Hello there, I guess it has been a while since my last real update. Thankfully, this update is all good news!

As many of you know, I moved to Halifax Canada from Melbourne Australia around June, and since moving here, finding work has been… difficult at best. I spent some time working as a whale watch tour guide which ended a bit over a month ago because it was seasonal, and my second job was as a social media manager for a small surplus store way out in an industrial estate. 

Anyway, during this time I was struggling to create anything, my work hardly inspired me and thanks to the stupid amount of time I had to spend in transit each way I generally was feeling burnt out constantly. I did manage to push through my short White Eyes, but it was incredibly difficult and I really had to force myself to finish it. There were more times then I can count where I honestly just wanted to give up on everything.

One thing I did do with that project was experiment a lot with After Effects, nothing particularly amazing or taxing, but just little things, and it really taught me the layout of the program and what does what in a lot of ways. This is important.

You see, several months ago, about 3 or 4, I tried out for a studio as a character animator. I will be the first to admit, my animation skills aren’t particularly amazing, my personal work consists almost entirely of pose to pose work and I do very little character animation, so it should come as no surprise that I failed the test and didn’t get the job.

Fast forward a few months and I get an email from them asking me about how much After Effects I know seeing as I had told them I dabbled with it. I was upfront and said while I know my way around the program I am hardly what you would call a wizard, but they liked me enough to send me a test shot for a project with a rough outline of the effects they were looking for to see what I would come up with. I did some experimenting until I had something I liked and then sent it back. Turns out it really impressed them and within a matter of a couple of days I had a job offer.

So now I am on a 15 month contract at this studio doing visual effects on a 2D feature animated film and I am incredibly excited. As a kid I dreamed of being an animator on cartoons, but I never thought that I would ever EVER be working on something like a feature film. To make the offer even sweeter I am on a salary and they will most likely be sponsoring me for permanent residency. So there you have it, I am a full time visual effects artist now!

But where does that leave personal projects? Well, thats where the picture below comes in. I have spent the last 12 months experimenting with a lot of different styles trying to show a diverse range of skills and abilities. But now, with this job (and the reel footage it will create, maybe I was destined to be a visual effects artist?) I feel like I can finally focus on the content I want to make, in the visual style I love doing most, and thats what you see above. 

I have my next few shorts nutted out, ones in my head, ones on paper, and the final is scripted. They will all be using the art style above, because well… thats the style I love working with most, and I cant wait to see how far I can push it. I will have more information on those shorts in a couple of weeks when I do a video update about them and my plans for 2015. In the mean time, thanks for reading, thanks for following me, and I guess I learn’t that no matter how hard things may get or how bad they may look, you cant give up. So don’t.