Being down to earth let’s say a personal space oddity instead.
When I was a kid I really enjoyed watching films in our VHS player. It feels like yesterday when I was deciding if I wanted to see that film with the robots in the desert, the one in the snow or the other one. I did ‘t know anything about star wars but I somehow loved watching those fantastic films. I was probably 6 or 7 and at that point The Phantom Menace was already out too.
Time passed and one of those films got stuck in the VHS player. I didn’t care, it was already DVD era and I got The lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I could choose the chapter and skip all the boring Frodo scenes and just watch the exciting war scenes! I also started painting Warhammers and I used the film as a reference to paint my war elephant (oliphant?) and made my own addons with threads and tooth sticks. Boyhood was fun.
In high school, we got introduced to 3ds Max 2010 and Reactor, the physics simulator of that time. I loved those lessons so I started practising 3D at that time with a friend using my old Pentium 4 computer (later upgraded to core 2 duo and then to a quad and that was top-level). We even created our made-up studio “RGB studios” (cool huh) and later rebranded it to “Render ID” (even cooler!) but the truth is that I didn’t know anything about computer graphics, I was just playing around, creating scenes (they seemed photoreal at that time) and modeling boxes with tileable textures, but I had so much fun.
After half a year making my first steps in CG, I suddenly stopped. I went into university and built up my career as a programmer focused on web development. But after some time of personal turbulences, I decided to apply to a VFX course and give it a try. I made a short reel with my 15-years-old-self material and sent it to The Animation Workshop. That was one year (ok, one year and 2 months) ago, I maybe knew 1% of the stuff we were learning and I developed myself as a VFX artist in 4 non-stop working months.
This last year has been crazy: I worked 5 months in a short film at the school, had the opportunity to teach the introduction week on this year’s VFX course and jumped into Ghost VFX in Copenhagen to start my proffessional career working on The Mandalorian (and some other projects!), and closed the circle that started years ago with my little self watching people fighting with lightsabers on a CRT TV.