Day 3 at Matter&Co

Today i focused on making more typographical animation, namely the titles and lower thirds for each of the interviews. For this Fiona recommended i try out the Mister Horse animation Composer, which offered some cool animations quickly. Editing the values of the animation was not my strongest suit however, but i managed to make something that looked nice.

In the afternoon, Fiona had booked us some time with Rob to look at out FMP, but after talking to Rob earlier in the week we decided it would be more useful for us for him to look at our showreels and I got some amazing feedback! We first discussed Max's showreel so i mostly took the broader advice from his meeting, things such as making sure that we have showreels tailored for specific branches of animation, for example having a showreel more catered to motion graphics and one more tailored to more 2D character based animation. If i were to go for freelance work i should look to aim for more of a personal style, perhaps pushing branding a little more, and if i were to want to get work sooner rather than later its good to apply for smaller studios and move up to bigger ones after some experience as they usually hire faster than bigger studios, and finally learn from other peoples showreels, if they use a good technique then copy it. It would also be worth putting the same ammount of effort into the cover letter as i put into the showreel.

More specifically for my current showreel i also got some good feedback. I need to work at making sure the song and the animation go well together, particularly as i used quite a bouncy song i need to make sure my actions are on beat. Ethan needs a little more breathing room at the start and end, with the audio fading out and back in again a bit later and earlier respectively. Also it would be good to aim for motion to be going in roughly the same direction on cuts. Finally i need to work on my logo, its a good logo but the intro isn't animated enough, also it would be worth losing my name underneath the logo as it distracts from the logo itself.

I wasnt expecting so much feedback and while it was very inspiring it was also a little overwhelming, however i now have a good list of things to work on to improve my showreel.