Interview with Yousef Ikhreis
What do you like the most: Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, Rendering, Sculpting, Compositing or Direction and please give 5 tips to the future wanna be animators?
Frankly, I don’t know, Because I love everything related to the Art and the CG, some times I feel that I am a greedy artist, and I wish if the day is 60 hours or more.
I love to write my stories, sculpting digitally or manually, Arabic calligraphy, graphic design, character design, environment design, inventing Aliens languages, modeling, animating, compositing, directing …. Everything.
What should I do with my passion…its killing me?
Five tips for the animators:
- Timing and body language: read the world best novels and learn from the masters how they deal with timing, read for Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Victor Hogue… how they time their words, sentences, paragraphs…, sometimes they were writing three simple empty lines (for example) just to make you breath lightly and relaxed, and in the fourth line they will put one exploding word that will make you irritated, also read carefully how they describe their characters poses and body languages.
- Learn from the music: sometimes the animation rhythm should be like the classic music, or like Pop music, Hip Hop… also think of the animation of a certain scene as one unit (not as parts), this will help you to find easily the dissonance in the Animation.
- The audience eyes are mine: while you are animating keep thinking were the audience eye is in every picture and frame, and keep your movements perfect and convincing with good animation rhythm, if you do that, then the audience will trust you and give you their eyes. This is the best chance for you… so; don’t lose the trust.
- Read the script many times before you start animating and draw your key frame poses.
- Test your animation many times with different speeds and screen resolution; it’s a shame to answer the director that you did not notice that in your animation.
If you had a choice to work with any CG Artist who would you want to work with and why?
There are the artists that I admire watching their works;
Rick Baker: 6 times Academy Award Winner
Aaron Sims: his works and character designs are splendid, I like his works, when I watched his picture when he was at 16 years old, working at a sculpture at Rick Baker Studio, I asked myself what a talent this guy has at this age.
Pascal Planche: his works has great original mood, lighting and composition. His works are very special, also his characters.
Meats Meier: the most committed CG artist to the art concept, after one hundred years his name could be side by side to Van Cough, Salvador Dali…
The list goes on …
What’s the most useful thing you have learnt in 3d?
Learn from others experiments and share your knowledge and experience. Also believe in your team ability
Anything you like to add? It is your chance now to state your opinion about anything.
I would like to invite everybody who likes or wish to be in this industry and believes in his ability, to step forward and try, no matter how old you are your gender, artistic or educational background. Art is for all, and no one has the right to kill your dreams, even you.
Thanks a lot for taking out sometime for us from your busy schedule.
Thank you for this chance to talk and to share my thoughts to CGArena community. Good luck for all.
This interview was first published in the CGArena Dec-Jan 09 bi-monthly animation e-zine
Related Links
Yousef's Website - www.yousefart.com
Making of Matrouk - Read Here
