Movies & 3D Animations

My responsibilities: As one of my first gigs out of college, I joined DreamWorks as a Junior Animator on Penguins of Madagascar, a spinoff of the original Madagascar movie series.

As an animator, my role was to work closely with layout artists, the character animation team and the lighting/rendering production crew for delivering feature-quality animations. The film grossed over $373 million worldwide.

Fun fact: With each character having 4000-6000 controls each, record ourselves performing dialogues and try to bring that personality into the characters we animate. Typically, each animator would animate 1-2 seconds of footage per week!

My responsibilities: Following the release of Penguins of Madagascar, we worked on 40+ episodes on DreamWorksTV - the largest kids TV channel on YouTube at the time. We animated various characters including some of my personal favorites - King Julien and Kung Fu Panda! 

Unlike feature film animations, each animator animated 10 seconds per day. The change in pace required us to rethink our processes to work faster, more efficiently.

Learnings: Right after my 12th grade, I joined Animation Mentor, an online school based in California. Over 18 months, we were taught by 6 mentors who were industry professionals with experience in Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Sony and other production houses.

Over 18 months, I probably spent my 10,000 hours of practice animating everything from bouncing balls to full-fledged animated dialogues with multiple characters.

Understanding the pipeline: In the process, I also learned the fundamentals of the entire 3D pipeline from pre-production to modelling, rigging, animating, lighting, rendering and post-production. As a Product Designer, I've been able to use these skills in my day to day work as well.