Laurie Rowan

0:05[Applause]

0:12hello the problem with that intro is that is essentially my talk that's that's what I did so hello I am Lori Rowan I'm an animator and I make things like that.

0:25So I've been animates for about 12 years. And I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna talk through my career and just show you what I do and sort of explain why I do that so about 12 years ago.

0:58I started in studios and this was my my first job for a small studio wait I've got something I may be some kind of Misha it's impossible to tell at this range whatever you do I can stop that is painful to watch but yeah that was my first job it was red dwarf mobile phone episodes so before there's smartphones there was whack and people would spend 2 pounds downloading one of those clips the reason that I bring it up is that I didn't study animation at university and that was my first job we've made 60 episodes of that.

1:35And so that was a kind of baptism of a safe fire but that's just too strong from there we moved on to television programs this which I'll show you now ♪

1:51all right my name is Luke and I'm doing work experience look around you yeah everyone's on their way to work he's having a go admittedly working with limited resources but that's what it's about I give a chant right. So that was for modern toss and the reason I included it that was a real formative experience for me making that we worked with fantastic art directors an amazing voice cast of some of the best comedians of the time.

2:22This is about ten years ago. And it just gave every opportunity to to learn the fundamentals of character animation and really breathe life into something and cement it to me that.

2:33That's what I wanted to do for a living so then. I went on to not do that and a lot of work in interactive media just things just seemed to go there.

2:44So I worked a lot for BBC for Disney middle eastern children's programming and then recognizable characters that I probably don't have the license to show you. And it's first without a lot of corporate work I've animated a lot of baggage handlers strangely about five years ago. I went freelance and I started to kind of have a few growing pains I was probably not the right word but I was getting frustrated that some without really meaning to I divorced creativity from a workflow I was just I had a completely pragmatic view of my outlook and so I thought okay well I'll dedicate some time to creative play so I started doing things like this in my spare time see if I could build a motion capture suit out of ping-pong balls and you can but you shouldn't it's not that practical and then inside from that absurd little animation test like this but everything I made have a sort of pragmatic backbone to it I made this to demonstrate my play of lights and my ability to mix 2d and 3d and that was really just my focus of that but ones like this.

4:00And this was just about some fabric and like I can do water each one of these are about ten seconds long my plan was to cobble together a show real to make it appear as if they were massive projects that was just showing you a glimpse of but that's that's literally what they were and then in 2017 I went to picked a plasma and if you're not familiar with it picked a plasma is a conference held in Berlin each year just purely around character design and I found it such an inspiring experience it was lots of speakers showing their work and their work was all immaculate and just really imaginative and the thing that really I took away from it they had a real sense of agency around their own creative lives and I felt salt Aeneas Lee just in all of them an incredibly jealous and depressed so I came home. And I thought writes I need a project I want to start doing my own work. And so I set myself this task and it was really basic why did I I decided okay every week I'm going to work hard I'm going to do something fun and I'm gonna put it out every Saturday morning onto Instagram so the first one I did was was this and that is what is and then about five weeks on I I've maintained this thing in about five weeks in I created this one ♪

5:40so this is the one that changed everything for me I put this on Instagram and I noticed that the reaction was just much bigger than anything had ever had before I also got featured on blogs and I noticed that the viewing figures went up to about quarter of a million for this one animation. And I start having conversations of studios that I'd already spired so to work with and invited in for meetings and it gave me the confidence to sort of identify what my style of concept was which was just things that are easier to show than to explain like this.

6:09So I'll just quickly talk you through a bit my process because I'm already over running everything always starts with a blank page for me I do a lot of stream-of-consciousness drawing so I just let my subcultures swim around the page and just see what it results in this page culminated in the animation I showed at the beginning with the two characters swapping the arm sometimes just ideas come to me just through combining to seamlessly unrelated ideas like Tupperware and bird mating rituals which might culminate in something like this and to give you an insight to what that looks like as I'm making it.

7:06This is the process so this is my rig and it shows you the controls of how you make something move like that the reason I show.

7:17This is I want to demonstrate that I try for this reason because it's just so technically in-depth I try and set my concepts before I approach the computer so if I'm doing a project. That's around say motion I might experiment in this way ♪

7:42and this slide just demonstrates to you how close I try and keep things to my initial instinctual drawings so this is one called having a sit down which is an autobiographical piece and then this just demonstrates you how do my faces all my characters have faces and I draw just reams and reason I've got these sort of psychopathic sketchbooks just full of of these illustrations and I never correct them I just just blurt them out. And I mean this is a bit pretentious.

8:15But I like to feel as if I've just encountered my characters not created them.

8:18This is what my characters look like before I apply them to the 3d I keep everything quite naive and that the intention is to just kind of humanize it 3d Punk be quite a cold aesthetic and this feels warmer more human to me so since that means putting the stuff up on Instagram a lot of opportunities have come my way.

8:40This is one I did with it's nice that themselves we did this film about fact-gathering Liverpool where I used my characters to explore the space that was a lot of fun to work on and a year later on from being so inspired and angry about picked a plasma they invited me to actually do the promotion for the festival so that meant a lot to me there's my stupid grinning face and since then I've done lots of other projects which I am NOT allowed to tell you about because they're all under NDA but I have been allowed to tell you that I'm collaborating with Google Labs on something at the moment with a view to it being released next year.

9:20So I guess the through line is don't be complacent and do your own stuff don't spend ten years just waiting to do something you like Thanks you