Former Leeds College of Art student, Matt came to do a talk at the lecture theatre and he gave us some honest advice and information. When Matt graduated from LCA, he left with only one piece of show reel to get him started. He had already started applying for jobs during 3rd year of university, he subsequently got offered jobs in London but due to his financial status he had to turn them down. Fortunately he got offered a job locally which he gladly accepted, though being under qualified for the job, he was offered anyway due to the fact that the company liked him and they saw major potential in his work.
After a few months of work, he then got offered a placement in San Francisco were he worked closely with Aesop Rock, it was a good fun project in which he spent a couple of months over in America he said.
When he returned to England, he signed to an agency called HF were he got various jobs with them. The most prominent one being to paint a hotel room. He mentioned it is important to pitch an idea to clients as most of the times they are limey to say yes.
'It is important to constantly try to experiment, don't box yourself in, otherwise work will dry up. If you use computers, try to use pens and pencils also" - Saunders.
He showed us a clip of the Belle and Sebastian music video, in which he was the art director of it.
He gave us advice telling us to be careful because some clients will take advantage of undergraduate and post graduate students therefore it is important to sign contracts before doing a job. clients will never listen when you tell them that the work given is not possible with the amount of time given. It's important to have contracts because some people are a nightmare to work with, he would sometimes receive threatening emails from clients and sometimes he would not get paid for all the work done.
While he was working on Ellen & The Escapades music video, he worked on it without a storyboard, all the ideas were flowing straight from his head. He worked with 2 interns from 7am till midnight. He had the concept in his head and he visualised it through film.
Below is Matt Saunders' Show reel:
What I admire about Matt is his confidence to dive into any project and not limiting himself to one media, I also admire his hard work, his passion and drive to keep on working on various projects, his motivation is very high.
"When I was at uni, they'd give us 2 weeks to design a poster and I'd be like, 'you can do that in a day', so I would design a poster and make an animation as well." - Matt Saunders.
No comments:
Post a Comment