Andrew Daffy

Born in the UK in 1976, Andrew Daffy specializes in CGI Supervision for the post production industry. He started working at Framestore CFC as a Junior Animator in 1996. After earning the position as Head of 3D Commercials some years later, he worked on award winning projects such as Levis Odyssey, Walking With Dinosaurs and two James Bond title sequences.

Andrew's final project within the company was the CGI supervision of a bat sequence for the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He's now looking at branching out. As well as editing promos and pitching for directing work, he's currently researching the idea of setting up a London based school focusing solely on training in photorealistic animation.

Andrew Daffy has recently formed his own studio. He can be reached at
www.thehouseofcurves.com

My Website
www.andrewdaffy.com

Richard Tucker
www.rtfract.com

CDIS
www.aivb.artinstitutes.edu/

Framestore CFC
www.framestore-cfc.com

The Mill
www.mill.co.uk

Pixar (for Reds Dream)
www.pixar.com

Q.How did you get involved in the 3D computer graphics industry?
A. I was one of those everyone used to mock during the school lunch hour because I preferred to swat up on the latest piece of animation software in the IT room than play football. Old classics like The Clash of the Titans really made a big impression, but I remember mostly being blown away by Jurassic Park. I was amazed that the computer could achieve such realism.

Around the same time, I was discovering that on my basic Amiga at home, I could create my own basic 3D objects and move around them. The combination of these two events put all my nerdy exploits into perspective. I could see that the small fry stuff that I was making on my computer could somehow lead to working on the effects projects I'd always dreamed of. It didn't seem to phase me that I had a long road ahead before I could knock on ILM's door. The important thing was that I'd found the right road in the first place.

During High School, I was the first in the UK to do my final GCSE art exam using computer animation. Whilst everyone else was getting messy with gouache and pastels, I had my computer and a big mug of coffee! It all sounds terribly geeky looking back, but if nothing else, it gave me my first experience of animating under pressure.

A photographer called Richard Tucker came to our school. As well as presenting his stills work, he talked about his passion for computer animation. He became a great mentor to me, and I worked with him on some of his ‘fractal' videos.

I decided to do a one year "Art Foundation" course. I wanted to experiment with other media and challenge the fixation I had developed with the CGI process. I left the computer at home, and ended up with my final project being an installation/chillout room based around shadows coming in and out of focus towards a Japanese shoji screen.

There wasn't much choice in 1995 when it came to finding an animation course in the UK. There was too much emphasis on the science and nothing on the art. I therefore headed to Vancouver, Canada where I attended CDIS in Burnaby.

When it came to finding work, Framestore was the obvious choice for me. Full of friendly people in bright, funky surroundings. We were a small 3D department then, so being a junior amongst the likes of Mike Milne, Andy Lomas, Paul Kavanagh and John Fuller, who are now key figures in the industry, stood me in great stead for rapid learning.

Q. How do you use Maya software?
A. I started supervising about the same time as I went over to using Alias products, I'm therefore not completely familiar with all the inner workings of it. I rely on the excellent teams that I'm put with to know all the complicated stuff. Where I can, I try to keep my scenes as low in detail/geometry/mess as possible. I've got a great many animation approvals with lambert, grey cubes.

During the Walking with Dinosaurs days our animation consultant, Chris Webster, showed us PIXAR's Red's Dream. I was inspired by how much emotion could come from something so simple (a unicyle dreaming about better times). I adopted a similar mentality for all the subsequent projects I supervised.

Mosquitoes for Xbox Mosquito, swimmers for Johnnie Walker Fish and the bats for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, were all basic cubes (or groups of cleverly squished cubes) until the animations received their final approvals.

I love inventing new ways to use the software. For Fish, the director wanted large groups of people swimming underwater, like fish. We opted against any automated particle system in favor of a replicating system, based on key characters dotted around the scene. It was really good fun sketching ideas of how to mimic accurate replication in nature, then designing non-conventional rigs in Maya. One of the images I've supplied shows the "hulahoop" rig I designed to get elegant swim cycles quickly.

I think it's hard to avoid having a bottle neck somewhere along the line within a production. With the other software that I've used in the past, I found that I could get 90 percent of the way to the final result relatively quickly, but the last 10 percent was incredibly difficult, if not impossible. With Maya, I find myself putting more energy at the planning stage, but find that I have much more scope and diversity at the end of the project to change and improve the work, which when under pressure, is very important.

Q. What projects have you worked on?
A. Mainly Commercials. The most high profile being Levi's Odyssey, Xbox Mosquito and Johnnie Walker Fish. I've been exceptionally lucky to have had the opportunity to work with the UK's top directors like Daniel Kleinman and Jonathan Glazer. The 3D departments learning curve increased dramatically when the nature of our work turned from the classic "pack shots" and "the science bits" within commercials to working on projects that appeared to be more like short films. Most recently I completed supervision on a bat sequence for the new Harry Potter installment Prisoner of Azkaban, and my first commercial as a freelancer at The Mill called Mercedes "Clouds".

Q. What makes this industry so exciting to you?
A. I suppose it's the same pull as everyone else. The feeling that the possibilities are endless. I've loved working on short term projects because of the constant diversity of the work. Walking out of a meeting knowing that you're going to spend the next few months creating a writhing bond babe sculpted out of ice, or a sky full of cloud gods or whatever will be coming next. As a teenager my creative output was 3D technology. I never imagined that my hobby would develop into my career.

I also think in terms of VFX, the industry has reached a point of realism where things are not going to look dated 10 years down the line. I can't see myself looking back at Gollum, the Roman Colliseum or a flooding New York and think "Wow, did I used to think that looked real?" Its an exciting time to be working in the industry.

Q. Where do you see the industry going in the next five years?
A.I would hope to see the tools becoming more accessible to non 3D people. Just like DVD authoring can now be done by a five year old, I'm sure 3D technology will become more open to other industries like fashion designers, hair stylists, sculptors etc., without them having to understand the dynamics of cloth, the properties of anistropic lighting, or isoparms within NURBS!

Q. What words of wisdom do you have for anyone interested in entering the world of 3D computer graphics?
A. The term 3D covers a whole range of skills and styles. Creature to character, photoreal to stylized, mainstream to cult. There is not one formula that will get you into the industry. I would, however, suggest that you think about your goals and work back in your head the best way of achieving them. This decision making process can have a big effect on your choices of software, school and showreel content.

It's worth tailoring the content of your showreel to accommodate the specific types of work done by particular houses. For example, the large post houses in Soho (London), deal mainly with photorealistic creature animation, set extension, motion-capture crowd sequences etc. Make sure your reel contains work of this type.

I think a reel should be very clear about how you're selling yourself. Someone whose interest is modeling would best get work with a showreel that featured exceptional models complete with renderings of the wireframes and the UV set. As opposed to someone who wants to be more "jack of all trades" who might consider doing a piece where everything is attempted from modeling to compositing. from modeling to compositing. In this case I'd suggest making it as short as possible so that your time goes into the artistic graft of perfecting the shots and not in trying to create an epic story.

Framestore CFC once hired a college graduate based on a clip within his student reel that was 10 seconds long. The rest of the reel wasn't bad, but the sequence in question was really 'very' good. He eventually became an emmy award winning senior animator for BBC's Walking With... series.

When approaching large companies you might find it difficult to get the right feedback from the HR and Heads of 3D. I'd therefore suggest going direct to the shop floor for advice. Get a credit list from a project you admire, look at the titles credited and think which position would best fit where you'd like to be. You've now got the name of a person that could potentially be an excellent mentor for you. They do want you want to do. They're not the boss (unless you're aiming high), so they probably get far fewer "how do I get a job" e-mails. Therefore, they might be delighted and complimented that you've tracked them down.