AM- First Q&A Session w/ Ray

So we had our first meet & greet /Q&A session last night, super exciting. Like I had heard, Ray Chase is just super cool, laid back, casually tossing off funny quips. Super courteous, acknowledging everything being typed in the chat window. I felt bad because the session started at 9:00, and while for me that was perfect, there are people in the class comin from the midwest, east coast, and even ENGLAND. So most people seemed really tired. That, or a bit shy. I was really blown away by how much people are doing to get into these classes, one of the students has been delivering pizzas to pay for tuition. And at least one other had some pro experience working in features prior. But overall a wide variety of experience levels.

Cam testing.

Ray works at Reel FX now but came from DNA, where he worked for about 6 years or so. So he talked a little bit about the differences between the two. He had about 4 minutes of footage on the Ant Bully, holy crap. After Ant Bully, DNA went from about 100 some odd people to 4 . Wow.

He mentioned working on more of a variety of projects when he went over to Reel FX. Recently they worked on a few scenes from the new ninja turtles movie coming out. Buck Cluck from Chicken Little came up when singling out great animated modern scenes. Nik Ranieri is the man.

Speaking of disney rockstars, because I sighted the animation in tarzan as a huge influence, he mentioned Ken Duncan when he came up to work at, was it Reel FX ?, maybe DNA. Anyway his animation reel was up on the network, including that suuuper long scene, no cuts, of Jane going off on a tangent about seeing Tarzan for the first time, and how that blew everyone away.

Introducing my geeky self to the class, and a Blu Ray Chase top window.