Born to an artist, I’ve always enjoyed and found myself to be passionate about Art in all forms. One of the first things that I love about 3D is its ability to create and make a fictional world come to life and its capacity to enhance the creative storytelling within those worlds.
Pixar’s Films have been an inspiration to me for as long as I can remember. The stylized modeling, realistic texturing, lighting which always seems to enhance the storytelling, and the overall visual aesthetics was something I wanted to try and recreate in my own demo reel.
Prior to VFS, I have only had some 3D experience in working with environments, which I had found my passion in, and therefore most of my work in this project was focused on creating a cozy indoor studio room similar to the room I lived in as a student.
The big windows, parquet wood floor, and the desk equipped with all the necessary stationery and tools all served as the basis for the environment concept. I also had to choose a theme where I would be able to portray the occupant’s story through the different props scattered across the room, and that decision was mostly based on my love for art.
As time-consuming, tiring, and emotionally exhausting as it was working on this project, I enjoyed and loved working on every bit of it
It was either going to be an artist’s or a wood sculpturer’s room, and I went with the latter due to the number of different tools and thus textures that I would be able to showcase. To challenge myself further, I decided to add a character (a pug inspired by my own back home, Chuckie) to help enhance the humor of the story where the pug is revealed at the end to be the reason behind the messy room. After all, I have always been smothered by Chuckie’s sad puppy eyes and guilty facial expression whenever he’s in trouble.
While working on “Little Rascal”, I came across quite a few challenges. One of the main ones was the camera movement. I really wanted the camera to play a big role in enhancing the visual storytelling through one continuous movement and shift away from the usual camera pan used in the modeling and surfacing demo reels. It was a very long process achieved through countless iterations based on the daily feedback from my mentors and classmates.
Another issue I bumped into was grooming my little ball of fur (Chuckie – the pug) as I had no previous experience or knowledge of how to work with Xgen. I watched quite a number of tutorials trying to figure out the grooming pipeline as I go, tackling every possible feedback from my mentors and classmates, to finally get it to the achieved result with the countless amount of iterations.
As time-consuming, tiring, and emotionally exhausting as it was working on this project, I enjoyed and loved working on every bit of it, and tried to push myself as far as I could with what knowledge I had to create a visually appealing short film. The best part about working on my demo reel was being surrounded and inspired by other talented, creatively driven students, and pushed, challenged and supported by experienced faculty and mentors.
I am very grateful to my friends for encouraging me to participate in The Rookies
I would have never been able to get my project to where it is now without their constant help and motivation, especially since I’ve never found myself to be too confident about my work and I always find some room for improvement. But, as one of my mentors once said: “An artist is never completely done or satisfied with his own work, he is just restricted and limited by time.”
This one year at Vancouver Film School made me realize how passionate I am when it comes to working in 3D especially texturing. The ability to create realistic textures used in video games, films, television, music videos, or commercials and make it come to life is something that I always look forward to with every project.
I am very grateful to my friends for encouraging me to participate in The Rookies. It has been nothing short of a great opportunity to showcase my Modeling, Surfacing and Lighting skills while simultaneously exposing me to other artists’ work which gave me a great sense of belonging to a wide community of talented artists.