New website

I wanted to create a website for years to be able to show my portfolio, this year I felt like I had to get it done for the job search after Animation Mentor and for the fmx conference. So thanks to my sister Sabine, I managed to put something up :)
Feel free to check my latest reel and resume at www.thomasgrummt.de

I am planning on adding more stuff to the site, such as animation clips from the feature projects I worked on and probably a links section, right now it is still pretty basic. You can also download the reel as a quicktime.

I registered at vimeo.com too, which seems to have become a very popular and widely used video platform, especially for animation. You can find me here.

I was very happy to find my reel featured on Jean-Denis Haas' animation blog Spungella!
Wohoo :)

This week's featured artbook is called "Walt Disney Animation Studios: The Archive Series - Animation". I got it for my birthday and it's full of big-size animation drawings from many major Disney animated movies. It's so great to be able to study the drawings of the masters this way, almost as if you're holding the precious original drawings :)

There are two more books of the series so far, one about Story and the other about Design.

AM Class 6

Hey guys!

Haven't posted in ages, so here is a summary of Class 6 so far. It's only 3 more weeks before this journey with Animation Mentor is over, very hard to believe at the moment. I wasn't sure what to expect from this class, because I was surprised that we aren't supposed to do new shots but "just" polish the stuff from previous classes. To be honest, I wasn't sure that I liked the idea.

I was fortunate enough to get one of my favourite mentors of the school for class 6 - James Chiang. I watched quite a few of his critiques over the last months and attended one or two of his Saturday Q&As, and I was really impressed by his teaching style and professional approach. He seemed pretty tough too :)
James studied at Sheridan College and was trained at Disney before working at Lucasfilm, Blue Sky and Sony. At the moment he is freelancing, teaching and working on his own projects.

I can say the term has been awesome so far, I learnt a ton of new things and I think I was able to push the dialogue shots quite a bit more with James' help. I was reminded how important it is to keep learning to see, to train the eye to look for even timing, weak shape changes, lacking forces and to address those issues.

This term is about getting the shots polished and selecting the best ones for the demoreel. So instead of posting the weekly progress (which is quite subtle in many cases), here is what I ended up with a few weeks ago for my fmx demoreel.
I'll only post the dialogue shots, because the mechanics shots had not been touched yet.

Cocktail - final



Exterminators - almost final




Right now I'm trying to improve the monkey shot during the last weeks. More to come! Hope somebody is still following the blog :)
Thomas