Introduction
Hello! Welcome to my showcase page! My name is Camilla Robinson, and I am a student at Freestyle Academy. At Freestyle, I took classes in Digital Media, Animation, and English, but today I primarily going do be showing my work in animation. I have always loved animation, but never really had the opportunity to explore it a whole bunch. Freestyle taught me both 2D animation and 3D animation, and I have loved both of them. This next fall for college, I am going to be majoring in animation and hopefully work my way towards going into the industry.
Showcase Video
The project I am going to be showing to you today is my Freestyle Senior Project, or my Zenith Project. For this project, I was focused largely on lighting and studying Maya more in depth with the final goal of creating 6 high level rendered frames. This project is important to me because for the first several months I was working with Maya, I could only use it at a very basic level. However, during the narrative project, I decided to do some outside research into lighting and was able to use this knowledge in Remnant. This made me want to learn more and so I made my Senior Project developing my modeling and lighting skills.
During this project, I definitely expanded my 3D modeling skills as well as my knowledge of the program. I went from just being able to model and assign textures from Substance to creating almost every part of the model and texturing in Maya directly with UVs and Hypershader. This was one of my most successful Freestyle projects, especially when it comes to my 3D work. I loved working in the medium and found a lot of joy in it.
Showcase Reel
The showcase reel is a collection of a lot of my projects from Freestyle. It includes the earliest ones (like the Zoetrope) all the way to the latest one. This was really cool to piece together because I felt like I was almost going through time back to the beginning of my Freestyle experience and I could see my progress.
Reflection
When I came into Freestyle, I didn’t really consider myself to be a good artist. I was a fine one, but not a good one. I was also extremely intimidated by those around me who seemed to be good or even great. However, through the two years I was in the program, I expanded on my skills and was able to find my own niche. There were trials and struggles (and some tears), but I eventually arrived at a spot where I could look proudly at my own artwork and not immediately try to compare.
It helped that I could see myself improve. Looking back through my work, there are things that I really want to redo or work on again because the first go-round was fine, but I know I could do better. Sometimes you see those things about “Practice makes Perfect” and “Time brings Improvement” and they can be really hard to believe when you are in the moment, but then you take a step back and realize that you actually did get better.
Freestyle allowed me the opportunity to create all of this really cool stuff and work with some really amazing people. I am so grateful for my experience. The lost sleep from trying to get in projects was definitely worth it. There is not a lot else that could have compared.
Thank you for reviewing my work!