This week's article features a collaboration with the great Paul Liaw, a highly accomplished 3D Artist who has worked at over 45 different places, while spanning different industries from commercials, tv, film, games, tech, 3D printing, medical visualization, and education. Paul's career spans prominent companies including ILM, Unity, Amazon Game Studios, The Mill, Psyop, MPC, Nathan Love, Framestore, and numerous others. Additionally, he has imparted his expertise in 3D as an instructor at institutions such as the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, ZBrush Workshops, and NYU.
In a recent dialogue, Paul and I delved into a huge range of topics, including Paul’s view on different roles in different industries and artists not effectively presenting themselves on platforms like LinkedIn and their personal websites. Often, their profiles lack clarity, rendering both their work and themselves indiscernible to potential recruiters. Furthermore, they may not be proactive enough in expanding their professional network and nurturing their careers to their fullest potential.
Drawing from his extensive experience, Paul has assisted numerous artists in overcoming these challenges. I invited him to offer some of his invaluable insights, which we'll explore further in the following discussion. Away we go!!! -Mike
By Paul Liaw
In my career, I’ve had the great luck of having to work through 3-4 major worldwide economic downturns, depending on how you look at it. In my experience, there are so many forces out of your control that change the hiring odds. I’ll go over a few that you can potentially control
Changing Jobs
Without improving your portfolio or skill set, I think the best way to improve your title or pay is to simply change jobs regularly.
In general, a new job is where the bargaining happens and companies allocate more budget for acquisition than retention. So where you might get a hypothetical 2-5% raise staying somewhere, you can easily get a double-digit percent raise by changing companies and negotiating up. The caveat is don’t inflate your title more than what you can do. This is mainly for if you notice you are underpaid at a company.
Geography
If you want to take advantage of moving around companies, you can’t just do it anywhere on earth. You need to live in a major hub city. For every sector, there is the primary country/city that funds the bulk of the projects. This is where the best projects/pay/influence is going to be. As you get to secondary cities or outsource cities, the pay/opportunities drop exponentially.
With the rise of working from home, it's easy to get hired and ignore this if you are already established. But if you are new, then try your hardest to be in a hub city.
Physically moving is a tall order for many people with geopolitics, visas, financial situations/ family, so do what you can.
For example, the VFX main hub is LA, followed by London, Vancouver, with an outsource hub in Bangalore.
Switch to an Adjacent Field
The pay gap between artists in big tech in the San Francisco Bay Area vs. one doing shot work in Vancouver can be crazy, like 5x or more after currency conversion. This is even though the work is not that different.
Granted, there is a trade-off in the level of artistic prestige/sexiness of jobs as the jobs get more technical and higher paying. In my opinion, if you are starting out, your focus should be on maximizing your art and don’t go broke. But if your professional art foundation is there, there is no reason not to retool your skills for a higher-paying sector, or at least try it out. Having worked in all the sectors, I find the biggest adjustment is the work culture not the software.
Tech>Games>Commercial>Tv/Film
When to retool/bail?
When a technology is new and gains traction, it's very valuable, then over time, it becomes commonplace, then irrelevant because there is a newer better way of doing things. This is true for most things. With this said, be honest with yourself on where you stand on the curve.
Example. When Photoshop first came out, it was the most powerful composite tool in the world. You can get paid hundreds per hour (in the 90s money) to use the clone tool and erase stunt wires. Then it became ultra-mainstream. Would you really want to stay a retoucher now?
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social media platform. It operates on algorithms like any other social media site. It's there for people to search and find you for jobs. Recruiters/producers look for talent by typing in keywords that match their description. So you have to treat everything you type like an Instagram hashtag. That is the only thing that will make your profile show up. Irrelevant information or wrong words will make your page invisible.
Big offenders are companies that call everyone TD regardless of what thing they do. Another problem is some companies (usually old ones) will have a title naming convention that only they use. Those weird titles are automatically invisible to the search engine. You have to look around and use the most common description.
For example, clarify TD to Rigging TD or Animation TD, etc etc
What Your LinkedIn Profile Should Look Like
The banner should have your name, descriptive title, and a clear, centered, friendly picture (the picture is important for proper ID in case your name is known inconsistently (middle names, maiden names, shortened names, different translations, people with the same name)
The contact bar should have your email and website.
The About section should be a story of your skill sets framed in a way that a nontechnical recruiter can understand. Also, include your contact info.
Job descriptions should highlight your contributions in a clear way. If it's more invisible work, make sure to call out what you did.
Your profile has to be up to date. I see people laid off have guilt/attachment to their old job and keep it active on their profile. Especially if they’ve been there a long time. It just confuses people who want to hire you but won’t because they don’t want to be seen as a poacher. If you are no longer at a company, it has to be declared, obviously. If you feel stigmatized for not having work, just say freelance to fill the gap in your resume.
Only put jobs relevant to what you want to be hired on LinkedIn. If you want a job in VFX or games, but you used to work in retail or some other industry, then maybe don’t include it. It's okay not to have a specific number of years of experience. It's all about what you can do in person and what's reflected in your portfolio.
If you are out of school, your email should be a Gmail account. If you have a .edu account, it is signing yourself up for low pay or distrust of your abilities. If you are a JR artist, drop the JR in your title. Just say ____artist or some recruiters won’t even click on your reel. Let them figure out if your skill is up to par don’t prefilter yourself.
Website
I’m a modeler and in a lot of ways it’s easy for me to show my work if I do the whole model and can show a Zbrush model or a wireframe. But most people’s work is part of the team effort and is often hard to express.
I want to start off with a real-life example, Nicole Mendez.
So, after the MPC Vancouver layoffs, I was helping my friend, and she asked me to look at the reel of her teammate Nicole, who at the time had 2 years of experience.
What I got was a Vimeo link with a montage of shots from 2 movies and a very detailed life story as a bio.
My reaction was flat. What I saw looked like average shots from a regular movie, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. I thought I would pass on the reel if I were hiring.
After talking time to Nicole, it was obvious that she had technical expertise, and further probing, it seemed like she did a lot that did not come through looking at the reel.
So I had her freeze the frames that she worked on and do a deep dive on what her contributions were and what tools she used.
When I got the frames back, I was blown away at how much I didn’t notice. With the motion blur and quick shots, it was not obvious that much more of the frame was CG than I realized. I completely changed my opinion of her skill level.
So now that the content was better, I had her improve the UI. Her website was originally hard to navigate and I would get lost.
UI tweaks
Next I had her organize the UI of each page so that each page would navigate back to the main page. Also I had her put her contact info on the bottom of each page so that if someone decides they like your work they can find where to contact you right away. I also had her trim the bio to keep it professionally relevant and kept some color.
This was a few years ago, but she was picked up quickly and has been crushing it working at one big company after another. She has told me her reel was called out mid-interview for being amazing.
I think her reel is worth a study if your reel is full of stuff that is a team effort.
In the breakdown, talk shop, tell us what you did, how you did it, the challenges, or how you fixed something. Tell it so that someone who isn’t in your direct niche would understand.
Relationships
If I need a job, I call up a few friends and I directly ask if they have work for me. This is followed up by a back-and-forth discussing details of the schedule, and that's it. If there is a job to be done, it's mine.
This sounds like collusion, nepotism or impossible if you are a kid out of school. But I’m friends with dozens of senior management spread over numerous major studios. This is the result of deliberate action over 2 decades.
Before I go further, I want to say active networking is not the most important thing to focus on. If I had to rank things-
Skill/portfolio by far most important, maybe 65-85%
People skills/communication skills 15-25%
Networking/luck/timing
Networking
If you think of a portfolio as the product and people skills as the service department, then networking is advertisement/PR. You can survive without it, but it amplifies something good.
Tier1
Most important networking is the organic development of a reputation of being good at your job and easy to work with. Good word of mouth is the highest quality networking.
Tier 2
Be an active/helpful member in the community. Posting tutorials, personal work, mentoring etc.
Tier 3
Being an artist, you often want to stick to other artists, but you need to foster trust with those who hire.
Recruiters, schedulers, producers, coordinators, hiring managers, PAs, they go by different names and titles and exist in different levels of seniority. They are the hiring class, gatekeepers to the jobs that you want.
It's important while on a job that your work/contribution is known to the producers, not just the other artists. It is crucial to be on friendly, transparent terms with that person,
Each person who hires has a mental list of maybe 5 trusted go-to people for each role. They hire in a pecking order. Only after they exhaust their list will they even start looking out of their comfort zone. You want to be one of the 5 who is on top of the mental stack because they will rehire you wherever they go next.
One overlooked part of relationship building is starting early in a person’s career.
The juniors on the production ladder will often be tasked with outreach and seeing if you are available, getting your rate, etc. They have to do that for a long time to know who’s who of the industry before they move up the ladder. Because of this, always be extra kind to those starting out because eventually they will climb the ranks and be the Senior Producer, Executive Producer or run a company. And then you’ll really wish you knew them personally.
Many people get annoyed by these emails from industry production newbies and eke out a yes or no answer. This is a huge missed opportunity.
If I’m not available myself, I will go out of my way to help them with their task. I ask what the job is, what they are looking for specifically, and proactively give them contacts to a handful of recommendations. Chances are you know someone who is looking.
I present a short list with maybe a 1 line description of each recommendation. This makes the life of the person way easier because they have reliable leads. You end up helping a project without even doing anything. They will remember your goodwill and will come back to you further down the road. This habit, over the years, translates to a steady flow of job leads.
I will say that currently, LinkedIn has poisoned the well a bit. There have been a ton of spammy recruiting firm recruiters who you can tell don’t know a single thing about what you do. Ignore them; they are not worth your time. But if an earnest recruiter from the company reaches out, keep the conversation alive.
Post Layoff Protocol
To me, layoffs are common and predictable. We all work at corporations of one type or another and that is built into the corporate system.
If I hear of a company having layoffs, I put immediate active effort into helping.
I do a few LinkedIn searches to find out who got laid off. I usually have some of the team in my feed already, and I reach out and add some others to my LinkedIn (so they can benefit from my network traffic ), and I start to compile their profiles into a Google Docs list.
I’ll usually ask someone I know on that list who the others are so I don’t miss anyone. Then, I start sharing the list of people to those I know who are hiring. I make the Google Doc shareable so it can easily be seen and shared around.
I also take a quick look at their websites or LinkedIn profiles to see if there are any glaring mistakes and point them out before sending it out on blast.
I’ve made it a habit to do this often over the years, so I think I’ve made a few lives easier during rough times.
Once again…a huge thank you to Paul for putting this all together. Scroll down to see some of his fantastic work!
3D News of the Week
A roundup of interesting 3D related news you may have missed this week.
Twinmotion 2022.2 review: is it now the best 3D visualisation tool? - creativebloq.com
Karim Abou Shousha's Water Blueprint for UE5 Gets Updated - 80.lv
ASWF, Adobe, Autodesk announce OpenPBR - cgchannel.com
Wednesday: VFX Before and Afters | Netflix - YouTube.com
AI Powered Asset Management - youtube.com
Artist of the Week
Check out the incredibly diverse work of the great author of this article.
3D Tutorials
Not a tutorial per se….Just Jorge Gutierrez being awesome.
3D Job Spreadsheet
Link to Google Doc With A TON of Jobs in Animation (not operated by me)
Michael Tanzillo is the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D Growth team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
In addition to his work as an artist, Michael is the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging.
www.michaeltanzillo.com
Free 3D Tutorials on the Michael Tanzillo YouTube Channel
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