Meet This Month’s Guest Curator: AJ Jefferies
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Each month we invite a creative from Behance to curate our social feed for a week. Our Guest Curator is for June is Norwich-based 3D artist and animator Alex J Jefferies.
“I’ve always been a huge animation geek — as a kid I would devour anything animated I could get my eyeballs on,” recalls 3D artist and animator AJ Jefferies. “There used to be these late night showcases of short films that I would tape which regularly featured these incredible CGI animations by studios like Pixar and PDI (Dreamworks).” These animated films ignited his young imagination and gave him the dream of one day creating his own films. Today AJ is one half of MDI Digital, a CGI production studio, whose client lists global brands and publications including Johnny Walker, Cadbury’s, and The Atlantic.
“As a kid I was constantly drawing, painting, model making or finding some way to create my own little worlds. This urge has never really left me, thankfully!” After graduating from art college, AJ started his career at a studio specializing in 3D illustration, where he got a taste of the diversity of projects that the world of commercial art had in store for him: “Something that really hooked me in was the sheer variety of the work we produced. You could be creating key art of battling robots for an AAA+ video game one day, then designing a disco dancing duck the next.”
In 2008, AJ joined forces with his former classmate Matthew Dartford to found their own studio. “Even though it’s just the two of us, we do a LOT of varied work for the advertising, music and gaming industries, from CGI illustrations to photographic retouching, digital sculpting, animation, motion graphics, photography and more. We both love learning new techniques and once you start adding strings to your bow, it’s difficult to stop!”
