Industry Indent: TRIXTER

Established in 1998, TRIXTER has worked towards creating stunning character animation and visual effects for television, commercials and feature films. In its early days, TRIXTER specialized in creating CG characters with powerful and emotive character animation. Recently though TRIXTER has become know for its visual effects pieces, which includes, but is not limited to, Captain America: Winter Soldier, X-men: First Class and Iron Man 3.

As I'm keeping an open mind with regards to the style of animation I want to head into, cartoony, realistic, etc, (I find it important to learn all of them if I am honest), animation used in visual effects certainly holds a bewitching quality. The best kind of visual effects will go unnoticed to most viewers, and I will be honest in scenes, such as the iron man fight scene above, its becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between real props and digital ones. I would love to one day help making these illusions, especially object animations, despite having only bouncing balls as object animations so far.

 TRIXTER is based in Berlin, Munich & Los Angeles, and as I am based in Europe and know enough conversational German, I would like to think I could adapt to the whereabouts...

TRIXTER creates stunning animation that matches live-action footage, for instance the shield in Captain America, as well as its own key-framed animation for realistic creatures,  such as the wolves in wolf's blood. Studying the animation produced by TRIXTER will help my understanding of  how to create realistic footage of animals, the acceleration and weight on objects. Take a look at more of their recent work in this showreel below:

Now to go and study!

See you later,
Claire

Industry Indent: Blue Zoo

Blue zoo is a multi-BAFTA winning animation company, who produce:

• Commercials
• series
• Idents
• Development trailers
• and many other types of animation (Check out their styles here)

I first became interested in Blue Zoo when they visited the USW in 2013, however my interest spiked with the Blue Zoo Christmas short, Xmas 2013.

Their use of warm-cool colour contrast and arcs for character movement fascinated me; especially the squirrel character (who I do believe is a Jackalope?!?!), who floated believably. More on this short in a bit... Blue Zoo has won 2 British Animation awards for their series 'Those Scurvy Rascals' and won a BAFTA in 2012 for 'Best independent Production Company'. The different style used within the studio is what makes Blue Zoo so appealing to me, from 'Lessons in the force' to their animal planet stings, their range of styles shows their adaptability in their work. I personally love their pieces for stings and commercials the most, mainly because of this diversity. Most of these feature a hand made look, rather like the Xmas 2013 short, in which you can feel the artist's influence and hand in the pieces. Even shiny pieces like the Rugby League World Cup 2013, stings, you can see the thought behind the style used, and the simplistic shapes used for the characters only highlights their animation teams' ability.

Their diversity in animation styles, not just textual, is my main pull to this company. As a student now working to diversify my showreel for multiple styles, studying Blue Zoo's studio pieces is proving integral for my studies.

Looking forward to seeing way more from them soon!
See you later,
Claire