Interview with Jason Baldwin

An interview with Jason Baldwin, a 3D-modeler from LA, California, specially for 3DExport

Hello, Jason! Could you first introduce yourself and tell our readers how it happened you became a professional 3D modeler?

Thank you for inviting me to your forum! I currently live in the USA in LA, California, but I grew up in and around Portland Oregon. I spent my childhood drawing characters and comic books. Other kids wanted to be firemen and astronauts. I wanted to make cartoons. I went to college at the Art Institute of Portland and quickly learned that my parents had greatly exaggerated my drawing abilities (as good parents often do). Thankfully that's also where I discovered a love of modeling. It was so much fun to get the ideas in my head fully realized in 3d. While I was still in school a local medical visualization company found my demoreel online and gave me a job. It was a lucky break indeed.

Can you recollect now your first professional project? Was it challenging?

My first project at the medical place was to animate blood cells going down a blood vessel for a trade show splash piece. I only had 3 days to do it and no art direction. I wanted to make a good impression so I treated it like a roller coaster. I had the camera racing along with the blood cells through huge dips and twists in the blood vessel. I added flashy shaders, camera shakes at the fast parts and dramatic lighting to better feel the speed. The company and the clients loved it! My first high profile work was as a secondary animator on the short film "Moongirl" by Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline director Henry Sellik. Even though the film did the festival circuit and won some awards, I still love the obscure little blood vessel animation more.

Your resume says you are currently working as a Character Modeler in Animal Logic. Could you tell us a bit about your professional career in 3D modeling?

Haha, I'm afraid my resume is a bit out of date. I'm now working as a modeler at Dreamworks in LA. As I mentioned, I started out working at a medical vis place. After about a year, technical medical animations became soul draining. Out of sheer boredom the other employees and I started having competitions to see how many lens flares we could slip into the animations without looking tacky. (The record stands just shy of 40) I took an internship on the side at Laika in Portland Oregon and worked myself into a full time modeling position. I spent about 4 years working in look development there for Coraline and several other potential films. I then got the travel bug and accepted a character modeler position at Animal Logic to create owls for Legend of the Guardians. After an amazing year in Australia I took my current position at Dreamworks.

Do you have any works made just for yourself, out of professional projects?

I'm always creating personal work. I find creating other people's vision at work can be fun, but nothing like creating my own designs, or designs by others that I personally find inspiring. The big difference though, is that my characters at work always get finished, while I have folders full of unfinished personal work.

Do you have other hobbies, except for computer graphics?

I dj downtempo and jazz at lounges. I also play piano, snowboard and run. And beer. I LOVE a good beer. This often conflicts with my love of running. One of my friends put it best,"Running is terrible, but you feel great afterward. Drinking beer is awesome, but you feel terrible afterward."

Your work “Max and Milton” is really stunning and characters are great! Can you tell more about its creation? Is it a personal or professional work?

Thank you very much! Max and Milton was a "busy work" assignment while I was at Laika. My boss and most my department went to siggraph one year, leaving me with nothing to do. Before he left, my boss asked me to design and create two characters inspired by the Goofus and Gallant comics from an old kids magazine called Highlights. The comic is about two kids who are complete opposites, one good and one bad. I decided to use this idea of opposites as my guiding design principal and tried to make them opposite in every way, from attitude to body shape. I took some design cues from the artworks of Jamie Hewlett and ovi nedelcu and clothing designs from Japanese street fashion. After designing, modeling and posing the characters I did occlusion and 3-point light renders of the gray shaded characters and gave them to the incredible artist Joe Beckley who did all the textures and shading in photoshop with blending modes.

Your portfolio is mostly focused on creating different characters, why did you choose this area and have you tried exploring different genres?

No one reads batman comics for the pretty pictures of gotham city. Its about the character. Of course there's an incredible art to environments, but I love modeling characters because that's where the heart of a story is. They are all I model in my personal work. Professionally I've modeled everything under the sun, from a 3000 piece, fully functioning sawmill to a mind-numbing stint of rock modeling on Shrek 4. I find modeling characters for films is rewarding because they get so much screen time, but frustrating since they tend to be extremely technical and require months of back and forth with other departments.

To finish our interview, can you say some words of inspiration to those who are just entering the realm of CG?

There's this feeling I used to get Sunday nights. Its that icky feeling in your gut when you realize your weekend is over and you've got to start work the next day. Back when I was flipping burgers, cutting down Christmas trees, checking out groceries... but I've not had that feeling once since I started working in this field. Every day I get into work, get my coffee, sit down at my desk, and I'm just happy. If you have that gut feeling Sunday nights, work your tail off to get a strong resume and demoreel. Try to get a realistic view of how your work stacks up against the work on professional forums, and what artists you admire do better. Be friendly, dependable and learn to take and apply advice and you'll be just fine!

Jason's web-site - http://bunkart.net/