Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1378252
SUMMER 2021 13 O N T H E J O B CANDICE STEPHENSON LOOK DEVELOPMENT LEAD, BIG NATE (UPCOMING) WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST ABOUT YOUR JOB? My first love—before I ever touched a computer, before I ever learned how to animate—was drawing and painting. When I went to school, I went as a generalist. And once I started doing the different parts of the CG pipeline, I found that texturing was something I was really good at. I also liked surfacing because, I joke, it's kind of like painting with math. When you build shaders and start dealing with that, all of those terms are physics terms. You have to think both problem-solving— dealing with the way the computer calculates, and the way that light behaves—in addition to understanding painting and color theory and how to make something look beautiful. This is one of the crafts where you really get to have a foot in both left brain and right brain thinking. WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR NEW ARTISTS STARTING THIS JOB? Sometimes in CG you have people who will come at it from a love of the software, a love of technology, which you absolutely need. But it's also important to go out and do your own research. You might have a program that has a really cool leaf shader, which yes, absolutely, research that. But go outside and look at your own leaves. It was kind of a joke with my peers at [Nickelodeon]. I love fabrics. So I had this bag of fabrics at my desk because there might be some really cool shad- ers out there that do fabrics, but I like to physically pick it up and hold it and play with it in the light to see what it does. Don't be afraid to do your own research, and really look at objects and come up with your own solutions. SUKI LEE HEAD OF ENVIRONMENTS AND SET EXTENSION, US AGAIN WHAT DOES YOUR JOB ENTAIL? I'm in charge of everything [to do with the] environment, from something very small—a mug the character is holding—to the whole set. [This involves] look development, which is texturing and surfacing. But also modeling, set dressing, and set extension, which is matte painting. Everything is all combined together as one environment… texture to finished art. DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE SURFACE YOU'VE WORK ON? One of the fun moments I worked on [in Us Again] was the bridge shot. It's the moment when it goes from dry to wet. So we need to look at how the street or concrete is reacting to different weather, and the time of the day, and when the neon lights or the traffic lights are zooming by, how it reacts differently. After that, creating the whole city in the background. How the lights are showing in the buildings, when some of the rooms have lights on and some of the rooms don't have lights on, and how that interacts with the traffic lights. We considered the geometry and the natural qualities of what the materials are. Also, we played with depth of field, boca, and all that stuff. That was really fun, working with animation and effects. HOW DO YOU STAY UP-TO-DATE ON TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY? You can't just be comfortable where you are. Always look out for inspiration from your peers, from other artists, from other studios. Even in our groups, our team members, we show what we're up to, personal work, what we're doing. And if there's new software or anything else, we share and we talk about it. It's a constant learning process. Stephenson built procedural CG fabric material (right) based on fabric from the samples she keeps at her desk (left). Foot contact on a rainy surface was one of the many moments Lee enjoyed figuring out on Us Again.