Althea Deane (Freelance Animator)

Althea Deane (Freelance Animator) Althea has a lot of experience within the games industry but her passion is animation. With her roots as an animator that had been trained to be an illustrator this had been her key into getting into the industry, But that is not all. Since she also had contacts elsewhere it must have been much easier to be able to have gotten a job within the games industry. From her talk i gathered that many U.K games companies reach a critical mass and eventually go out of business, but this just may Very well be the case from Altheas point of view. As said by Pete Akril “Programmers make A.I so that characters and objects move while animators make the objects and characters appear intelligent” This is very relevant since everything that Althea has done revolves around the animation of specific characters in order to make them look inelegant. Or that the movement the character is doing has a real purpose and that it looks relevant as to what is happening. For example. If a Character that is stood still does nothing then the character looks “Soulless” or empty, By adding a little bit of character swaying or facial expression will make a huge difference to whether or not a character has no purpose other than being in a certain place doing nothing for no purpose or a car driver stood next to a car waiting for his next race. Althea has jumped from a fair few companies in her role as a character animator. She started game animation in Warthog, and this is where se started learning about game animation in 3D until the company went out of business in 2004 From Warthog she moved to Eurocom and worked on the Batman begins game still doing character animation. After Eurocom she joined Psygnosis (Which is now Sony entertainment Liverpool) crating some animations for a F1 game... Small animations which make a character look real rather than having a character not moving and lifeless is what she did for Psygnosis. She then moved onto working on Little Big Planet (PSP) As lead animator since she was the only animator in the studio. She showed us some of the animations for the project and told us that the project was given away to another studio so she didn’t actually know if any of her animations were actually used in the final game. After this she moves onto working for Evolution studios on Motorstorm : Apocalypse She did character animations for the stunts performed on bikes. A few issues were mentioned here with designers talking to her about shortening the animations to be quicker and shorter than 3 secconds. From then on she went freelance. Freelance work is good since it is not uncommon to have a higher daily rate than having an actual job within a company however you don’t get the benefits for working in-house since you don’t get payed for overtime and you don’t get a pension and work may not always be available. And then got a job as a freelance animator at Bizarre creations working on James bond: Bloodstone mainly cleaning up motion capture animation since bizarre needed more people in-house to make sure that their deadline was met. Althea overall appears to have worked at more places than than any other professional who has done a talk. And has provided a valuable insight into how hectic working in the games industry can be, and due to the changing nature of the games business and the decline in game studios within the U.K i may have to concider the idea of settling down at one place may not be an option in the future.