I went to Filmcon ( http://www.filmcon.org ) this weekend, and met lots of great artists and professionals.
It’s a really small convention just over 200 attendees, so you can talk to all the guests and ask questions.
Every year I’m surprised by the quality of the guest and the convention. This year, it seemed especially well organized, color me impressed.
Erik Tiemans( http://watersketch.com/ ) worked on concept art and digital paintings for Star Wars episode II and III
He did a live demo on Sunday where painted two entire scene in painter. Took him about 10 min for each one.
The freaky thing is, his coworker, Ryan Church, apparently works 5 times as fast. His talks make me want to study light design and color theory. woo.
The pictures of thier office at Lucas Ranch were very cool too.
C. Andrew Nelson ( http://www.candrewnelson.com/ )was also there, he works at ILM doing digital matte painting and rotoscoping.
He’s also the guy who plays Vader in all the commercials,when he first started doing charity appearences as vader, they had
him wearing the actual Vader suit from the first movies. He had an amazing talk about ethics in the industry, and some talk about what work is like at ILM.
They apparently lay everyone off after every movie, and can hire them back for the next movie. It’s apparently cyclical, and very few people actually have non-project jobs. He’s worked with ILM for 4 years, project based.
Chris Jones ( http://www.christopherjonesart.com ) is a comic artist currently working on The Batman Strikes for DC. It was really cool to see the process he uses to pencil pages for a license. He’s also working with Kovalic on Dr. Blink, Superhero Shrink.
He also helps run http://www.convergence-con.org/ , and has an awesome sense of humor.
Doug ( http://www.deg3d.com ) is an amazing artist who’s been working on mastering Lightwave. He’s got a super intricate Slave 1 model he’s been working on for the last 9 months. He and his wife are just a blast to talk geek with.
I think I’m going to try to get them to come out to Anime Central. I wonder if people would dig 3d stuff there?
I had promo packs for our Studio with me, and handed them all out. I almost ran out of cards as well. Very few other people had cards on them, so I hope they drop us a line or post in our forums. It was also very cool to see Kim and Maciek there on Saturday.
I really enjoyed myself, I love making new friends. It’s also very awesome to hang out with people and talk about comics, Dr. Who, and other general geekery. As always, I learned a good deal I’ll have to process over the next few weeks.
Had to get myself a new sketchbook as well. My filmcon notes now span 2 sketchbooks.
I need to prepay for next year. This convention is awesome, never runs in the red, very tightly budgeted, and well run. All the guests are donating their time, and all money after con expenses are paid go to charity.
