Andrey is a 2D Animator with game developer, Iron Monkey.
What do you do?
As a 2D animator, I do pretty much everything from hard assets to characters, little sprites, backgrounds to character design - just about anything that moves!
A typical day varies from project to project. Usually when we come in the morning, we have a talk to see how the project is going, how busy the schedule is, and what we'll be doing. Then I start drawing, sketching, animating, or building assets, all depending on what I have to do. I would be given assets to do and a schedule. I would talk to the supervisors and they would tell me that I need to a car, or a walking character or an aeroplane.
I work with other artists incuding Dan who is the lead artist, Nick who is artist like me, and Tony as well: he draws a lot and does the design.
We start with some basic moves - for example for a punch, a walk forward, a walk back, a block - four or five movements - very basic stuff. Once we get that down, we are given a whole lot of renders from the 3D version of the game. I scale them down, pick out a rough look on how it's going to fit on the screen. Then I start doing some basic animations - punch, walk back. And then we have a look and see if we have too many frames or movement not quite right, so we to scale it down further and make it very simple and very basic. Once we've worked that out and we're happy, we move on to variations for each movement - like for the long punch, there's the variations - long punch, high punch, low block, high block. And on we go, move by move.
How did you get to where you are today?
This is my first job as an artist in the games industry. Before that I was studying. After school I went and did a course in classical animation - that's hand-drawn Disney-type of thing. There is two types, 2D animation and 3D animation. This one was focused mainly on 2D style. I did that for three years, and after that I realised that I really love animation, but I didn't actually want to work in it at that stage. Then I saw that my 2D and 3D skills translated really well to games. I saw that it was basically tree art and sprites, which is what I'm doing now here at Iron Monkey.
What skills are necessary for you to do your job?
The mains skills are drawing and painting. The painting is very important, especially in 2D and texture work. You have to do a lot of painting. Sketching too. And you have to talk a lot of other artists.
How important was your education/training?
It was very important. For one it helped me narrow down what I wanted to do. I knew what I enjoyed and what I understood more. Because of that, it gave me a clearer direction. We did a lot of drawing in the course. We drew pretty much every day, eight hours a day. It was a lot of work and a lot of practice. It definitely helped me. Also, working in an environment in a creative field, you have to socialize and have to be able to discuss ideas.
Where do you see your career going?
I would love to continue to create different types of art. This is a cool job because every project you get to do something new. So I just want to continue drawing and continue making interesting games and entertainment for others to enjoy.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to enter the games industry?
Number one thing is just draw. Try to make friends with people that do similar things to what you want to do. They will inspire you every day and will challenge you and you can talk about it and discuss it and you?ll grow very quickly if you are in an environment with creative individuals. They'll push you, they'll push the limits, and that's great.
Watch movies and cartoons, and see what's popular and what people like or what people play these days. There is a whole bunch of things - like sitting on a train - you literally see thousands of environments and you just start imagining what would happen in that environment. Let's say you see a building and you say 'what would it be like if there was a bus on top of the building, or what would happen if an aeroplane was flying by'? That's very complex to animate, of course. But imagine even the simple things such as colours. Sometime you see a stick and it's scratched you say 'wow, that would be cool in my scene where a poster is hanging off and it's all scratched off'. Look at everything. There is just so much information around, especially on the Internet.
To get my foot in the door, it was my portfolio. The three years I spent as an animator I drew a lot. This is most important.
Also, be flexible. In the games industry you have to be able to do 2D, or fantasy, or science fiction. What if your next project asked you be able to draw a hip-hop style characters? You have to be flexible and enjoy it as well?
