About me

Hello, I'm Emily. I animate, rig characters, and develop tools for creative work. 

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I often hear people draw a line between artistic and technical work, as if one side is vibrant and fun, and the other totally devoid of creativity, but I disagree. I find the creative problem solving in tool development just as rewarding as I ever did animating a shot. I've been lucky to start from years of animation experience, which informs how I approach solving these puzzles. Bringing an artist's perspective to this technical work is especially beneficial, as the tools and rigs I am designing, are for other artists to use.

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In my free time, I experiment with VR, making some stand alone experiences, and worlds for VR Chat. I have also been tinkering with creative coding in three.js and p5.js.

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What I do at work

I am a "Sequence Artist" working on the Avatar franchise (the James Cameron one, not the anime one). The role of a sequence artist is similar to a layout artist, but for virtual production. It involves bringing the characters, props, and costumes, audio, and mocap data together in an environment for the director to begin shooting with a virtual camera. These shots are edited together to create the first "template", a previsualization of the sequence.

When the need for previz work on Avatar 3 ramped down, I spent more time developing tools to solve animation and rigging problems. This introduced me into the niche of rigging, first in Maya, and more recently, in Unreal Engine. In the last few months, this had become my exclusive focus.

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Previous work

Previously, I was a lead animator at Lost Cosmonauts, where I worked on game cinematics and trailers. Our clients included Valve Software (Dota 2) and Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile 2). This was mostly keyframe animation but some projects required retargeting and polishing motion capture data.

 

I was a technical animator on The Lego Movie 2 at Animal Logic (now Netflix Studios), in Vancouver. I then moved to Animal Logic's Sydney studio, to work on Peter Rabbit 2.

Before that, I animated characters for television, on Disney Channel and Disney Junior shows like Elena of Avalor, and The Adventures of Goldie and Bear. I also worked on The Deep and Super Monsters, and Max Steel.

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I started my career making motion graphics and limited animation, for ads, music videos, and PSAs. The majority of the animation work was in Flash and After Effects, but I dabbled in some stop-motion and traditional hand drawn animation as well. 

 

I graduated from the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts 3D Character Animation program. I have since furthered my animation education with iAnimate's Advanced Body Mechanics course, and Quadruped Locomotion course.