3D Animation Student Demo Reel

Student 3D Animation Demo Reel

My entry is my 3D animation demo reel I compiled from my 2 years of studying animation online with CG Spectrum. I started my animation  journey in March 2021, from having absolutely no prior knowledge of animation or VFX, I was (and still am) a veterinarian that decided to make a career change and follow my passion for animation. 

I completed two 9-month online courses and am very proud to have this demo reel demonstrating my best work from those 18 months. I found I have a particular love for body mechanics and creature animation and aspire to be a creature animator one day. This demo reel landed me my first ever job as a junior animator which I started in January this year and have been absolutely loving the industry and can't wait to grow and push myself as much as possible as an animator. 

Opening Shot Breakdown

This opening shot of the Gamma rig by Agora running and sliding around was my final shot I completed during my studies. The inspiration was the rig itself, Agora had just released the Gamma rig and I loved it and needed to animate it straight away. The idea also came from my own cats (Laith and Luna) who are food obsessed and will run like the wind when it's feeding time. It started as just the running to the food bowl and evolved as I wanted to add in the slides and scrambling as I thought it would be good to push myself as an animator to add in more actions than just running. Multiple references were used for the run and slides and to get all angles to get the real detail of movement. 

Lion Jump Breakdown

This shot of the lion jumping on the rock is short and simple but came directly from reference. In this shot, I wanted to challenge myself to do realistic creature work, which meant strong focus on getting the weight of the jump right as well as getting the sit right and the small details on how the lion plants the feet and moves the feet when jumping and sitting down. The actual breakdown video below was made during the time I made this shot, as a lot of my friends were wanting to know how the animation process worked so I made this breakdown video to post on my socials so my friends could get a basic idea of what we see as animator's when doing our work. 

The Dragon and Girl Shot

This shot started as such a simple idea and evolved into a 30 second monster of an animation 😅. The idea started when I was learning creature cycles and was learning flight cycles with the dragon rig, then I wanted to animate someone riding the dragon whilst flying. I still wanted to push myself further and animate the dragon taking off as well as landing. As the idea grew, I then wanted to highlight a "how-to-train-your-dragon" type of relationship between the girl and her dragon. This shot was done as 3 different scenes in Maya, the first being the girl jumping onto the dragon and the dragon taking off, the 2nd was the dragon flight and close-up of the girl and dragon looking at each other and the 3rd scene was the dragon landing and the girl's dismount from the dragon. I only used reference for the dragon movement and the rest is all without reference. This was such a great learning experience, very frustrating at times but I'm so happy with the final result. 

Horse and Dragon Dialogue Shot

When starting animation, I desperately wanted to animate talking animals, like the classic Disney and Pixar animation we all love. I saw these rigs (Gorgeous George and Arc Dragon) and immediately knew I had to do an acting animation shot with them. The audio came from a YouTube channel I regularly watch and I just chose 5-6 random times within one video and isolated the audio from it. From the audio and the rigs, the idea came of one of them trying to do something absurd, such as a dragon trying to fix a robot. I shot reference for movement and expression ideas. I also wanted to show them acting differently as expected, so added in the horse scratching his ear like a dog would, which was inspired by the incredible horse animation from Tangled. 

Dragon Fight Breakdown

More dragons! This shot was heavily inspired by my love for the Monster Hunter franchise and particularly a new monster in the most recent game called Malzeno. His fight in the game is so epic and his moveset is amazing, I wanted to again push myself as an animator to see if I could create something that could showcase dragon movement and body mechanics. This shot used a lot of reference of Malzeno from Monster Hunter as well as some reference I shot myself for the body mechanics movements.