Professional Practice (Week 4)

Talks from a Graduate-Placement and Early Career

This week we got the choice of attending two speakers who were former students at Ulster University and who were going to walk us through their personal journey through university, how they progressed within their career and where they are at now in their professional endeavour’s. I decided to attend Rachel Dixons talk on a whim and was happy I choose too, as I really related to her work, her interests and felt her advice and personal journey through university was similar to mine and very helpful.

Rachel began talking to us how for her third year she decided to take the opportunity of a placement year and stated how this helped in beginning her early carer and finding her feet within her animation profession. Racheal currently is employed by the company Italic Pig and told us how when she arrived, the company was very small company, with five to six people and has now grown to an impressive twenty people. I admired the idea of Rachel working within a small business, as I also feel it’s a good start to begin working small and grow with your business and capabilities and that sometimes a large, corporate business could be too overwhelming for a beginning student.

Rachel talked about how from university to now being hired within Italic Pig, she is still growing and developing her skills within creating 2D and 3D assets, as she only learned a year ago that she was able to animate characters successfully. She expressed to us as second year students that it’s okay to not have a cemented style which you mostly work in and that it is okay to still have confusion on where you want your career path to take you.

This is something I personally really related to with Rachel, as for so many successfully animators and designers, they seem to start their career off with a great knowledge of who they are and what they are capable of producing when they get hired outside of university. Many of these artists have developed their personal style within their own time and now have the ability to know what work they can produce and fully enjoy their style of art. My favourite thing to create personally is models and although I do enjoy character design and creating. I haven’t developed a style or individual look within my art, something that I hope will not affect me negatively within my career, but instead boost my ability to be considered by an employer as I can easily work within many styles and not be subjected to one style. This is why when Rachel also expressed this trait and showed how she was still able to hold down a successful and thriving career without having a unique style, she had provided me with a more optimistic look on the future.

Rachels talk was already very informative and was relaxing me about the rest of my course and career within university, so I was happy to continue to listen to what she had to say. She continued to talk about how many of the things we are learning in our university course is going to really help us for our careers and will prepare us for the type of scenarios we might find ourselves working in within a company. She talked about how many of her jobs were working within a pipeline of people, trying different types of art and how they all worked together to achieve a final outcome.

When it was Rachels time to develop a showreel and be hired within her third year for placement, after looking at her work and what she had available to edit into her showreel. She decided that if she was going to develop her own work and show employers, she is serious about her career and would be a good choice for them to hire within their company. She was going to take her own incitive and produce some more work for her showreel. She told us how she just gave some time to developing her work and had started to strengthen her portfolio and maya skills, by creating lots of different assets and following different tutorials on YouTube.

She also expressed how having a positive outlook on yourself when writing up your cover letter or when attending the interview for your placement, is a really good character trait to learn and can both help your confidence and when appealing to employers. This is something I have always kept within my head, as it is always good to be a self-critic and keep yourself improving and working hard, however there will be no benefit in being negative about yourself and your abilities as the world can be negative enough. She reminded us how she said earlier in her presentation how she was always an artist with no unique or individual style and how this was something that she noticed had made her different from most people in her career. This was both a negative and positive thing as it would have helped her carer to have a more secure style of work, to continuously improve and progress within, however allowed her to be more valuable to her employer as she was able to draw a create in a varied number of styles instead. When Rachel was attending interviews, she made sure that she was confident and honest by saying to her employers how she as an artist having no individual look, allows her to work equally between both 2D and 3D materials, have a better understanding of all steps of the animation pipeline and how she can give a number of different perspectives. Rachel showed that she is an honest person and self- aware and had presented us with a healthy outlook, always make sure that you are pushing yourself, but that it is important to remain positive and that she herself, shows that everything will work out in the end.

Rachel throughout her entire presentation presented a really down to earth and chill personality, showing us her work and being honest with all her struggles throughout her career and even now within her job. I see many similarities between me, and the speaker and I was able to learn a lot by listening to her advice and took in what she had to say that she wished she had prepared more for her placement, tried a little harder at developing her own styles and work. She also provided a reliant tone and sense of reassuring, especially during this December with the much work that is expected of us as students and during a pandemic. Rachel stated that it is important to work hard at what you’re doing, but to also enjoy what you are doing and to take her word that what you are doing is enough and that everything will work out as long as you try your best.

https://vimeo.com/272079572

Rachel Dixon Showreel 2018 - 1

Rachel was extremely relatable and encouraging and described her career and how she worked to where she is now, with great passion. She told us about us for many years she worked in a local supermarket and was excited to finally quit her job, move forward and really make a start in finding her feet in employment. She attended the interviews, sent in her showreel and when she got her offer, she had been more than ready to take the leap and succeed. She told a very real story however that the company that had accepted her offer to work with them for placement, actually pulled out of their offer last minute and had not continued the agreement to work with her in the end. This was another hit for Rachel who was stressed she had left looking for a placement too last minute, was not going to find a replacement, and nearly lost her long-time job, all just to have her plans change. Rachel used this time in her story to tell everyone that no matter what comes your way, remaining positive will be the one thing that at the end of the day will help you the most along your journey and to remember to try and plan as much as you can, but to always pick yourself up and move forward. It was interesting and educational to get an insight look on just how difficult the professional world may be and that the journey may never be a straight line.

Rachels journey left her to accept a placement only for six months in a studio I also am looking onto for placement within my third year, Flixerpix. My reasoning for wanting to apply for this animation studio is that they are located in Bangor which is the closet to me between my hometown Derry and where I am currently living Belfast. It is also the only main studio in Ireland, that work it stop motion along with other styles and that I think would be a great place to apply for, to encourage my learning and skills in making puppets, modelling and the steps in creating a stop motion film. Rachel expressed however she had to finally leave Flixerpix as they were a none paying, last minute placement and that she needed to move on within her work and decided that her work deserved to be respected more and needed to be paid.

Rachel explained to us her reasoning for taking a non paying placement, as she was aware that the opportunity would be beneficial in adding to her portfolio of work and helping her to gain valuable experiences and skills and how this may also be a position, we may find ourselves within. Rachel went onto explain to us that this time in our life in going to be filled with hard decisions and that we need to really be honest with ourselves as individuals and sometimes put in the effort and hard work, that we may not want to necessarily do, but is something that we may need for our career. After Rachel had worked in Flixerpix for a few months she then told us how she needed to be honest with her employers and tell them that she could no longer work an unpaid placement and showed us that in being artist and working within a creative sector, there is going to be a lot of situations where people may request our work for free or less than what we are deserved.

This has been a popular topic coming up to our time as independent artists, where we may want to branch out onto freelance work or working for a company. We have been regularly told by Alec and Rachel to state our worth, to be confident during interviews and how important it is to set terms and contracts. This will be something many of us artists have not experienced yet, as I myself didn’t even consider the importance of agreeing on a contract before work, so that all terms and work that has been asked for, is being paid for respectfully and has been proved on paper.

She told us how during this time and the numerous interviews she had attended looking for that paid placement, she realised how relaxed most interviews turn out and how although it’s good to be cautious and prepared when entering an interview, it is also healthy to keep in mind that everyone is understanding of the high stress situation and how they are just there to get to know you and your work. She stressed how interviews are not as scary as thought out to be and that as long as you show your personality, that’s going to be the happiest you can make everyone and yourself.

Rachel continued her talk by saying she was thankful for the career paths she had taken up to this point, gaining experience from Flixerpix and how she was able to land another, payed placement in a company called Mammonth. She told how this job was a paid placement and how that their sector of work, which was graphic and design and advertisement, wasn’t something she really was interested in doing or pursuing with her career. However, just with many of her past decisions, this job had given her loads of useful experience and helped her to obtain her job today in the gaming studio Italic Pig.

In this job she was able to gain responsibility for her work and others, developed her skills in other software’s and had gained new independence for her craft. She worked hard grafting and climbing the social latter, networking and gaining clients at her placement and soon enough was able to develop her own freelance work and provide for herself.

Rachels presentation from the start was really inspirational for me and was a joy to listen to how she learned to develop herself as the artist she is today. I related a lot to her struggles and worries and how she was able to remain optimistic, took every inconvenience in her stride, learned from it and had pushed herself to where she is now happily in her career. Today’s lesson was really refreshing to hear how Rachel had gone through her ups and downs to develop her career has inspired me to do the same.