Starting Monday June 7th (9:00am, PST) you can start asking questions for Carlos and he will start responding at his leisure. Until that time, this thread will be locked. You will have until Friday to ask questions, and then this round of [b]Ask The Pro[\b] will end.
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Carlos Baena has been animating for over 8 years. He specialized in computer animation, and has had experience in the traditional and Stop-Motion mediums as well as drawing and film.
Carlos has been working at PIXAR Animation Studios (www.pixar.com) for the last couple of years where he has worked on films such as "Finding Nemo" and most recently "The Incredibles". He has previously worked at Industrial Light & Magic (www.ilm.com ) as an Animator on the films "Jurassic Park 3", "StarWars Ep.2: Attack of the Clones" and "Men in Black 2". Before jumping on to work on feature films, he worked on commercials, documentaries and shortfilms such as Wild Brain Inc. "Hubert's Brain" or Will Vinton Studios M&M's Commercials.
On his free time, he likes to spend time doing both animation, music and video projects. He has been working on two side projects: An animated shortfilm called "Screws" (www.carlosbaena.com/screws.html). He's been also creating an Online Animation School (www.animationmentor.com) for the last couple of years, with two of his best friends, Bobby Beck and Shawn Kelly, and with the collaboration of many animators and artists from around the world.
First I want to thank you for offering your time and professional expertise on this forum. Secondly, I wanted to ask you about the services you plan to offer through www.animationmentor.com. As I understand it, this is an online school where students may take online video classes.
1) Are you offering a degree program?
2) Do users of the site need to enroll in an entire online animation program or can they purchase some personal critique time for an individual animation project? Do you charge an hourly consulting rate? If so, how much?
3) Are you only offering critiques for projects using the 3D characters that you provide? I'm asking because I believe certain suggested improvements to an animated 3D character may be limited by how the character is rigged. Obviously, if students use the 3D characters you provide, then you know what kind of rigging they have to work with.
Thanks very much Carlos!
- Tom
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----- AnimationMentor.com student ----- "Learning to animate anywhere in the world from the world's best animators." Pixar, ILM, Disney, Dreamworks & more. ---------------------------------------------
Like almost everyone else on this forum, my dream job is to someday work at Pixar. So....
When you guys watch reels, what is considered more important...
a. storytelling ability
or
b. animation ability
For example, if you recieved a reel with a great short on it, but certain parts of the animation didn't work well, would that be considered better than one that had a bunch of unrelated clips, all of which were very well animated?
Also, I've heard a rumor that Pixar is going to triple it's workforce soon for future productions....comments?
Cheers,
Greg
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Greg Lemon Character Animator ------------------------ www.greglemon.com
Hey Carlos, thanks again for giving up your time to do this. Very cool of you. Anyways, here are my questions:
1. When working on a shot, how much creative freedome vs. direction do you have? Does the director specifiy everything down to the position of the fingers every 10 frames or does the director just kind of give you the overall feel and emotion to be conveyed by the character and let you run wild with it, or perhaps somewhere in between?
2. What are some of the differences working at Pixar and ILM? Specifically with the kind of animation you were doing and the general work environment?
3. So many jobs these days seem to be of a contract/per project basis which I suppose can have its advantages in that an animator may get to work on a multitude of different kinds of projects over his/her career. However, that doesn't seem to offer a lot of security. I was just wondering what does it take to get a full time/staff position at a major studio like Pixar or ILM?
4. What are some common mistakes you often see young animators making, and how might we improve in those areas?
I have a ton of questions about Animation Mentor, which looks friggin' great, but I'm sure tons of people will be grilling you about that on here.
As I understand it, this is an online school where students may take online video classes. 1) Are you offering a degree program? 2) Do users of the site need to enroll in an entire online animation program 3) Are you only offering critiques for projects using the 3D characters that you provide?
Good morning everyone...just woke up. Mondays suck.
Tom, about AnimationMentor, yes, it is a Online Animation School, where people get animation feedback and personal critiques, online video classes, and other stuff. The school will be released in Fall 2004. We will have mentors from studios critiquing students exercises, whether they use our models or they wanna do their animations on 2D or Stop-motion. It doesn't matter. It's only about animation, and not about software.
I think, any questions you guys may have, you should send an email to the mailing list, and there will be a Q&A emailed back to you. My guess is, many people will mostly wanna talk simply about animation in here.
Ok, time for me to wake up and stop walking like a zombie.
1. What frustration, if any, do you find with your animation? How do you deal with it?
2. I'm a non-US resident here in the states on a work visa. How has the immigration experience been for you? I've had nothing but stress, fear, paranoia and complications. Did Pixar or ILM help out with your situation?(On a side note..I remember reading a Gamasutra article that the author mentioned meeting an animator named Carlos from ILM at the office where you go for Green Card interviews...was that you?)
3. Multi-character scenes...Where do you like tostart? Do you block them all at the same time? or one at a time?
4. What was the transition like going from ILM-styled animation to Pixar style? A shock or a slight adjustment?
hola carlos.. first of all, thank you for taking the time to do this. Im sure we are all feeling great about it.. ok my questions :
1. Is it true animators at pixar are assigned certain shots?? What i mean by this is .. do some animators get all the thinking shots? and some the more body oriented shots? I would assume that the material on your demo would influence this...
2. How do you act out a shot?? by this i mean your mindset in acting a shot out before animating it?
3. What do you do when your stuck in a shot?? how do you get out of this?? ex.. by this i mean when you think your shot is done but there is still somethin missing from it..
Hope thats not too much for you.. I know your probly gonna get swamped with questions..
I used to work with your buddy, Rodrigo Blaas while we were at Blue Sky. Tell him I said hello.
Anyway, I was wondering if you could go over your journey to Pixar, starting with your start in Spain? What were some of your worst animation assignments prior to your work now? What were some pitfalls along the way? I think it would be very inspirational to a lot of people who may be just starting out, very far from where movies are made.
Hey Carlos, Great to have you here. I've followed your work for many a years.
On to the questions:
In this recent Interview you mentioned how on Incredibles you guys are taking a 2d approach to animating. This sounds very interesting and wondered if you could elaborate on that. Do you rely less on curves? or do you even open the fcurve editor at all?
Pixar Animation Studios seems like really nice place (from pictures i've seen) Is it hard to go home after work? Do you ever roll around on that nice green green grass?
Do you guys feel any pressure to do a good job on Incredibles considering that the main characters will be human, and something that Pixar has not done yet?
How's it working with Brad Bird? He seems like a really cool guy. According to this Wired Magazine Article he was brought in to basically shake things up. How's that going?
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