Marion Strunck

Background

Marion is a German animator that focuses on creature and character animation. She started off in Framestore workshop in Denmark after attending a small university that focused on mostly 2D animation, and few days of 3d animation which was based mainly on teamwork. University focused on cartoon-based animation.

Images taken from her blogspot.

Life After Uni

After university, she worked on her reel and made sure to have realistic pieces as the industry looks for those. After final year in university, she applied to many companies but got no replies back from any of them, that of course didn’t stop her as it shouldn’t stop any of us 🙂 After visiting FMX festival to network, she got feedback on her reel. People who review he work later called her offering an internship at their studio! This just shows that you should never give up and opportunities are everywhere if you put yourself out there. She worked on 2014 Paddington working on animating the pigeons and was kept on after the film was made. Two years later ILM contacted her and she has been working there for four months so far.

Schedule and Workspace

• Mostly it’s 9-6 regular hours.
• Receive a brief from a scene supervisor.
• Look at a lot of previs videos for reference and usually blocking stage is already completed for them.
• Daily meetings.
• Hierarchy is different as there’s a lot of supervisors.
• Multicultural industry with varied experiences in animation.

Projects

Work to Marion comes from model studios, sometimes big companies run out of time to finish their work do they send it odd to smaller studios. In London, industry has a lot of studios – pool of people and have many connections – help each other get jobs. Great job if you like traveling because there are many studios

Visual effects

People don’t realise how much time and effort is needed to produce visual effects and polish the shots. It can take anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months for one shot. You need a lot of patience with that kind of industry. Always put the stuf you enjoy doing the most at the beginning of your showreel or mention it on your resume. The recruiters will give you more of the jobs you enjoy doing. Find out what stuff studio has done before, what films they’ve made and your favourite things they did. Know anatomy of creatures since it tells a lot about how the animal moves, when you finally understand the realistic you can begin exaggerating movement to make it more stylised .

Showreel

It’s important to know all traditional principles of animating. Even if you do a simple exercise the supervisor can see your skill set straight away. They like to see action shots, weight shots, mechanics. Best method for getting better is analysing the animations you actually like, then download it, draw over it, block it and analyse the poses. Follow people whose work you like e.g. start by searching on Vimeo, find out what they do now and how they do it. Most people are passionate in this industry so they would be willing to answer your questions.

There’s no rush and it okay to make mistakes. Animation is all about learning and learning should be fun. Always upload your work online, people will get talking about it. Create a stir! Get noticed!

Class Questions

What are the differences between uni work and industry? – Progress was immediate after getting into a studio since you’re basically forced to work.

When you were applying, what do you think employers were looking for? – For an up to date reel, it’s enough to have 3 amazing scenes, in visual effects it’s important that quality is extremely realistic. Feature animation is 90% acting, poses, character.

What do they wanna hear on interviews? Your knowledge about upcoming projects, how passionate you are about it. Make small connections with the industry.

Is 2D needed? – No, but it’s good to know principles of it.

BYOA

Marion also mentioned an awesome event held in London every month called ‘Bring Your Own Animation’. It’s where a bunch of people bring their animated pieces together and critique ones work. It would be awesome to have something like this in Belfast. It seems like a great opportunity to share your passion and get involved in networking.