Chris Sasaki - From Pixar!

Our tutors managed to arrange a meeting with a character designer from Pixar while he's on holiday in Leeds yesterday, which means he came to speak to our class exclusively! The main two projects he has worked on for Pixar so far are Monsters University and their next release: Inside Out. After the talk I researched his work and found these designs for Monsters University:

I personally love this film (I've even had the artbook for it for a year!) so having the chance to meet someone who worked on it was a great experience. He talked us through the process of how he creates a series of designs to present to his boss in regular meetings, to gain regular feedback on his work and which they feel would work best for the film, for him to then develop further on the ones the boss likes the most until a final design is decided upon. 

He also spoke about how he graduated from _ to then get an internship at Dreamworks, which is where he decided to develop on his character designing portfolio. He tried to apply for a job in a lot of places as soon as he graduated but they all said he didn't have enough experience. This is something I think everybody in my class can relate to since companies in England tend to say the same thing.

He encouraged us by saying the facilities he has seen around our college are impressive, and that we don't necessarily need to graduate from a famous school such as CalArts to become successful in this industry. This being said, we all still have to work extremely hard and show commitment and purpose to our work in order for the success to happen; This has shown me that I will need to constantly work on improving my skills and take more into consideration when developing ideas, which will only get better with practice.