I started studying Product Design because I wanted to build more creative and efficient furniture, but early during my studies I realized I didn’t want to work in the product industry. I caught myself a little lost during my BA, so I decided to apply for an internship to work with motion graphics, to try new areas. It turned out they offered me a spot at the CGI area. I interned for 1 year and a half at Rede Globo, which is the largest television network in Latin America and the second largest in the world, giving me the opportunity to learn concepts such as modeling, lightning, texturing, and animation.
I fell completely in love with CGI, especially with modeling and shading. My basic tasks were to help other artists in modeling secondary assets and shading some scenes we did for television openings. What I most like is to create an environment where an asset will be placed. In practice, I only learned CGI skills, but I saw coworkers working in compositing, and during out of duty hours, I would sit and watch them work, which sparked my interest in the area. At my department I only used After Effects, and I knew that in order to stake out my spot at the VFX industry I’d have to learn Nuke.
A next step into being a CGI professional is to learn how to model organic things, and also to learn software that creates more realistic shading, such as Substance Painter, since I used to work only with photoshop and nodes in Maya Arnold. In applying to this master’s programme, I was looking for taking VFX-related face-to-face courses, learning compositing skills, and deciding whether I’d still want to be a Generalist Artist or if I would want to specialize myself in one role.