Can I get some advice on landing work?

Arebiter

Hi everyone!

I've been applying for various 3D artist positions in different studios and companies in my city (NYC) for about a month and a half now but I haven't even been able to get an interview with any of them. I've asked my friends and co-workers for critiques and help on making my portfolio and demo reel better and everyone says I'm good. But clearly something is off with my applications. I was wondering if someone here would be willing to take a look at my portfolio and demo reel and tell me what I'm doing wrong and how I could improve my chances of getting hired. 

I want to find a job as an animator, that's what my demo reel was made for, but I have been applying to generalist and environment artist positions as well. 

My portfolio: pasandharmasena.squarespace.com

Alex_J

Im not animator so take my critique with grain of salt, but your fight animations seem to lack weight. I think if you went back through the ones with master chief fighting and add some exaggeration and timing adjustments into the impacts, it will be a much more impressive scene.

I don't remember where I first heard it, but it's said that "mastery of the basics is was separates the champions from the also-rans." or something like that.

TuxedoPato

I'm going to be pretty straightforward here:

When I see your demo reel, I immediately think "student." Like Alex said, your animations lack weight. A lot of the missing weight is due to your timing being jerky with a lot of sudden starts and stops. Your fundamentals need work, especially timing.

You've got some good stuff going. I think the Master Chief vs a bunch of dudes one can be impressive with more polish. I'm not so sure about the rest right now, unfortunately. I think it would be good for you to do smaller scenes and get them to look really good, and then move on to longer scenes if you wish.

My impressions on other ones:

The Master Chief vs samurai one is quite ambitious in its length and it doesn't quite hit the mark. The animation is again stiff and jerky.

The "Dear Dad" one doesn't really impress me in any way; the motion is not particularly exciting. It's not bad, but its pretty bland.

The Pixar one at the beginning also strikes me negatively. I immediately compared it to the actual Pixar animation mentally, which is not really something that you want recruiters to do (also, I saw you wrote that your teacher said it's a rite of passage of sorts to copy the Pixar logo anim for animators... I've never seen or heard of anyone doing such a thing).

The Frankenstein-ish one is not helping either. The mouth shape of the guy is really weird, and I'm noticing stiff, unnatural hand poses as well as clipping. 

The fox locomotion is jerky and there will be foot sliding if translated forward. The overlapping action on the tail and ears is also off.

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I'm also not sure what kind of animation you're going for. Your reel is pretty general with there being one game locomotion cycle with the fox, many action cinematics like the Master Chief/Samurai one, and then there's a film one (the first Pixar one) and I'm not sure what I'm seeing with the one called "Dear Dad." There are different specializations of animation and you can improve your chances of landing an interview if you show focus. Some common specializations are film, game cinematics, and gameplay. There's even hyper specializations such as melee gameplay (though this is pretty rare and it would probably be ill-advised to go this far right now). What do you want to do?

That being said, you don't necessarily have to specialize, but it can help for some people.

Anyways, my impression is that you're not quite ready yet. You've definitely got some good things going, but you've still got a ways to go to get to "industry standard". I recommend getting feedback not just from friends/coworkers, but from online animation-specific communities like AnimState. I've heard iAnimate or Animation Mentor are also good online schools you can take if you can afford it.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions and good luck.

PS: I’m sure your coworkers and friends mean well when they say your stuff is good, but I suggest trying to objectively compare your work to high level work such as AAA game studios or top budget movie studios (Disney, Pixar, ILM, etc). With how the competition is nowadays, many studios can have their pick of top-level candidates, so you want to be up there.