Day in the Life of a Character Artist: Introducing Gabor!

Speech Graphics comprises over 50 talented individuals who each drive our company forward through their technological, linguistic, operational and creative experience.

We want to give a face to the many names who strive to deliver our industry defining facial animation software.

Today we’re spotlighting our Character Artist, Gabor, who has been a crucial team member in our character delivery pipeline for over 4 years.

If you’re interested in diving into Gabor’s role and learning about the day-to-day runnings of the creative team, keep reading!

What are your main responsibilities?

I work in production within the creative team - our job is to teach the characters to talk by training their speech muscles and set them up with facial expressions so that clients can animate their own audio lines with our software and produce high quality, production-ready facial animation.  

As an artist in the team, my main responsibility is to make sure we generate natural looking, believable speech animation that matches the style of the given character that can vary from abstract and cartoony through imaginary characters and aliens, to hyperrealistic human heads.

What does a typical working day look like for you?

Our work is a combination of solo, immersed/focused facial muscle sculpting and collaboration, when the team comes together to discuss workload or to review our character setups and share feedback.  

I personally like to have a good balance of the two. I enjoy spending days on a character, getting familiar with their faces, sculpting their speech poses, facial expressions, giving them a personality, and making them come to life. 

We have weekly meetings and review sessions, where we share our progress and feedback to get the best possible animation output SGX can generate. 

What would you say your biggest achievement has been during your time here?

We started with a small team, but our team is rapidly growing. Being a part of developing this growing team has been a real achievement for me, and I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing my colleagues build up their skills.

I still really love character work, and every successful setup feels like an achievement in itself, but being able to share my skills and knowledge has been the biggest and most recent challenge and achievement. I have hosted several training sessions on anatomy for my colleagues which have been very well received.

What's your favourite movie and why?

I admire the movies of Michael Haneke, you come out of the movies as a different person (Funny Games or L'amour). 

I also love animated movies, especially visually artistic ones like Spirited away.

Stay tuned for next month’s post where we’ll introduce you to another one of our hardworking team members here at Speech Graphics!