Two Years of Being an Indie Animator

April 1st marked two full years since I quit my job to make independent animated films, so its a good occasion to take stock and see how things are going.

How am I doing?

Whenever people ask me this, my response is “I’ve never worked harder, I’ve never been paid less, and I’ve never been happier.” That has stayed true ever since I began this new journey. It isn’t that everything about my new career is fun and exciting — there are many days that are incredibly frustrating, especially in the moment when something crashes, or doesn’t work like it’s supposed to.

But I’m learning so many things so fast that any time I step back and look at my rate of progress objectively, I tend to feel good. And importantly, this year, I have been able to connect with a wider community of incredibly talented professionals in the animation and VFX space. Maintaining a beginner mindset is great and all, but sometimes this can just feel like a very indulgent hobby. So when people from Dreamworks or Industrial Light & Magic tell me that my work is impressive, that is objective validation — and makes me feel like I could eventually be really good at this. I’m still not even fully comfortable calling myself an artist, but I’m getting there. And having a great time doing it.

I feel very lucky to be on this path, and so grateful to the many, many people helping me along the way.

What happened in Year 2?

A lot. My new reel for Spring 2024 covers most of it, albeit with overlaid technical details. These demo reels are the animation / VFX world’s equivalent of a resume. I make them primarily as a way of taking stock of my journey, but they have come in handy when applying to fellowships / programs etc.

The major highlights of the year are as follows:

I completed a second proof-of-concept short — Avengers: An American Workplace. This was primarily about learning the basics of keyframed character animation, and building Unreal control rigs. My first POC short somehow caught in the algorithm and went viral with zero marketing (Rogue Squadron is currently at 130k+ views). I did not attempt to market this one either — I think the animation is still pretty janky — but it was fun to do and I learned a ton.

Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) and painterly 3D look development has become a major interest area for me. I’ve been excited at the proliferation of original looks that studio animation has pushed into in the last couple of years as a direct result of the Spiderverse films. So I’ve gone deep on achieving interesting handmade looks in Unreal, and am building a custom shader to use in future films. Stylization is a complex stew of geometry, materials, textures, lighting, frame rates, and animation technique — it is a fascinating rabbit hole.

My other major research area has been custom Metahumans. My modeling and rigging skills are basic at best, so I’m always on the lookout for new ways to setup custom characters for animation. Epic’s Metahumans are rapidly becoming the digital human default standard for realtime animation, and I’m very comfortable with their rigs — but they’re too realistic (and a little boring) for my taste. So I’ve spent a lot of time on all the workflow paths for setting them up from unrigged stylized models. This is perhaps the topic I get the most outreach about — clearly a lot of people are attempting this particular workflow as well.

In July I was able to attend Summer School at the legendary Gobelins school in Paris — which was fantastic. A whole new cadre of peers and mentors that I remain in touch with, and in news that will shock no one, summer in Paris is wonderful. I spent 2 weeks animating a 5 second shot of Spiderman, and it was great.

Soon after that I applied to, and was admitted into Epic’s Unreal Fellowship in Animation, which was a fantastic multi-week intensive of expert talks, in-depth lessons, workshops and an Exquisite Corpse project. This was the first time I found myself shoulder to shoulder with real industry pros, working and learning together in what has become a very important community to me. Between my CG Spectrum crew, the Gobelins gang, and the Unreal Fellowship, I had a real “found my people” moment this year.

Unreal Fest in New Orleans was soon after that, and I was invited, along with several other Fellows, to talk about my work and my Fellowship experience. This was so much fun — meeting so many Unreal friends IRL for the first time, and yet another jam packed morning to night learning experience of classes, workshops and talks. Epic does a great job running these and I was grateful to be a part of it.

I’ve always wanted to do Inktober, and in 2023 I finally did it — inspired in large part by many artists in my newfound community. You have to do a daily sketch each day of October based on a set of word prompts (‘Fire’, ‘Saddle’, ‘Massive’ as examples). I chose to do all of mine based on frames from classic animated films and TV, and as I’m no purist, I did it on my iPad with Procreate. Some travel we had planned threatened to disrupt my regularity, but I was actually able to catch up a few days on a couple of the longer flights.

I’ve been teaching and speaking about storytelling for a long time — it’s one of the ways my old job and my new job come together. Apart from my usual Storytelling for Business lectures and workshops at NYU and corporates, I was asked to do a specific variation this year. A couple of Columbia GSAPP professors asked if I might speak specifically about environmental storytelling — how to tell stories with spaces. Their students sometimes struggle with how to tie the ideas behind their designs into a coherent narrative. Since I build environments for all my shorts and videos, I was able to tailor my storytelling framework for this particular use case, and the students seemed to really find it useful. I did the same talk for the Fellowship audience, and will repeat it at the 3DNY meetup in May.

In the first week of 2024 I began writing and storyboarding my first original short film, Machines Learning. I wrote a little about it here — and as I feared it is taking a LOT longer than I had expected. I am actively regretting taking on as much complexity as I have (after I thought I’d simplified it so much already!) but remain determined to see it through. Suffice to say 140 shots is no joke for a solo animator.

I still struggle with the fact that I have way more story ideas than I will ever be able to make. My target of 2 films a year still feels realistic, but that is a fraction of the concepts that pop into my head on a daily basis. Everything starts as a couple of lines in my Notes app, and then if it sticks I develop it into a two pager pitch doc — yes, I still make slides. I’m developing a few of these into more comprehensive pitches for some meetings that are coming up, but for now most of them will remain confidential.

I can however, talk about one of them. A mentor of mine from CGSpectrum, Diego Hernandez, recently co-founded a studio in Madrid called Argonauts XR. His team was looking for fun projects to work on, so he reached out, and I pitched a few of my short film concepts . We are now working together on Colonized, a short film about an astronaut attempting to establish a human colony on an alien planet, with mixed results. This is my first time working with a group of artists like this and it has been a very fun creative collaboration so far — I can’t wait to show more work from this project.

So what’s up next?

Machines Learning and Colonized will likely take up a lot of this coming year — and I’m aiming to begin work on another short in Q3/4. I’m also doing some contract animation for a Turkish game studio, and various assorted smaller projects. In early May I’m excited to be going to San Francisco for an animation class and campus tour at Pixar, which will be a major bucket list item for me. And I’m looking forward to Unreal Fest again later in the year, in Seattle this time. Lots of fun stuff to come.

These annual retrospectives are always a little long, but they are good journaling therapy for me, and also keep me accountable on progress towards my goals. If you got this far, then thank you — I hope you found it interesting. If you are on a similar journey and would like to talk, do reach out via email or on IG — I’m happy to help if I can.