Last weekend I attended CGTantra Expo 2009 in Mumbai. CGTantra.com is an online community of artists related to computer graphics arts (on the lines of CGtalk) and they run this expo every year to showcase the best works from the community, conduct masterclasses, job fair and basically a chance to meet more artists from around the country. I had to finish my assignment early to make it to the expo. It was a day very well spent.I attended a 'meet the artists' session about character animation which was hosted by Anand Baid and Deepak Ganguly. Anand is a lead animator at Dreamworks dedicated unit, Bangalore and Deepak is a lead animator at Tata Elxsi. The session was really cool, and it also focused a lot on staging and composition, which I just love to think about ! After the session I got a chance to show my AM progress reel to both of them and got some Awesomely detailed critiques. I got a good idea about what needs to be on my reel later on and also about what was missing and what needed polishing in my work.
Thanks a lot to Anand and Deepak, that some time they spent with the feedback was like striking gold to me !!
Later on me and my friend Aniket took a look at the job fair. Since I still have some months to go before I finish AM, I dint have a final demo-reel which I could apply with. There were some studios which wanted to recruit right away while some others who will need artists some time soon. I hope the industry keep getting bigger and better, increasing the quality of work done. I'll wait for the day I am ready to send in my reel :)
There was a sneak peek into Merry Madagascar, a 20 min film being made at Dreamworks Bangalore. The quality of animation and the look of the film was totally awesome ! At the same level of what we have seen in Madagascar 1 and 2. I am sure the studio is going to reach great heights with such amazing artists working there. The session was conducted by artists from the studio. They talked about their animation process, the character Fx, lighting and effects. I had never known what goes into the lighting and effects - what kind of passes and experiments do they have to do. This session was insightful and I got to know a little about these other technical departments too. You could read a news item about this session here - http://www.animationxpress.com/index.php?file=story&id=19671
Visiting such expo is also about meeting artists who do some really cool work! While me and my friend were hanging out and snacking, we bumped into some guys there. We met some guys who have started their own online Comics website. I checked it out yesterday and flipped (or clicked) through some pages of their first online comic book "Rage" and it was awesome ! The illustration style, design and story narration is very interesting. I recommend you take a look at their site and I am sure you'll enjoy reading their comics. Another interesting thing is that they are free to read online and its great to see artists making use of the new "internet revenue model" as we could call it.
Heres a link - http://rockstarcomics.net/ alternative link- http://www.rockstar-comics.co.in/
There were a lot of other great sessions at this event. I wish I could attend more seminars there, but some of them happened to be overlapping. Overall I just enjoyed it and I will look forward to next such event.
Enough of blogging, I got to get back to layouts !! ;)
-Chai'
