Animator

Lead Animator at ILM | Industry Mentor at KPU

Teaching at CEA/KPU!

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!

A presention I held at KPU

An old shout out from TUMO in Armenia!

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! 🙂

One of the World’s Best Studio!

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!

ILM Poster

Finished the World Race!

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!

Helping out on Predator

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!

 

New Animation Supervisor for X-men: Dark Phoenix

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!

Blade Runner 2049 : Rachel!

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!

BLADE RUNNER 2049: Richard Clegg – VFX Supervisor – MPC

 

BladeRunner2049_MPC_ITW_02A

Goosebumps Reel!

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!

Wesley Chandler Goosebumps Animation Reel from Wesley Chandler on Vimeo.

Goosebumps! The 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. =)

Bardel: Veggie Tales in the House : Rigging Modeling!

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.