Paul is a recent graduate of our Animation Certificate Course and during the year worked on Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight a Screen Ireland Short Film which premiered at the Galway Film festival last month.

We caught up with Paul to have a chat about his time in Pulse, his latest work and what he’s got planned next.

So, Paul You Completed the Animation Cert at Pulse, How’d You Find it?

Yes, that’s right I did the Animation Certificate from 2017 – 2018 and finished with a distinction so, I’m very pleased about that.

Previously I had studied both game development and animation and a lot of my work is in this area but nowadays it’s important to keep learning and adding new skills. I wanted to brush up on my animation and Maya skills and came across the certificate and Pulse and thought it looked like a good great fit.

We covered a lot of interesting topics including Maya, 3D modelling and animation, the history of art, life drawing, 2D asset creation, storyboarding, 3D assets for games, narrative and storytelling. There was probably more topics but that’s what springs to mind right now!

The 3D modelling was quite technical, and the life drawing is challenging & informative if you want to get things correct from an art perspective so a good blend of skills is covered.

I really enjoyed the storyboarding classes and found them very helpful

Learning how to read the boards and deal with quick revisions is good for students to get to grips with, as I soon found out when I went straight into production with real boards to help create our 3D Animatics from.

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There was a really good blend of experience in the lecturer team too who had plenty of industry experience.

After graduating I got the opportunity to work as a 3d Background Artist and Technical Director on Lady Isobel and the Elf Knight. The short animation was written and directed by Cashell Horgan, animated by Graham Isherwood and produced by Andrew Moore.

The movie is about a young girl’s encounters with a Dark Elf Knight. A very cool project to be involved in.

Tell Us More

Sure! It was a really nice job and a lot of hard work but at the same time plenty of fun. The production company were looking for people with Unity and animation skills, so I was a good fit for the role. I was hired to work on Unity and backgrounds. They had a target amount of backgrounds that had to be built to a certain 3D style.

I had plenty of technical responsibilities, co-ordinated work with the animators – receiving their files and getting them into the pipeline. I also worked closely with the director and keep an eye on his requirements & technical changes.

We had difficult deadlines to hit and constantly needed keep on top of the workflow. There were something like 3 major milestones with the animatics and the film board checking as well so the pressure was always on!

Check out the trailer here…

What’s Up Next?

There a few things I’m working on right now with a couple of game and VR projects in the works.

There’s a bit of a film and storytelling with VR scene starting to emerge in Dublin at the moment which is quite exciting & the games people are always up to something cool. Things move really really fast so you need to be keeping up with the latest technology & requirements.

For anyone thinking of doing a course at Pulse I’d strongly recommend applying yourself having fun and participating in extracurricular activities like game jams.

Training is a big thing it’s a multiple-disciplinary field now and there’s growing opportunities for work if you have the right aptitude & skill sets.

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