Visit to the Anthill

Yesterday my class had a field trip to Silver Ant studios. The studio is located at The Boulevard which was quite surprising to me. The company just moved to the block about 2 years ago, that was about when The Boulevard just launched.

We were welcomed by Raven (I don't know if that's how you spell his name). He first welcomed us and did a small introduction about Silver Ant, then he showed us around the place. First was the reception floor which consisted of a pool table, meeting rooms, library, gym, cafeteria and more. I have to say this first, the interior design is beautiful, it's modern Japanese themed mixed with some traditional touches. There is an impressive Silver Ant bust next to the reception counter and a fine collection of books at the library. The place is small but very nicely arranged to put all the places together.

One floor down the reception is the working studio. We got to have a look at the working environment but we were not allowed into it because of private and confidential stuff. We went back to the reception floor and into the little review room to watch Silver Ant's impressive demoreel. After that we went up to the N-Cube, which is Sliver Ant's management department, which is also called the boring department because of it's huge contrast of interior design to the bottom floor. There's a lot of meeting rooms and a mini cinema here, everything is cubic shaped, like minimalism. We watched some stuff in the mini cinema like the Seefood trailer and Silver Ant's current work, the Transformers Prime television series and the new KFC cinema rating clips.

Raven took us to the general meeting room and showed us the Transformers Prime workflow from pre-production to release of an episode stuff. We then had a Q&A session with some of the employees and after like an hour or more of questions and answers we finished the trip off with a group photo.

Silver Ant really appealed to me and I learned quite a lot of stuff about the animation industry. The competition here is quite high so if I were to try to land a job there, I most probably won't with my average skills, also, I would go as a CG modeler but it looks like they need animators more than modelers. I might try to sign up for the internship program. End of the day, the trip was a good experience.