Animator : Jonathan Holt (Q&A)

What inspired your film?

Well, as far as theme goes, my dog mocha is really the inspiration of this piece. I tried to capture her mannerisms and attitude as best I could. Stylistically, I refer allot to the old UPA stuff, 101 dalmations, Mary Blair, the short Donald’s Diary, Annette Marnat, Lorelay Bove, Erwin Madrid, Jon Klassen, Wallace Klakenwski (how do you pronounce that last name!?), Ben Butcher and many more that I am leaving off. Plus all my friends and

Jonathan Holt – Demo Reel 2009 – v1 from Jonathan Holt on Vimeo.

Can you explain the process in terms of creating animated films?

The process I took was mainly what is taught at Ringling. That is, you start out working on story and character designs world design. You work through that till you have a firm grasp on what it is you want to do. That is, a solid animatic with character designs and environment design locked down.

Then you head into “production”. You model all the characters, set up their rigs, model the environment, and start texturing everything. Once you have that pretty much set up, usually you want to jump into animation as soon as possible, textures and lighting can be finished later. Once you finalize animation you go in and polish things, add effects, comp things, finish textures lighting etc.

Obviously all of this is not set in stone and you often are jumping between things non-linearly. A change in character design will hopefully mean you change aspects of nearly every part of the film. Same for every other part, music, sound etc etc.

All throughout yu are getting perspective and feedback from other people to try and get an idea of what is working and what is not. Obviously like everything, there is balance there as well, too much feedback and it’s design by committee, has no singular voice and all the opinions start to contradict and you don’t know which road to go down. Too little feedback and you miss opportunities and mistakes.

How much of a challenge is it from learning so many technical things (like using maya and photoshop)

but also finding a way to adapt your talent as an artist?

Well, I tend to be able to pick up computer programs and systems pretty quickly, so it wasn’t much of a hindrance for me. Finding intersting ways to use simple tools is really the part that is intereting though. Even the simplest tools often times, with imagination, can do far more than complex ones. Keeping it simple makes for quicker mastery I think.

Where can more of your work be found?

You can find more of my work both at jonathanholt.blogspot.com and also rsadstudent.blogspot.com Though I haven’t added much there lately, I will be adding allot of new cool stuff that I have been working on but I unfortunately can’t talk about right now.

Will you be premiering anything online in the future?

I am currently working on a project with a friend of mine, Miriam Nagi, we hope to have something online for people to love and enjoy around or soon after December  When it is done it will be posted in on her’s and my blog so be sure to check in now and then!

Anything else you would like to add?

I just want to say that I’m really honored that people even care to spend the time to watch my short all the way through. Thanks everyone who watches my film! Leave me a note on my blog, I love to hear from people!

 To change this standard text, you have to enter some information about your self in the Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile box.