I attended my first Unreal Fest this year. It was held in Seattle, Washington, my home state. I now reside here as well, so it was nice to be able to skip hotels and see my family each night. In addition to checking out the product floor, I attended the following panels and talks (many of which were also livecast or recorded for the Unreal Engine YouTube page. It was impossible to see everything I was interested in, but I did my best:
Tuesday:

• Opening Session
• Intro to Control Rig lab - Sean Lake
• Intro to Niagara Fluids lab - Joe Raasch
• State of Virtual Production - Ryan Mayeda
• Blur Studio: Crafting 'Secret Level' - Thierry Labelle, Jean Baptiste Cambier, Sachin Patekar
• The Future of Hip Hop and Gaming - Cordell Broadus, Ewald Vorster
• Visualizing 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes' - Wes Ball, Casey Pike

Wednesday:

• Making your Animation Unreal - Fredrik Nilsson
• Additional Animation Production Workflows lab - Kevin Miller
• Making AAA Cinematics with a Small Team - emptyvessel
• 20 Years of Visualization - Chris Edwards, Johnson Thomasson
• Tools of Tomorrow: A Practical Application of AI & ML in Animation with ChikaBOOM! - Tom Thudiyanplackal, Koina Freeman, Erik Weaver, c. Craig Patterson
• A Real-Time Frontier: Building a Stylized Long-Form Narrative Workflow - David Alve, Shawn Dunn

Thursday:

• Weta FX Brings Real-Time to the Oscars - Keith Miller
• Advanced Animation Techniques - John Fielding
• Making Piece by Piece, the Pharrell Williams Animated Biography - Josh Wexler, Veerendra Patil, Rakshith Hoskote, Aritra Mukherjee
• Party at the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPop)

Over the next several weeks I will be watching the Livestreams and recordings for the talks I missed and also to complete my notes on the ones I watched. It was an absolutely packed week of information, exciting news, reunions and long-overdue IRL meetings with people I've known and collaborated with going back years now. I left energized and looking forward to my next personal 3D animated film.

I will unpack this idea more in future posts, but it was on my mind lately so I wanted to at least touch on it today.  Although like anyone, I've made mistakes along my journey in the entertainment industry, I've also learned lessons that I know can benefit those of you on creative teams. Particularly in leadership.

One lesson for creative leads and supervisors is that there are usually three major parts, or dimensions (imagine a three-level chess board), to be aware of during the course of any project:

• The client
• Your company
• Your team

Your goals for each dimension are different. No matter the project, you will want it to be a happy success of course, and you will always want to bring universal qualities like confidence and ethics to every show. Achieving success in each dimension takes different approaches, however.

Succeeding with clients requires being present. This includes being available for sudden call requests, responding to emails, but most of all it means actively listening and coming to meetings prepared with questions, information, and items for review. They should never feel in the dark about anything, whether it be deliveries or things that are holding your team up from doing its work. It also means being accurate. Accuracy for clients includes providing important information and advice (without over-promising), and not rushing to reply until you are certain your response is clear and undeniably factual (reread your replies as many times as it takes). Even a quick "I will look into that for you, I should have an answer in around an hour" is better than a muddy or partially incorrect reply ten minutes after their ask.  Likewise, timeliness is a necessary ingredient too. Set the standard for deadlines to not just be met on time, but early. And perhaps above all else, being pro-active is a key factor in success with clients. This means putting yourself in their shoes to anticipate needs and ask them questions they might not have known they need answers for yet. When a client feels like you can be trusted in this way, you are truly part of the team. You'll know this because you'll see more work come your way, or your opinion will be sought more. It means you've bridged the gap between knowing what the client wants, and knowing what their audience wants.

If you lead a team that is only one of several at your company, success to your department head, managers or producers can mean getting ahead of schedule, looking for ways to provide available resources to your peers (after your client is 110% covered, of course), and ensuring your morale is high so it is a boon to the department/company as a whole. No matter how exciting your project might be, making sure it is a "no-drama zone" puts managers and producers at ease, because they know your show is on track from the good feedback they're hearing from your client, and there isn't grumbling from your team members about mismanagement or personal issues through the grapevine. Strive to avoid being the project that is "on fire" and needs resources from other teams. Being on fire isn't always possible to avoid, sometimes due to forces outside your control, but don't be fooled into thinking that things can't be better planned and anticipated. Even though you might won't spend as much time dealing in this dimension in your day-to-day, you cannot ignore it. A good rule of thumb is: if you succeed in client and team work, the company issues mostly take care of themselves.

Success with your team is paramount. If your team isn't functioning, success in the other dimensions is impossible. For a creative team to be successful, your leadership needs to help remove obstacles for them and provide your crew not just information, but encouragement, respect, a stake in the success and the inspiration to achieve beyond what everyone originally thought possible. This provides them a work environment where they are set up for success. Once you do this, they can become empowered and confident, and it is very hard to for this kind of team to fail. I have seen empowered teams succeed in high-pressure situations while still being relaxed and fun, and this is a great goal to strive for. Hiring people that match your culture and meet your needs gets you most of the way there, but you still need to get them to believe in the project and care about their teammates so they can help each other deliver their best work for the client, which helps everything. And don't forget to give them the praise and credit they deserve along the way! Your results wouldn't be possible if it weren't for them.

So to summarize:

High-performing teams make for happy clients, which translates to a good workplace environment.

Winning the client dimension requires:

• Being fully present and actively listening
• Making yourself available for requests in calls, emails or messages
• Coming to meetings prepared with questions, information, and items for review.
• Accurate and timely information and advice
• Hitting deadlines
• Being pro-active, anticipating needs, asking questions that solving problems

To win the company dimension, you must:

• Keep your department head informed
• Take care of problems on your side of the fence, so they don't affect others ("no drama")
• Get ahead of schedule
• Provide available resources to other teams when possible (but always make sure your client's needs are more than covered)
• Keep morale high so it can spread to the rest of the company

Winning the team dimension means:

• Removing their obstacles
• Providing information, encouragement, respect, a stake in the success, and inspiration
• Hiring the right people for your culture and needs
• Once they're hired, get them to believe in the project and care about helping their teammates
• Giving praise and credit!

This went longer than I expected and there's still so much more I could add on the subject. Thanks for reading. Leave a comment with your thoughts if inspired.

This week the new show Dark Matter aired its first trailer. I'll have more details on this project closer to its release date on May 8.

These days I'm being asked more and more to speak with students about working in games and film. In order to do so, I needed to make a demo reel without any violent or mature content, so this reel is meant for all ages.

My latest release is now streaming. I made some of the previs on the sci-fi film Spaceman, now on Netflix. You can read my  project writeup for it here.

Our MPC Visualization team handled previs animation for this spot last month, and it made it way to the Sphere building on the Las Vegas strip just in time for the Super Bowl. The featured quarterback Patrick Mahomes would become Super Bowl MVP less than a week later. You can check out a writeup for it on my project page.

Our MPC Visualization team worked on animating this spot for previs last month and it's already gracing the incredible Sphere building on the Las Vegas strip. You can check out a writeup for it on my project page.

As the year wraps up, I think the biggest takeaway from 2023 is being grateful to have made it through the momentous and costly union strikes that rocked the film and VFX industries this year. I don't think the studios and union members realized how damaging they were to people not just within the writing and acting professions, and I hope that profits are equitably shared beyond just a small section of all the many people who make entertainment in this industry. I know that many VFX artists and 3D animators got discouraged and stepped away from the industry, and I hope they get their chance to return when things recover.

No matter the difficult circumstances, MPC Visualization remains a place where we work on fun projects with great people. This year's releases were Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Strays, and Goosebumps and I'm really proud of these final results. We also started a YouTube channel for our department. There are also several shows we're still working on that I look forward to seeing next year, including some special formats that have been really rewarding puzzles to solve. I'm glad that the Unreal Animation Fellowship provided another opportunity to make an individual animation piece that I could take to final.

My main goals for 2024 are to improve my health habits and get back to weekly drawing. I received some painting supplies for Christmas, so I will also be thinking about what to paint with them. When it comes to skills, I will of course be working more with learning Unreal, and I want to get a basic understanding of Substance in January and February and learn other new programs.

A few weeks ago I posted my making of video for the shot I made for the Unreal Animation Fellowship, but today I also finished my write-up of the experience, with more detail than I could pack into that breakdown video. You can read it here.

Our MPC Visualization team worked on the first episode of this young adult horror series on Disney Plus. Check out my project page for the show here.