocking (this freelancing type work is exhausting).

This coming year I'm hoping to do a longer more involved personal project on top of the standard efforts towards staying employed while relaxing.

Happy New Year to everyone, and thanks for being out there for the 'discussions', advice, and fun.