I joined Centre for Entertainment Arts as an Industry Mentor on May, 2021 to teach students about animation and rigging.
Over the past year, CEA started a new partnership with Kwantlen Polytechnic University to help students have a better opportunity for job placements after graduation!
It’s been really awesome to see students progress and learn how to become better animators and riggers as I get the opportunity to help them with their demo reels in their final term 6 course!
As I prepare to present at a local school in Vancouver, I happened to find that TUMO actually tweeted about me doing a presentation at their school! Thanks for the shout out! 🙂
Yesterday at TUMO Yerevan, Wesley Chandler talked work-life balance for an animator in the movie industry and being part of an Oscar winning visual effects team. pic.twitter.com/zmRtZ9vVce
After finishing my contract with Method Studios, I started a new job at Industrial Light & Magic in August! If you aren’t familiar with the studio, they work on some of the biggest franchise! Star Wars, Marvel Universe, Jurassic Park, to name a couple… I can’t say which project I’m on yet but they are really exciting projects!
After finishing the World Race Program, I had the sweet opportunity to live in Colorado for a bit. At the start of 2020, I got a job offer to work at Method Studios on the longest movie title of all movies I’ve worked on! “A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting”! Check it out as it air’s today on Netflix! Perfect time for Halloween!
Wow, what an incredible wild experience it was to travel around the world to 15 different countries and helping local organizations with their ministries! It’s impossible to sum up the entire trip in one blog post. So if you want to see some of the wild things that has happened, hop over to my YouTube Channel and have a look! I may try to finish some extra videos I haven’t done from the trip as well!
So after much contemplation, I’m leaving the film industry for a year to do volunteer work around the world! I’m going to be doing a lot of Vlogging so you can see what I’ve been up to. Just look me up on youtube: Wesley Chandler !
So X-men: Dark Phoenix got postponed due to rewrites. So my team of 20 animators have been moved to other projects. It turns out after half a year of having Predator put on hold, it is now back and in full force. What is remarkable is that we need to finish this project within 2 months with still having much of the project due. But amazingly, the team was able to pull it off. I was able to lend a hand while still supervising X-men: Dark Phoenix, to animate and lead a small team on Predator. In the end, I think the VFX turned out fairly well on Predator. A lot of it thanks to the many hours of preproduction that was done a year before!
After temporarily working on Predator with my request to be a Lead again (I wanted to take a break). I was offered this position to be the animation supervisor for X-men: Dark Phoenix! What a gracious offer! I am also blessed to get to work with Greg Butler, who was formally the Global Head of Visual Effects at our company MPC. He stepped down to get back hands on as a Visual Effects Supervisor. I had the opportunity to come on set and help catch any issues and also help direct a sequence for motion capture with the motion capture actor! I’m looking forward for the rest of the months on this project to see how it turns out!
From January 2017 to July 2017, We have spent 7 months on essentially 8 shots to recreate Rachel (Sean Young) in 3D. The difficulty of this work was that it was shot in 4K, Close up, nearly static cameras, with a very subtle performance! We spent months doing lots of research and development to look at human anatomy and micro facial expressions.
Here is an article interviewing our VFX supervisor, Richard Clegg!
It was really fun working on this project! We had a great crew and a good team! I was fortunate enough to work on this one shot. Since it took a while for me to wrap up on Goosebumps, this is the only shot work I really did. Still very happy to receive a shot like this!
After wrapping up on X-men: Apocalypse, I moved onto working on Ghost in the Shell. A project I’ll be on for the foreseeable future with tons of work at MPC. Really looking forward to how it turns out! I really enjoyed the 1995 Anime of Ghost in the Shell. This one should be pretty good! Here is a fan made trailer based off the 5 teaser that was released!
Finally after a year later working on Goosebumps, I have compiled a goosebumps animation reel! What a show to work on! It was the most hours I’ve ever put in on a single project. Working more than 100 hours a week and averaging 80 hours for a good solid few months. I was only able to make it through being surrounded by such an amazing and enthusiastic team. Led by Jason Snyman who really kept the morale high and made it enjoyable to work even if it was 5am in the morning!
So I’ve decided to move to Montreal! MPC (Moving Picture Company) has been so graciously helped me transfer over. Which means I have moved to a new project! I have started working on X-men: Apocalypse! It will be a tight turn around as the movie comes out in end of May. Here is a trailer of the upcoming movie!
Releasing on October 16th! Check it out in theatres! This show was one of the most difficult shows I have ever worked on. I’ve never pulled hours where I was working from 9 am to 5am (19 hour work day?) and consistently leaving work anywhere between 10pm and 5am for 4 months straight. Although all the long hours, it was a fun project to work on. A lot of amazing creature animation and hero work. Everyone on the team got a chance to do some really cool stuff! It was also a great time to bond with an amazing crew. It felt like we went through a war together and came out a close family =).
This was also my first animation job as a Lead Animator. It was a great experience learning from such an amazing Animation Supervisor Jason Snyman! And learning to bridge the gap between client request and our fellow animators. Hopefully everyone enjoyed working together as much as I have! Go check it out in theatres! It should a be fun halloween movie. =)
Well look at this! Seems like WordPress had made this automatic update that fixed my website! For the last 2 years I wasn’t able to log into the administration page to post things. Now that I’m back, I might start backlogging some blog post about all the changes the past two years!
Wow! What an experience it has been! It was one weekday I went to go visit Bardel at lunch time where the Line Producer, Tini Wider, came running up to me and said ‘Wesley! I heard you can rig! Can you start Monday?’. To be honest, I haven’t rigged in years and only learnt what I did in school. But I told her I’d come and try to help out as best I can and take on the easy mundane tasks. It was the period where Aaron Hempler, who was my rigging supervisor and good friend needed extra help. I quickly learnt a lot from him on rigging and was able to assist him. After a month went by, my proposed contract was up, but they end up extending me another month, and then another month, until I ended up staying at Bardel for 6 months. During this time, I had the awesome pleasure to work with Melt Van der Spuy and Jan Zgiet, who taught me so much on programming in Python. I even then had the opportunity to help out in the modeling department and learnt tons from Warren Dowson who was the Modeling Supervisor.
Here is the trailer for the up coming Amazing Spiderman 2. It was a blast to work on, and we learnt a lot about physics with our animation supervisor David Schaub. He really helped us focus on accuracy and broke a lot of myths about gravity.
