Matt Gealing

I met matt at the Glug animation festival in manchester that i attended on the 9th of February and arranged a portfolio crib meet up with him.

He is a 3D animator and designer from Fuzzy Duck Studios in media city, and explained that there is 17 people that work at the studio who all have different regions of techniques in which they specialise and this makes for a diverse spread of skills when coming to creating work for clients and exploring new ways of approaching the work they produce.

I went to visit him and i had the chance to show him some of my work that i have been producing and get some feedback on it from him which was very helpful especially at this point in my course as i am coming towards my final deadline and therefore need to make sure all of my work is the best i can make it, and i will be going back and tweaking some of my older projects to achieve this.

Firstly i showed him my show reel as this is something i have recently put together alongside while i have been working on my project briefs. He told me first off that the length of the show reel was a very good length as if it were to be longer than a minute/ a minute and a half it is generally too long as designers do not really have the time to spend more than this amount of time watching the clip, and so keeping it a shorter lengths is a good way of making sure that it will most likely get seen all the way through, which is what you want when showing your work and skill sets to potential employers.





He also explained that he thinks it is good that i have shown a variety of skill sets and techniques in the work i have created and shown in my show reel as this shows how i can be diverse with the work that i produce and how i produce it which is appealing to the industry as it shows how i can adapt my region of work and have some understanding of multiple techniques which is useful when coming up with ways to approach creating a piece of work relevant to the brief and with the freedom to then create a piece of work for this, as i am less likely to be restricted by the technique if i have some experience with a broad spectrum of work skills.
He also explained that this variety of techniques shows my interest toward the approach to working and makes the overall feeling of my show reel more interesting as it is more diverse and keeps the viewer interested.
He did mention, however that it is noticeable in my show reel that my skill sets and interests in techniques are leaning more towards the world of 3D animations, which is correct and i thought was quite interesting that he could pick up on this just from watching my show reel as it is not something i had noticed myself or thought about when i was making it but he said is a good thing as well as it gives the viewer a feel of who i am and how i am progressing with my work.
I was also very pleased to hear him say that he thinks my 3D work is very impressive considering how long i have been trying myself with it as well and said that its not just the 3D aspect with regards to skills that can be seen but he said a good design and creative approach is still present in my 3D work which is a really good combination as he said that there are lots of people who have the skills but not necessarily the creativity or design thought process involved but this is perhaps even more important that the skills when being able to come up with and produce work for the ideas that would make clients happy with the work that they receive.

I showed him a couple of clips from my most recent project i have been working on (as it was still unfinished at this point but i had some scenes for the piece rendered and finished that i could show him) because he was interested in seeing a bit more of the 3d work i have been making and he said that my character rigging especially for the wolf that i animated for my forest scene was really good with smooth movements and considering that character rigging can be particularly tricky at time i have done a good and effective job of it.

He also at this point explained to me how he tried to do a similar thing for his final piece animation when he was studying at stockport college in which he chose to create his animation using cinema 4d and that he uses cinema 4d in work now. He explained that the cross over between maya cinema 4d and ads max are all fairly similar but he prefers cinema 4d.

I did also show him my previous finished piece from this year (my silhouette animation) and he said that he can see the progression of my character animations and rigging from 2d to 3d and said that it is interesting to see where my skills in this area have evolved too.

He said that he likes my depth of field in this animation and it works quite well and he said that the cuts between scenes and transitions to the cuts work well as well.
He said regarding to how i could improve this animation that i could draw the eye of the viewer to the second tree that is shown in the first cut of the animation and to make it seem more like it is still the same area the characters are walking through the same area, to move the camera angle into the environment more so that the second tree becomes slightly visible.
He also mentioned that there are some parts of the animation where the boy is floating slightly and it could be a good idea to just tweak those keyframes slightly so that it dosnt happen.

Matt also said that i could send any of my work over to him for him and the other people he works with to have a look to get more freed back.