Mia Golubovic Svensson Character Animation
https://miagolubovicsvenss.wixsite.com/portfolio
Letter Of Intention Character Animation 2017
Hi!
My name is Mia, I'm 27 years old at the moment. The course I would like to apply to is the Character Animation (CA) Program. This is my first time applying.
I'm born and raised in Sweden, and I've been drawing since daycare.
Like most people who love to draw I am also fascinated by animation, to make characters and emotion come to life. When I was 15 years old in 2005 I got accepted and attended a school called Eksjö Gymnasium which had a 3 year animation course. I've always wanted to animate and when I first got to try it I knew for sure I was in the right place. We studied classic animation, stop motion, cell-animation. We Scanned it into Flipbook and edited in Adobe Premiere. It was a great school, we had great teachers and guest teachers who were artists from the Swedish industry and they were a delight to work with. One of them was Lasse Persson. He inspired my young self a lot and he made me realise that living and working with animation was possible, and it has been my dream ever since.
After school I started out as a saleswoman in a company called GAME and it was an incredible experience. After a while I got more hours and a year later got a full time position as Vice Manager of the shop. Other than the access to a great culture of video games, I became much more confident and relaxed in myself. I got to know some terrific people and made some fantastic connections with customers.
It also helped me improve my sense of team work as we would work 3 to 4 people during the day.
I also realized there was another place for me to animate, than in film. And what I came to love about games is the experience I shared with others, We've all been to space and back to save the universe.
After circa 6 years of working in retail I went on my first trips alone to Portugal and Italy.
I started to think about how I was living my life, and I realized I was not very happy with my situation.
I asked myself questions on what I wanted from life and what I love doing, and the answer really couldn't be more clear to me. I need to study and work with art. So I decided it was time for me to pick up where I left off. I bought my first Wacom Tablet and during the fall of 2015. Almost everyday I would come home after work and sit down to study different artists, photos and some animation to brush up on my skills.
I learned a new software called Sketchbook Pro within a couple of months.
In the summer of 2016 I applied to The Drawing Academy and got in.
During this time, it has been hard work, but through hard work comes great improvement.
This fall the students got to choose the teacher. I chose Artems class because I heard he was a bit "harsh" but very skilled, and I knew I needed that to develop my craft further.
Time moved very fast and within a month I grew fond of the atmosphere around the school, art students and teachers here in Viborg. I joined the Party Committee to get more understanding of the place and to get to know the other bachelor students better. I volunteered to help out during the Viborg Game Expo.
I got in contact with Sif whom is character animation student of yours to help her in her project Tales Of Zale. I helped cleaning up a scene, which you can look at in the optional category.
I simply couldn't get enough!
During this time I also took online courses on Digital Landscapes : Painting Environments with Photoshop with Hardy Fowler and character design with Tom Bancroft. I'm also getting to know Photoshop better as we speak. Between February and March 2017 I signed up for croquis in Malmö, to keep my eyes and hands fresh. I also got accepted to the Florence Academy of Art in Mölndal, which is where I will be this summer between April and June painting and drawing, hoping for your acceptance.
My dream is to work with a team of people or freelance in games, films of all kinds in both 3D and classic 2D animation. The industry as I see it is growing everyday, especially in Video Games, Virtual Reality but also in Film and TV-shows. A great example of this is Bobs Burgers or Rick & Morty.
I think we will always have a desire to see the world through a different lens in order to understand it, escape it, educate ourselves, to spread ideas and culture. You can discover and learn so much through visual media, with this in mind I find that it is important to tell and experience stories from a new point of view.
My great inspiration in animation is Glen Keane. He has a beautiful way to express emotion in movement that moves me to my core. His film Duet captured me and brought me tears of joy.
The Game Last Of Us by the talented studio Naughty Dog is one of the best experiences I've had. The emotional connection between characters displayed in acting and animation, the immersive universe, their care and attention to detail and the story's (highly unusual) female perspective is what captured me and kept me playing through the night and into the early morning.
David Lynch's work Mulholland Drive is one of those gold mines of expression in darkness and "uneasiness" through simple but interesting narrative imagery.
It is one of my favorite movies and I watched it several times. What these works have in common is the awe and curiosity of exploration. I think they awaken something deeper in us, and I want to work with those kinds of stories.
I am half Swedish half Serbian which has affected me in many ways, but most of the time left me feel like I am standing between to national identities, not really fitting into one or the other. For me it has both a negative and a positive consequence. I found myself looking for people outside my family to find familiarity. And I found them in TV, movies and music. As I was growing up I consumed a lot of media, and I still do. It also made me a person who wanted to explore the world and learn new things to be able to connect with people. You never know when that article on 'Evidence of shaken baby syndrome Questioned by controversial study' will come in handy!
Speaking of multimedia (wow what a segway!) This might not be a popular opinion but I do have some problems with the Transformers movie franchise. Not because of the CG and visual effects but because their stories lack depth and originality. I feel as to they are constructed to bring in fast money and they do not discuss relationship between society and machine except with vengance and battles between what they consider to be good and evil. I feel that pacing and building strong characters should be essential to telling an interesting story that people care deeply about, and I just can't see it happening here.
In video games there are a lot of good examples of bad, but one game that sticks out to me is the success of a game called Destiny. It made a lot of promises before it came out about endless possibilities in an endless universe of space, and how, through game play, they would tell the story of the players as heroes within that universe. Sounds fantastic does it not?
However (surprise, surprise) it's not the situation at all. It's a straight up shooter with a rehash of events with little to no loot or any deep storytelling. I feel like criticizing games for not keeping up their promises is not always up to the actual idea/creator of the game, but rather the industry behind it. Publishers and investors wanting to see results and to capitalize often push out the product before it is finished and finalized. Yet the community around the game is really strong, there is a lot of love and I think we sometimes forget whom to credit for that.
As for comics, I am not a big reader, but since I was young I have been angry with the comic strip Laban (Fred Basset). I think it could be a generation gap, and the fact that I could not relate to the humor because I was lacking life experience. But maybe I should give it another chance. Sometimes it is all about perspective.
Sketchbook - pretty well
TVPaint - fairly new
Photoshop - Beginner
Maya - Beginner
Thank you so much for reading this and looking at my application, I hope this gives you an idea on what I'm about :). The financial situation will be a loan from the Swedish Studentloan CSN.
Best Wishes
Mia Golubovic Svensson.
Letter Of Intention Character Animation 2017
