Sometimes I feel like my life sucks, but every now and then something cool happens. So:
At the beginning of this year I moved down to Los Angeles to intern at the visual effects company Zoic Studios -- the guys who did effects for nuBSG, Firefly, T:TSCC, and now work on V, CSI, Tru Blood and a ton of other shows. Now, I'd been out of a job since the middle of 2009, after I'd gotten laid off from the art division of a small a software company thanks to the economy, and I'd always wanted to work doing visual effects, having grown up addicted to shows like "Movie Magic,"and that episode of Reading Rainbow where LeVar Burton showed off behind-the-scenes on TNG. So when I was down in LA for unrelated matters the month after I lost my job, I decided to waltz into the Zoic building and start waving my portfolio around and asking to talk to somebody important. Not because I knew what the hell I was doing but because Zoic had been on my radar for years due to BSG and Firefly and I'd always sort of hoped I'd work there doing coll sci-fi stuff. They were also the first and only company I talked to while I was there, so needless to say I was surprised and pretty pleased when they liked my work and accepted me to an intern program I didn't even know they'd had. Long story short, it took the rest of the year for to get everything order and get moved down -- including buying my first car (used, and cheap), as there's no way to bike to LA from another state
-- so it definitely felt like putting all my eggs in one basket.
Anyhow, as part of the program, they'd have interns group into teams to work on a mini-visual effects project of some kind over the four-month duration of the internship, to sort of test our mettle and see who had the chops to work in the industry. I ended up as a producer, writer and visual effects lead on our team's project, and cooked up a faux car ad with a robot panther (it was really just an excuse to do a robot, but I knew that one of the guys heading up the intern program really liked car commercials). The team ended up dwindling down over the course of the term to me and about two other people, but we kept grinding away on it and finished the project about a month-and-a-half ago. My co-producer and I got pretty famous at the company during this time for always being there at all hours working on stuff, and people were always asking about our progress because the other employees really seemed to love what we were doing. The really cool part is that higher-ups at Zoic ended up liking it so much that they put together a screening and showed our work to the whole facility, and -- and this is where you all come in-- added it to the company's website.
You can watch the whole thing here.
So. Yeah. That's my robot, that I modeled, textured, lit and rendered, on their site, in a project that I wrote and co-directed. Which is motherfucking awesome.
Also -- and this is just a bonus really, hardly worth mentioning -- I got hired and am currently part of the team working on the second season of V. As I write, I just clocked out after a day building one of the new virtual sets that will appear in the first episode of the season. (And if you guys scroll up a bit on the homepage and play the Kingdoms of Alamur: Reckoning trailer, I built the helmet and neck armor for the hero character. But he's not a spaceship, so it's not as cool.)
Like I said, sometimes things are awesome.
At the beginning of this year I moved down to Los Angeles to intern at the visual effects company Zoic Studios -- the guys who did effects for nuBSG, Firefly, T:TSCC, and now work on V, CSI, Tru Blood and a ton of other shows. Now, I'd been out of a job since the middle of 2009, after I'd gotten laid off from the art division of a small a software company thanks to the economy, and I'd always wanted to work doing visual effects, having grown up addicted to shows like "Movie Magic,"and that episode of Reading Rainbow where LeVar Burton showed off behind-the-scenes on TNG. So when I was down in LA for unrelated matters the month after I lost my job, I decided to waltz into the Zoic building and start waving my portfolio around and asking to talk to somebody important. Not because I knew what the hell I was doing but because Zoic had been on my radar for years due to BSG and Firefly and I'd always sort of hoped I'd work there doing coll sci-fi stuff. They were also the first and only company I talked to while I was there, so needless to say I was surprised and pretty pleased when they liked my work and accepted me to an intern program I didn't even know they'd had. Long story short, it took the rest of the year for to get everything order and get moved down -- including buying my first car (used, and cheap), as there's no way to bike to LA from another state
-- so it definitely felt like putting all my eggs in one basket.Anyhow, as part of the program, they'd have interns group into teams to work on a mini-visual effects project of some kind over the four-month duration of the internship, to sort of test our mettle and see who had the chops to work in the industry. I ended up as a producer, writer and visual effects lead on our team's project, and cooked up a faux car ad with a robot panther (it was really just an excuse to do a robot, but I knew that one of the guys heading up the intern program really liked car commercials). The team ended up dwindling down over the course of the term to me and about two other people, but we kept grinding away on it and finished the project about a month-and-a-half ago. My co-producer and I got pretty famous at the company during this time for always being there at all hours working on stuff, and people were always asking about our progress because the other employees really seemed to love what we were doing. The really cool part is that higher-ups at Zoic ended up liking it so much that they put together a screening and showed our work to the whole facility, and -- and this is where you all come in-- added it to the company's website.
You can watch the whole thing here.
So. Yeah. That's my robot, that I modeled, textured, lit and rendered, on their site, in a project that I wrote and co-directed. Which is motherfucking awesome.
Also -- and this is just a bonus really, hardly worth mentioning -- I got hired and am currently part of the team working on the second season of V. As I write, I just clocked out after a day building one of the new virtual sets that will appear in the first episode of the season. (And if you guys scroll up a bit on the homepage and play the Kingdoms of Alamur: Reckoning trailer, I built the helmet and neck armor for the hero character. But he's not a spaceship, so it's not as cool.)
Like I said, sometimes things are awesome.
