Heather VASE Talk Followup

APSU Press Relations has a followup article about Heathers speech last week.  Check it out HERE

The Department of Art + Design and the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts welcomed award-winning senior matte painter and environment designer Heather Abels to Austin Peay State University on Wednesday, Feb. 26. 

“Abels is a Clarksville resident and friend of the Department of Art + Design who works with major film, TV and animation studios such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Rhythm and Hues and Nemesis Collective,” Michael Dickins, chair of the Visiting Artist Speaker Committee, said. 

Abels has worked on matte painting for various movies, including “Frozen II,” “Deadpool,” “Game of Thrones,” “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” “Django Unchained,” “300: Rise of an Empire” and “Moana.” She also worked on Academy Award winners in best animated feature or visual effects, including “Zootopia,” “Big Hero 6,” “Avatar” and “The Golden Compass.” 

During her talk at Austin Peay, she discussed with the students three major things that she has learned throughout her career: inspiration, failure and acceptance. 

Abels was inspired early in her career by legendary matte painters. She got her inspiration when she was a young child by watching “Star Wars,” “Toy Story” and “Jurassic Park.” 

“When I talk about inspiration, I’m not talking about what excites you,” Abels said. “I’m talking about people that you surround yourself with and surrounding yourself with people who inspire and motivate you is one of the first things that helped me in my career.”  

She encourages the new generation of artists to take the next leap and evolve from digital 2D to digital 3D matte painting techniques. She has taught at several universities and has an ongoing workshop at CGSociety. 

She reminds her students that they will fail at times.  

“It’s about failing and failing again until you get it right,” she said. “And it’s not always what you want. You’re trying to execute somebody else’s vision.” 

Acceptance is being able to take the feedback and create something better. 

“You don’t know what you don’t know, till you’ve learned what you didn’t know,” she said. “What I’m saying here is about being humble. There are a lot of artists whose careers haven’t taken off because they were unwilling to accept feedback, and visual effects is all about modification.” 

Heather's APSU Visiting Artist Talk

Last night Heather gave a lecture as part of APSU's and CECA's Visiting Artist Speaker Series. Even with a slight snow storm there was a great turn out and lots of great questions by the students in attendance!

Heather's talk this week!

Press Release for Heather's VASE Lecture

You can check out the full release HERE

The Department of Art + Design, with support from The Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, is pleased to welcome award-winning senior matte painter & environment designer, Heather Abels, to Austin Peay State University.  

“Abels is a Clarksville resident and friend of the Department of Art + Design who works with major film, TV and animation studios such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Rhythm and Hues and Nemesis Collective,” Michael Dickins, chair of the Visiting Artist Speaker Committee, said. “She is credited on such films and TV series as ‘Frozen II,’ ‘Deadpool,’ ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events,’ ‘Zootopia,’ ‘Django Unchained,’ ‘300: Rise of an Empire’ and ‘Moana.’ We are really excited for her visit as she will give an artist lecture on her creative practice and her life and career as a sought after, award-winning, Hollywood matte painter.”  

Abels’ lecture – which is free and open to the public – is at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 26, in the Trahern Theatre, located in the Trahern building at Austin Peay. All ages are welcome. 

Abels has contributed to multiple Academy Award winners 

Abels is a senior matte painter with over 12 years of experience in the visual effects industry. Her work encompasses live-action blockbusters, animated feature films, national advertising campaigns, cutting-edge VR and concept work. She also has taught at several universities and has an ongoing workshop at CGSociety.She has worked at top studios including Walt Disney Animation, Blur Studios, Weta Digital, Matte World Digital, The Orphanage and Rhythm & Hues. During her time at Rhythm & Hues, she became matte department supervisor. In doing so, she was able to cross the divide between artists and technicians in order to build and adapt the department to meet new demands, as seen in the Academy Award-winning film “Life of Pi.” 

She worked on other Academy Award winners in best animated feature or visual effects include “Zootopia,” “Big Hero 6,” “Avatar” and “The Golden Compass.” Abels was mentored and inspired early in her career by the legendary matte painters who made the leap from traditional painting to digital. She has focused on mentoring the new generation of artists to take the next leap and evolve from digital 2D to digital 3D matte painting techniques.

Heather giving talk at APSU!

I'm so excited to have Heather come talk to APSU students as part of the VASE speaker series put on by our own Michael Dickins with support from the Center of Excellence in the Creative Arts.

Heather Frozen II Interview

Heather was interviewed about her work on Frozen II (which comes out today!) for this press release from APSU.  Check out the full article HERE

What was your experience working on “Frozen II” with Disney?I worked at Disney years ago on “Big Hero 6,” a little bit of “Zootopia,” “Moana” and some other projects. After that, we moved to Clarksville. All my friends that are still there are really great artists and a really fun collaborative environment, so when I got the opportunity to go back for a couple months, I was like, “We can go to Disneyland all summer and work on a movie and hang out with my friends? Heck, yeah! I want to do that! That sounds great!”  The first big thing was going back to Disney and seeing how much things had changed. The whole building has transformed, the people are reinvigorated. Seeing the familiar faces was nice. But every team on every movie is different, but for me, getting to meet and work with the art directors is always thrilling. When you’re working remotely, it can be very isolating, you don’t have any colleagues to work with, you don’t have anybody to go have coffee with. So just getting to be around all these people is really exciting. Everybody there gets along incredibly well. Getting to see the movie ahead of time is always exciting because you don’t just see the movie, you’re seeing it as a work in progress. The versions of the movie I’ve gotten to see are part storyboard, part rough animatic, part completely finished. Even the last version I saw is not the last version of the movie. I can’t wait to see the final product because I’ve had the songs stuck in my head since June, but I can’t sing them out loud! Even if I’m humming a tune to myself, nobody’s going to know what’s going on. It’ll be nice for the rest of the world to see it. 

How is matte painting different when working on a live action film vs an animated film? Fundamentally they’re similar. With live action you always have a plate. You always have a reference to real life. The goal is to make it as photoreal as possible. That can be quite easy with all the photographic references. You know what that target is right away. With animated movies, the target is always different. The style changes on every movie and even on every sequence. While you want it to look real, it’s also very stylized. Everything has to fit the style of the world. You have to have very strong painting skills in addition to being able to do a bunch of generalist work. With animated movies, it’s trickier to fit matte painting into the schedule and find reference for what you’re making. 

Does there ever come a point where you can be picky about the projects you take on?Since I’ve moved here and decided to only freelance, I have been able to pick and choose whichever jobs I’m interested in. But more importantly than the jobs is that I get to pick my colleagues or the companies I work with. I choose the companies that are easiest to work with and the most friendly as opposed to working with another company with a cooler project. At this point in my career I have enough cool titles and shots that I’m not worried about building my reel. I’ve already led teams. I’ve helped companies build their departments. Now I just want to have a good working relationship with my colleagues. 

Is there a dream project for you?Not really. Everybody used to want to work on “Star Wars” or “Avatar” or “Harry Potter,” and I got a chance to work on all of those. Part of the problem is, if you love a franchise, working on it is like seeing behind the curtain. Then you have all these different memories that changes the movie for you. There’s not a whole lot I would choose over my family now. The whole reason we moved here was that we chose family over fame.  

What are you up to now?Now I’ve got my own office at home. I work on a lot of different projects. I don’t get as much feature film work now. I get a lot of commercials and game cinematics. I got to work on “Game of Thrones” and “Lemony Snicket’s” series on Netflix. I get to help companies train their matte painters. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work for a company that does all the park shows that use projections at Disney World. 

Are you teaching or doing any mentoring?I had been teaching online at CG Spectrum and a class through Pluralsight. I also taught electronic imaging here at Austin Peay when we first moved here. That was really fun. I was just really excited to teach people. I still have hundreds of students that I have taught in the past that keep in contact letting me know if that they got a job interview or asking to use me as a reference. It’s really exciting to see your students successful. 

What is your opinion on what the animation department is doing here at Austin Peay?I think it’s really exciting that students have a place to go that isn’t too far from home. I had to go five hours away when I was going to school to get something even close to what I wanted to do. But now students have so many opportunities so much earlier in life. With any education, it’s all about the effort you put in. If you put in the work, you can go anywhere and do whatever you want. Everything we do online is something that has been designed by artists. There’s so much to do out there. It would be very difficult to design some web pages without animation knowledge. What’s great about Austin Peay is how much students get to dabble in everything.

Animax Visit

Last night Heather and I had an amazing opportunity to go visit Animax Designs here in Nashville.  The meeting was set up by a former student of mine, Henry Kiltpatrick, who works there now.  They are working on some super amazing stuff, of which almost nothing I can talk about - but they have announced recent work includes the T-Rex from Jurassic World Live and creating Hagrid and the Screwt for the new Harry Potter attraction at Universal Orlando.

We met some awesome people and saw some incredible things. Pretty great to have a place like this in our backyard...

Heather and Disney Bagel Friday

Friday is free bagel day at Disney Feature Animation.  So each Friday, Disney Animation posts an employee's bagel recipe.  This Friday they feature Heather's!

Disney Animation Studio Visits

We had lots of funny visiting Heather at work as much as possible this summer! We had lunch at the lighting departments "Snuggly Duckling" bar (from Tangled) to the commissary at the ABC Building to coffee on the main old Disney Lot. And lots of shopping at the Disney Employee Store. And LOTS of playing the Wreck-It Ralph arcade machine!

Disney Animation BBQ

In the time Heather previous was at Disney, we never were able to make it to the annual Family BBQ. The first year she was on maternity leave, and we left for Tennessee about a week before it was held the second year. But finally we made it! We had lots of fun, the kids lost their minds getting to see a sneak peak of Frozen 2, and I found out that Lewis and I together have GREAT taste in Hawaiian shirts.

Heather's Disney Summer

Today Heather takes off for a huge adventure - she has been hired over the summer to head back to Disney Feature Animation and be a Set Extension Artist on Frozen 2! The boys and I will join her in a few weeks when they get out of school. I'm so proud and excited for her and can't wait to see what the summer will hold!

BBC One Christmas Promo

The first few clips of The Highway Rat show up here.  I had to laugh watching the promo, because they are also airing Home which I worked on and Big Hero 6 that my wife worked on.  About a third of the BBC Christmas movies have someone from the Raymond household involved :)

Faculty Triennial

The Art + Design Department is holding it's Faculty Triennial this year (usually it's a biennial, but we didn't have a gallery last year during the building construction).  So for the next month, Heather and I are showing our collaborative piece "Field Kit of the Cryptozoological Studies and Observations of Dr. William Oliver Raymond" as part of the show.  It's really fun to see what all the full-time and adjunct faculty create as their personal works.

Heather's Pluralsight Course is Live

Yay for Heather!  She had a busy summer creating a stunning online course for Pluralsight.  There's seriously so much info packed into this well-crafted class.  I'm very proud of Heather.  You can check it out by following this LINK

Description from the site:

Learning how to you matte painting effectively and efficiently can elevate your work to the next level. In this course, Matte Painting Basics and the Static Camera Shot, you will begin by gaining a solid understanding of foundational techniques by learning about resolution, static grain, distorted plates, bit depth, and software settings. 

Next, you'll learn how matte paintings should be organized, what painting techniques will break your shot, and even small details like how to name your files and layers. Once you understand how to properly setup and build your file, you will learn how to match your plates perspective, and alter the perspective of some architecture to fit into your shot. During the blocking phase you'll also learn how to build your own personal reference library, and then how to extract and clean up your painting after you've finished blocking. You will then take your painting from photoshop to nuke to composite and add life and movement to your static shot. 

Finally, you'll learn a bit about how matte painting fits into a vfx pipeline, how to hand off your shots to another artist or department, and the process of revision in the visual effects world. By the end of this course, you'll have a beautiful shot and be more confident in setting up your own static matte paintings. Software required: Photoshop-CC-2015.5, NukeX-10.5v2.

Work in New Mousetrappe Reel

Mousetrappe posted an updated reel called Shifting Perspectives today - and it features work from both Heather and I.  Which is really fun!  The second shot is mine and you get a few glimpses of the Racing Legends ride in action.  The shots of Happily Ever After features Heather's work on the Hunchback of Notre Dame sequences.  Really excited to see all the amazing work this company is creating!

Heather Plays The Game Of Thrones

Soooo excited to share some of the work Heather did for the Game Of Thrones episode this weekend!  We are huge fans - so it was unbelievably exciting to see not only her shots but her name in the credits as well.  Congrats Heather and all the Rodeo FX team!

Bournemouth/UK Trip

Bournemouth hotel by the sea

I had an amazing opportunity last month to visit Bournemouth in England, and travel around a great deal of the U.K. as well.  My University wanted to send me to visit with a potential study abroad/exchange school - and it's just a few months away from Heather and I's 10th anniversary, so we made a 10 day trip out of it!

First and foremost was to travel to Bournemouth, a wonderful town on the southern coast of England. I spent some time at Arts University Bournemouth and met some great colleagues and see how their programs are structured.  It was the last week of their "student show" so I got to see a lot of the amazing work their students produce there.  Having backgrounds in art, film, theatre, and animation myself it was really great seeing how much collaboration goes on there!

Of course, if you're on the south coast, you have to do some day trips to Stonehenge, Salisbury (where I found a centuries old pub), New Forest, and the Jurassic Coast.  In fact, I seem to have found lots of centuries old pubs.

Part I matinee and Part II evening show

London was the next stop.  We got to meet up with our old college friends Bryon and Tiffany, who just moved to London with their daughter.  We only had time for a quick run through the National Gallery because we managed to get last minute tickets to the two part (i.e. all day) production of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child on the West End.  It was amazing and I could have gone back the very next day to watch it all over again.

With Buckbeak

Keeping with the Harry Potter theme, we visited the Warner Bros Studio tour of the sets and props from the films.  It was great to spend the day looking at all the craftsmanship that went into every single aspect of these films.  

Glencoe, Scotland

And if you've come this far, why not take a scenic 5 hour train ride up to Scotland!  Our flights meant we spent most of the time in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but we did get a 12 hour tour up into the Highlands to see Glencoe and Loch Ness.

Loch Ness.  Not pictured: Nessie

It was an amazing 10 days.  England and Scotland were just wonderful.  We already have a to-do list for a future visit.  I was impressed with AUB and Bournemouth in general, so hopefully there will also be an opportunity to return there as well!

Heather's "Happily Ever After"

Heather has been able to once again work on a theme park show - this time its the brand new nighttime fireworks show at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom.  Called Happily Ever After it premiers tonight!

Check out more of the behind the scenes clips below - it looks like it's going to be one hell of a show. They are bringing in just about every disney character ever and creating original 2D animations for the show.  Heather has been helping Mousetrappe create the background projections that will be displayed on the castle.  This is as close as you can come to traveling back in time and getting the chance to work on Aladdin, Lion King, or the other classics of the "Disney Renaissance"

I'm so damn proud of her!

Heather's Moana Test

There's some great behind-the-scenes stories about how Disney did a "water test" early in preproduction on Moana.  This is when Heather was put on the show.  The test had been seen early at a D23 convention, but this is the first time we get to see it.

Apparently this scene was cut early in the process, but everyone loved it so much they found a way to get it back into the movie.  It's fun to see the differences between this version and the one that ended up in the film.  Either way, I have to share any video clip that starts with a matte painting done by my wife!

Heather and LOTR

After months of rumors, WB finally announced the new Middle Earth: Shadow of War video game with an Announcement Trailer.  Heather was able to contribute to the big final shot you see above.  I'm so excited for Heather - to work on a Lord of the Rings property is just insanely fun.  We are the vfx generation that was in undergrad as these films came out and it really felt like a rebirth of the industry.  Also she got to work with Blur, doing some kick-ass cinematics work.  That's several pretty impressive accomplishments in one fell swoop!

Check out the game site HERE and see the whole announcement trailer below.