Kickstart Spotlight: David Vandermeer
This month our Kickstart Spotlight is on Senior Animator, David Vandermeer!
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I grew up on Vancouver Island. It was a great place to grow up as a kid, but a very boring place to live as an adult. I much prefer living where I am now on the mainland, with the life that I have built over here since moving to start my career in animation. While living on the island, I enrolled in Animation Mentor to learn 3D animation. The course was a great cost-effective way to get into the industry! The only real down sides were having to learn Autodesk Maya by myself (you can take an extra course for that, but I opted to save the money) and you also don't really make any local contacts unless you're very lucky. Most people you will interact with are all living outside of Canada.
For personal hobbies and activities outside of work, I regularly exercise (thought not as much as I used to be able to,) ride my motorcycle in the summer, and I enjoy an ever-growing art hobby that started with painting miniatures, stretched into clay sculpting, jumped to figurine customizing (mostly Nintendo Amiibo,) and recently evolved into diorama building. Each new hobby has borrowed and used skills from the last, so I'm interested to know where it will take me next.
What was your first job? What good habit(s) did you take from it?
My first job was working at Petro Canada when I was 16. It was horrible. I was basically tasked with doing anything that needed doing, that the regular employees didn't want to do. I made six dollars per hour for weeding their garden, sweeping the lot, and the worst one, scraping the old crystallized spilled soda from the cooler floor. Shortly after that last job, they ran out of work for me. I also think I was getting close to my 500 hours work experience, so they would have needed to boost me up to a lofty eight dollars per hour, so I was let go.
I guess if I learned anything from that job, it would be to appreciate the value of a dollar. It was hard work for very little pay.
How many years have you been working in this industry?
Woof. At the time of this writing I have been working in animation for around nine years, having started back in 2014. Time flies.
Tell us about a personal project. What sparked the idea for this project?
I taught myself to vinyl wrap last year so that I could create a Proto Man theme for my motorcycle and helmet. For two weeks, I watched video's on how to do it and then dove in. I made a lot of mistakes, but learned a ton from the experience.
For this year, I'm going to re-wrap the bike for a version 2 of the Proto Man theme. I think with what I learned the first time, I will do much better now. Especially since the for the bike I was just using what vinyl I had leftover from the helmet and had to make a lot of compromises as it ran out. What sparked the idea and inspired me to do this was definitely from listening to my favourite band, The Protomen. They make incredible music based off of the Mega Man universe.
What’s your favourite colour combination?
Probably purple, pink, and blue. I really love the synthwave style.
Can you think of a particular moment when you realized you wanted to be an animator?
I was fourteen and modding Half-Life 1 had a huge scene. I used to try to practice modelling in a program many people used called Milkshape 3D, but I never got really too great at it. YouTube didn't exist back then and I found it hard to follow plain text tutorials with some images here and there. Eventually I gave it up and decided that I couldn't create things in 3D, but what I really wanted to do was animate the creations that other people made, bringing them to life. So I sat on that idea for about a decade and eventually enrolled in Animation Mentor.
Looking back, I think I'd have made a decent 3D modeller if I had gone to school for it, with how much I enjoy creating things out of clay. Alas!
What are you trying to improve in your work?
Subtle acting. Quiet shots when a character is thinking or processing some heavy emotion are very difficult and not something we often ever get a chance to work on in cartoons.
What’s your idea of the perfect Sunday?
Waking up with the perfect amount of sleep on a warm day with a cool breeze, opening a few windows for fresh air and setting to work on an art project. Because on this Sunday, I finally have nothing I need to do other than enjoy myself.
You’re stuck on a desert island with a laptop and a USB stick containing the entirety of one cartoon - what show is it?
I think I could enjoy the Netflix Castlevania series again before succumbing to dehydration.
What have you enjoyed lately that inspired you to create - podcast, tv, movie, music?
The Protomen! Go and listen to them if you want to treat your ears to an epic rock opera!
What’s on your work playlist?
I mostly just listen to relaxing video game music as I work. If I'm able to listen to something with dialogue though, lately I have been listening to some Soft White Underbelly interviews. Hearing peoples stories on there can be pretty eye opening.
What continues to motivate your work, or has that changed over the years?
What motivates my work is the ever growing battle against rising cost of living and property values... Also to just become a better and more versatile animator. I want to reach a point where I can look at most shots and immediately know how to do them and exactly how long it will take me. Figuring out animation for something complicated that you haven't done before is time consuming! And time is the enemy.
