Im working on my demo reel which will be done in a couple months. My plan has been to focus the reel on TA skills such as rigging, scripting, and possibly some HLSL samples, but that might have to change…
Ive been looking around the forums and the vast majority of ta’s here have come from production level backgrounds and are not really coming right out of school. Now, Ive been told by some instructors that a modeling internship/junior position is a good way to get into my foot into the door before i become a ta. I agree but the competition is absolutely fierce. :D:
Is production experience necessary? If not, do i have to be a prodigy child of technical artistry? What aspects should I focus my demo reel on?
And finally, What do you feel are the minimum requirements for a junior TA?
It might be a good read for you as well as this thread over at the Rigging Mentor Facebook page, we gave some advice and feedback on a rigging demo reel.
Recruiters will not hire you without some experience, generally. This is a discussion I always have with them to try to get them to hire junior people.
A good TA will recognize talent and potential and hire you for non-senior spots (ie, contract/junior/mid-level) even without any or much production experience.
The alternative is to get your foot in the door and make the switch once you are there.
There are a lot of people at my school who have a position of an TA on an internship. Thats internship is 4 months. Can this be enough of experience for a position?
I’m pretty new into the industry overall, but I will say that experience means a lot. Production experience that is. When I went through school, they taught long, arduous practices that don’t necessarily fly in production. I took an apprenticeship here at ReelFX and I know, looking back, that I really wasn’t ready to jump into production straight out of school. The apprenticeship was awesome because it gave me a chance to cut my teeth and gradually move into larger, more important tasks.
I think people straight out of school have a drive to prove themselves and I know I did a lot to learn quick and prove my worth. After 5 months of the 6 month apprenticeship I was brought on as a TD, and while there’s still learning (and will always be) I think the 5 months gave me a huge leap forward in all areas.
Thank you all for your responses! I’ve had a look at the sites and the demo reel tips were helpful. I know that there are many on these boards like myself who want to reach a goal but need a bit of direction to get there.
Ive generally had the same responses from my instructors. That it’d be best for me to get into the fray of things and learn the issues before I can fix them. Its also true that I currently have an art orientated background. But that’s not going to stop me from learning some hardcore scripting or programming =).
I wish there were some TA internships here in Toronto. Maybe there are that I’m not informed of?
Any more tips would be fantastic. I need all the support I can get. TA’s seem to have a really small community and I’m really glad I found this one.
One thing I found at one of the recent TA round tables is that there’s quite a few of aspiring tech artists about, in fact I think they out numbered the employed TA’s in the room.
Production experience is invaluable, and is seen as a pre-requisite for the job as a TA. Good TA’s are cross discipline generalists and you just don’t get that level of understanding without cutting your teeth in production.
So where does that leave the aspiring TA?
I’m curious about TA courses, anyone on one who’d like to share? I’m wondering about the teacher’s take on this. My company has a relationship with Universities in the UK, but they sometimes miss the mark when it comes to current practices and thinking and a lot of their curriculum seem to be based on assumptions and often outdated. As a result we hardly hire candidates straight out of school and favouring experienced applicants instead. Btw, our relationship with these educators is an attempt to address this.
One way in could be to specialise. Pick one of the many subset of roles that a TA performs and focus on that, and target that to the company you want to join. You may find that this specialisation will go against you in the long run, but hey, you need that foot in the door and you’ll have moved into different areas by then, right?
Lastly, just get in. Get in anyway you can and get started doing whatever. If that’s as a TA, well done but expect to work 200% to keep up to the hirer’s expectation as you’ll have no experience. If you get in as an artist, learn your craft well and move to a TA position when it presents itself and you’ve proved yourself. That’s really how it happens.
And to bring some balance to the thinking that there’s a TA ‘shortage’ about, we just made 2 excellent TA’s redundant. Life in the real world isn’t as fantastic as GDC can make out, it’s tough and competitive but what’s new eh?
Here’s a last thought; I’m gathering more and more evidence that the most common type of background degree for a tech artist is Architecture. :):
I am one of the students that attended one of the TA Round Table session at GDC and was amazed on how all of the questions I had was answered prior to me asking them. That session really taught me how to be a TA and the characteristics of being one. I do believe, from what in-industry TAs shared, that to be a TA you need to be detail oriented, problem solver, open minded and likes variety.
As a student the most I can say is that there are no courses that I’ve seen or heard of that teach what a Technical Artists needs to know. All of the fellow students I met at the roundtables are working hard to teach themselves using resources outside of their schools.
I come from a computer science background before focusing in on art as my degree. All of my learning for technical artist has been me taking advantage of that past to learn the artists’ tools. I also make additional tools for fellow students to help their work flow, help them with rigging and any other problems that I can while learning all the tools necessary to do this on my own time. But it all comes down to learning it on our own time without the resources from school and instructors.
I think your advice for aspiring TAs is great though. Focus and perfect one thing while you can, get a job doing anything to get your foot in the door and get production experience. The more I look into it the more I realize I won’t truely understand the challenges a TA needs to deal with until I start working on a games’ production.
[QUOTE=Paul;5650]
And to bring some balance to the thinking that there’s a TA ‘shortage’ about, we just made 2 excellent TA’s redundant. Life in the real world isn’t as fantastic as GDC can make out, it’s tough and competitive but what’s new eh?[/QUOTE]
I can agree with this. My previous employer, GRIN which shut down last August, had at it’s peek 9 TA over our 3 offices. After the company shut down the TA team where the people it took longest for to find new jobs. One even moved from Sweden to Australia to get a job as there where none to be found in Europe.
I’m currently commute from Sweden to the UK just for work, which isn’t really that appreciated back home with the family.
If they were really that good they would be able to find work, after trying to find TDs to hire several times now there are many that are not up to the task or they don’t know how to interview/demo their work well.
I had many people that were great on paper but once I talked with them it was a diffrent story.
Also if your a character TA/TD that in an interview gripes about animators wanting some feature or them being difficult to work with, during an interview you are automatically removed from my candidate list.
Also I try and look for some one that knows how or has animated since there is a much greater chance they will understand what makes a rig work for animation and animators.
While there might not be a shortage of TAs and TDs, there is a shortage of them that can be hired. It is not enough to just be technically proficient.
One unfortunate aspect of technical art is that TAs sometimes get stuck in a position where they are operating or maintaining a difficult-to-use tool that other artists just don’t want to touch. It’s not about the craft of TA, it’s about the ability to wrap your head around something that no one else finds easy to learn. So we end up with TAs with expertise in a particular tool that isn’t relevant outside their current job position.
It seems to be part of the growing pains of a studio. Once you get more than one TA, there’s suddenly room to breathe and fix problems at their root, instead of just firefighting constantly. Until that happens, though, TAs end up in the unfortunate position of falling behind their peers, just trying to keep their current project afloat.
About the only way to combat that is personal drive. None of us can afford to stop learning.
There are fundamentals that can be carried forward, though – knowledge of anatomy and kinesthesiology, programming fundamentals, linear algebra, physics – having an understanding of any of these fields will help tremendously, because a TA can apply them to any rigging, scripting, shader, or simulation task.
If you’re trying to pick a specialty to help you get a job, make sure it’s not a tool specialty, because they go out of style. Pick something that’s going to last you through your whole career.
[QUOTE=Bronwen;5707]One unfortunate aspect of technical art is that TAs sometimes get stuck in a position where they are operating or maintaining a difficult-to-use tool that other artists just don’t want to touch. It’s not about the craft of TA, it’s about the ability to wrap your head around something that no one else finds easy to learn. So we end up with TAs with expertise in a particular tool that isn’t relevant outside their current job position.
It seems to be part of the growing pains of a studio. Once you get more than one TA, there’s suddenly room to breathe and fix problems at their root, instead of just firefighting constantly. Until that happens, though, TAs end up in the unfortunate position of falling behind their peers, just trying to keep their current project afloat.
About the only way to combat that is personal drive. None of us can afford to stop learning.
There are fundamentals that can be carried forward, though – knowledge of anatomy and kinesthesiology, programming fundamentals, linear algebra, physics – having an understanding of any of these fields will help tremendously, because a TA can apply them to any rigging, scripting, shader, or simulation task.
If you’re trying to pick a specialty to help you get a job, make sure it’s not a tool specialty, because they go out of style. Pick something that’s going to last you through your whole career.[/QUOTE]
I’ll second this. Definitely feel the effects of working with tools that have been built up over years of hacking and working around the issues of the moment. Would be very nice if companies could invest more time in stepping back and reevaluating the pipe.
I 3rd,4th,5th,6th and 7th this. The stronger your foundation in fundamentals in any discipline or art form the better you will be able to adapt and continue to grow as tools change, get better or become outdated.
This is the area that was the weakest among the job applicants I last reviewed. I…well I better stop before lack of sleep send me in to a rant, great points in your post Bronwen.
What aspects should I focus my demo reel on?