Shawn Kelly

So tonight we had a Q & A session with Shawn Kelly, co founder of AM and animator at ILM. I went into the Q & A session and there were TONS, tons tons tons of people already there waiting. I'm thinkin it was mostly everyone in Class 1.

Shawn is real energetic, amiable and seems ridiculously happy to be alive. Like this Q & A was going to be the last thing ever he did on this earth. I mean, the session officially was 9:30 to 10:30, I left midway through the session to take Cheryl to work, came back at 11:30 and he was still answering questions.

He wanted to keep it casual and said he didn't come with any agendas so I fired off the first question. I asked how much motion capture he has to work with versus hand-keyed animation. I can't retell his answer verbatim but I quickly jotted down some bullet points, I'll type them exactly as I wrote them so they are a little fragmented, but you get it right?

-Barely uses Mo-cap, out of about 14o shots he's animated, maybe 4 were motion capture.
-Transformers? Not much mo-cap.
-Much like Gollum from Weta, The Hulk had very little of it, most of it was tossed. Thinks its just good PR and newer technology is always sexier to the public.
-Directors don't seem to care much if you toss it, they just want it to look good.
-Proudest scenes he's done are of Yoda.

Aaaaaaand so that was it for my question, actually that last one wasn't even my question. There were hordes of students there, so I wrapped it up quick. Anywho, super generous, elated person despite being super busy. Good peoples that Shawn Kelly.

Rose Rushbrooke: gawd everyones teeth so white.

Thanks!


Also in attendance was Albert Ao, who is only one of two students from the Philippines, RAD!