Jessie Rolan

Character Animator

Instructor / Consultant

LinkedIn Profile

www.jessierolan.com

allhollow@hotmail.com

 

Projects

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (360, PS3, PC)

Watchmen (360, PS3, PC)

Rock Band 2 (Wii)

Mercenaries 2 (PS2)

Call of Duty 3 (360, Xbox, PS3, PS2, Wii)

Section 8 - Trailer (360, PC)

Axis and Allies (PC)

Kohan II: Kings of War (PC)

Experience

 

Freelance Animator

08/2009 - Present

Animation and Art Solutions: Provide clients with affordable alternative to costly permanent or in-house contract positions. Services provided via remote outsourcing or contract capacity. Over 9 years experience and multiple AAA titles. Communication availability 24/7 via email, phone and Skype.

Services Offered: Modeling, Texturing, Rendering, Rigging, Keyframe and Mocap animation solutions for games, film, tv, advertising and web. Assets created with MotionBuilder, 3ds Max, Maya, Maya, XSI and Adobe CS Suite.

The Animation Workshop

Instructor & Consultant

10/2009 - Present

Consulting: Graduate students form production teams to create their final project Bachelor film.  My role is to guide the teams’ communication and collaboration and to assist with planning and adhering to strict deadlines. The idea is to replicate working as a team and the work environment in the real world.

Instructing: Maya courses for 2nd year students who have been using the software for 3-6 months.  Courses taught:
1) Basic Physical Action: Students film themselves and animate a box-lift from floor to table.
2) Action Scene: Students animate a multi-action scene in an environment of their design & creation.
3) Quadruped Animation: Students help design the creature, then animate movement cycles.

Syllabus Topics:
- Scope Management: Prioritizing, time management, following pipelines to ensure asset delivery.
- Workflow: Working in passes (blocking, 1st pass, polish) to simulate game development pipelines.
- Reference: Creating and finding reference material. Eg: designs, sketches, storyboards, video, etc.
- Principles: Including Squash & stretch, timing, anticipation, staging, weight & balance, overlap.

Deadline Games

Senior Animator

06/2008 - 05/2009

Animation: Using Motion Builder and 3DSMax, the majority of the workload involved mocap, including processing, editing, and polishing to give the action more “oomph”. Keyframe animation was done as well, in addition to exporting and integrating assets to the proprietary engine.

Leadership: Animation team’s point-man for communication with the mocap studio (Centroid); trained animators in Motion Builder and engine tools, provided direction and advice for animation quality standards.

 

Pi Studios

Senior Animator

10/2005 - 05/2008

Animation: Animated and rigged characters using 3dMax, Motion Builder, and XSI. This included keyframing new animations, modifying mocap to work in-game, facial animations and lip-syncing, cinematic camera work, and polishing existing animations.

Leadership: Anim team’s ‘Point-man’ for communication with the projects’ parent companies (ie: Treyarch for CoD3); trained new animators with anim software and engine tools, and provided them with advice to ensure ‘look and feel’ anim quality standards.

Modeling/Mapping/Texturing: Worked on numerous characters ranging from 20k to less than 4k polygons.

 

TimeGate Studios

Lead Animator

10/2000 - 10/2005

Leadership: Lead team of four animators, directing their quality standards, overseeing their peer reviews, and ensuring they met optimization limits on bone counts, skin partition counts and frame counts. Worked with Art Director on schedules, pipelines/workflows and evaluations of new tools, exporters, and engines. Compiled Animation Lists with Design. Worked with Programming on engine integration.

Animation/Rigging: Keyframed dozens of characters’ animation sets. Polished 90% of all anims

Modeling/Mapping/Texturing: Modeled/Mapped several characters; textured a number as well

Optimization: Ensured all character optimization, specifically: Polygon, bone and Skinning Partition limits.

Skills

Abilities

Software

Bipedal Animation

Quadruped Anim

Rigging/Skinning

Modeling/Rendering

Motion Capture

Storyboarding

Texturing/Unwraps

Character Design

MotionBuilder

3ds Max / Char Studio

Maya

Adobe CS Suite

XSI
CAT
Unreal Engine 3, 2.5

Gamebryo Engine

Education

The Art Institute of Houston

01/1998 - 03/2000

Associate of Applied Science in Computer Animation

Grade Point Average (GPA): 3.7 / 4.0

Dean’s List

 

References and portfolio available upon request