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The first thing after graduation in my plans is to gather all the work I have and choose the best sequences I have and refine or finish them and also animate new ones so I can put it together as a portfolio/reel. 

I have drafts of CV, resume, cover letter, all versions of documents employers state they are looking for upon application. I believe I can still improve some of them, for example I am not sure if my CV sounds/looks professional yet.

Here is my latest draft: 

I find it challenging to understand sometimes exactly what my application is missing that makes it not good enough yet as I have not gotten any positive responses so far. However, I am open to advice and learning more about the job hunting process and try to remind myself that it just takes time and skill improvement.

Some specific roles I am interested in and on the look out for include: Storyboard Artist, Layout Artist, 2D Animator, Illustrator and almost any pre production role really. A recent opportunity I am applying to is the Supernova Design internship that Shaun let us know about through Moodle. I took my time exploring their website and made notes of what type of animation they do and how it stands out to me, key company values that I figured out and last but not least, I tried to gain clarity on what candidate they are looking for exactly based on the description. And this is more or less the way I prepare when applying for jobs. (I have not yet applied to that many as I was hoping my final project submission would have some content that I could use for my reel.)

There is something about storyboarding that my brain enjoys greatly! I recently visited an “Arcane” exhibition and was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of boards and thumbnails some of which were in physical mediums like pen or pencil! That was so exciting to look at as I am a big fan of traditional mediums.

It was insightful to follow through the artists’ process and have an authentic behind the scenes view to such a popular project. It seemed they truly had the artistic and painterly feel of the series as a priority even in all the way back in pre-production.

Another source of inspiration and information when talking about visual storytelling planning and composition is the book: “Framed Ink” by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. I find the advice in this book is clear and easy to follow while still being extensive. It has to be one of my favourite “art learning” books!

Storyboard Artist is definitely a potential role that I am interested in and am actively looking out for job opportunities for.

I recently volunteered to be a tester for Kinda Studios’ recent project called “Your inner Symphony”. (Kinda Studios is a women-led neuroscience studio and lab based in London.)

“Your inner symphony” is now open to the public and available to experience as a part of the Barbican’s new exhibition ’Feel the sound’ (22 May-31 Aug 2025). It is an immersive installation that “blends neuroscience and design and uncovers the unseen connection between music, emotion and the body’s physiological response”. 

The project is in collaboration with Nexus studios as they provide the animation and all visual elements.

What was asked of me as a volunteer tester was to use the installation prototypes multiple times and provide feedback on the overall user experience, ease of use, understanding, readability. 

This was a first attempt at such activity for me, however I found it was enjoyable and I felt I was good at it. I managed to spot and describe in detail certain aspects of the experience I felt might be communicated to the user better or just simply differently. I believe I provided valuable feedback and a lot of it, in fact, I think much more than they expected (haha). It felt so natural the information I collected from the tests was so clearly identify-able in my head and I was able to communicate it well to them as well.

This volunteering opportunity was a chance for me to look into another use of animation and learn about the mechanics of it and briefly about the pipeline.

It reminded me of a “Game Jam” festival in Sofia, Bulgaria I attended back in 2019, where i attended talks on UX/UI testing. It peaked my interest even back then but I somehow got distracted with other matters and simply forgot all about it until now. I find the process of sharing my personal experience and registering and pointing out ways to make a product work better comes somewhat naturally to me as I am incredibly detail oriented and it seems my brain is good with patterns. 

With all that being said, I believe this is a career path I am interested in looking into further. As it is a rather new idea for me my research and knowledge on the topic is yet to become more extensive.

The second topic I am keen on talking about in this blog segment is one that I have been researching even before this assignment came around and it is fashion. It is more specifically the crossover and links between fashion and animation.
I have been aware of fashion animator in a studio environment as a role of possibility for quite some time, yet when going through job descriptions it seems that the expectation for the role is more technically focused, leaving the artistic side of it to other team members.
Based on that I have been thinking of potentially going the freelance route and directing, pre-producing and animating all together, which would allow more space for me to make artistic decisions as well as execute the animation in a smaller scale than a studio of course.

Since I would state the human form is my biggest inspiration, it feels instinctive for me to gravitate towards the art of fashion. I am fascinated by how a piece of clothing can complement, enhance, change or just highlight bodies.

In fact, I feel what I love about drawing, animation and fashion are all the same things – shape, flow, gesture, fluidity. All of which to me translates to dynamics, energy and liveliness build in (in my case 2D art and animation) a flat drawing that becomes alive and if done well shows the deep understanding and craftsmanship of the artist. I just love all of this, it brings me great joy to consume and create such content.

I am yet to find the exact technique of intertwining animation with fashion that actually fulfils my expectations of a satisfying final piece. I have tried animating designs of mine in the past in my usual 2D (advert style for example) and I always reach the same conclusion – that 3D animation would visually do much better justice to a project of this sort.

However, as I have been looking into trying stop motion as a way of preserving the realism of textures and colours of fabrics. I am looking forward to potentially exploring this in Unit 3 as well as after graduation.

I watched a dozen of videos and can definitely say I have improved my overall understanding of the role with certain aspects of it surprising me. For example, I did not realise how important an accurate reference for scale is in backgrounds and how difficult it is to determine the correct sizes of objects/characters when just eyeballing it, no matter how trained one’s visual library is.

Another thing I was happy to learn is that Layout Artists basically set up a clean, structured and precisely designed foundation for the animators to make the end shot will work in practice work the way the storyboard team and writers expect it to. I found out that Layout is a rather important connective role in studios that seems to go unnoticed and unappreciated as a lot of people are not aware of what it entails or that it even exists, me included before deciding to research it in depth.

My conclusion on whether or not it is a role I see myself in is that I would gladly try it as I am sure it will provide a lot of worthy experience and insight on artists who i would I probably find myself working closely to if I was to be in the role of a storyboard artist or animator (as these are the roles I have been interested in in the past). However, I am of the opinion that long term, it would not fulfil my desire to draw/animate characters which is truly my passion when it comes to this industry.

Nonetheless, I am more than happy to have become more competent in this topic as I am sure my character skills can only improve once having a better grasp of the environment around them.

This is my first blog post as part of Unit 2 of my UAL MACA degree and is meant to explore my findings and research evaluations on the Entertainment industry.

When thinking about where I want to go in my career after graduation it always starts with my core interests and passions. I got into animation in the first place as I loved drawing the human form in motion. Therefore, how expressive drawing could highlight beautiful nuances that go unnoticed in live action was what I wanted to focus on portraying.

Because of my fixation on characters, animating them felt as a natural progression. As I began my university studies I became acquainted with the many roles that go into the creation of an animated production.

The first role that I decided to research for this blog is 2D Layout Artist. I wanted to stray away from what I already knew a lot about and gain knowledge in an area of the industry that was foreign to me.

As I already know I enjoy the pre-production side of filmmaking, I figured learning more about environments, perspective and spacial dynamics would be useful for me whether or not I end up determining that Layout art is for me.

I first started by reading articles and watching videos of professional explaining their role.
One particular YouTube channel that I liked and felt provided a plethora of information was:

https://youtube.com/@dongchang?si=SMTFiQ4DYFF7o5iI

As a person who naturally likes working in pre-production I have gone deep in storyboarding, sketching and exploring visually this term. Here is some of this:

I was assigned to work on Bob’s second year project. Communication between us was clear and productive and so were the roles I was given.

Actually I had the chance to choose what I wanted to work on of a few options given to me by Bob. His structured and detailed explanation was very appreciated.

I chose to do concept design with focus on characters. There were two main characters in the storyline: a robot cook and a kid. I worked on some more defined visual concepts of them, turnarounds, expression sheets and played around with poses and thumbnails.

I would say my task was definitely relevant to the industry.

Something that I could improve on would be working with color. I feel like my strong suit is structure and graphic looking art and so I will definitely benefit from more color studies.

I was given the freedom to make small changes and came up with these suggestions that I also shared with Bob:

“

• adding eyebrows to the robot character may make it easier to animate facial expressions
• if you choose to use the kid character with spiky pigtails I think it would be cool if they move as follow through as an extension of facial expressions
• similarly to the previous point I think adding forced perspective to robot may also be better read when making facial expressions or poses (if it fits the artstyle that you want to go for) “

I found the experience fun and enjoyable, yet educational. It was useful to take a peak at 2nd years process and learn from this.

Additionally, I am also quite happy I got to practice my perspective skills that we had just talked about in Vanessa’s class.

This task definitely had me thinking of my 2nd year project and what I could do. I will most definitely bring the organisation of files and folders with me for future tasks as I liked the way Bob had that structured.
Another thing I observed and learned from was attention to detail when it came to props which I imagine will be quite handy when progressing with the project. I got the impression that story-wise everything was well thought out.

I am attaching the work I did:

While doing research for my World Animation presentation I was introduced to many unique techniques and mediums to create animation with. The choice what or who to actually present about was not an easy one. I was well aware that i would have loved to talk about somebody whose practice has a personal value for me. After all I picked Theodore Ushev as my topic case. He is a Bulgarian born animator, residing and practicing in Canada in present times.

What left me compelled by his artistry was the creativity he seemed to show in choosing his materials and techniques, as well as the heartwarming fact that his pieces are often times a rendition of Bulgarian folklore tales.

Theo has had major commercial success in the animation and film industry as a whole. He is most known for his 2016 short film Blind Vaysha who was nominated for an Oscar. However, my true favourite production of his is Blood Manifesto. A less mainstream, yet incredibly powerful film that explores the self. Besides the deep motives, what also makes it stand out is the medium. Ushev uses his own blood as one would use paint/watercolor.

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