Animators Without Borders: How the Global Animation Community Came Together at ACM SIGGRAPH London

Massively, this has definitely been a big, big change because I’m usually quite expressive in person when I try to get my ideas across, and this was far easier to do face-to-face. SyncSketch has been super helpful with this because when we have to go through something as a team, and everyone is looking at the same thing at the same time. At my current company, Blue Zoo Animation Studio, we have remote access to our computers in the production studio.
Brenda Romero, Junior Animator (Character Animation) in Birmingham, UK
I’ve been working with SyncSketch as a review tool for over a year and it has been invaluable during my undergrad. I think it was one of my classmates that told me about it, and it is such an amazing tool. We would use it to record references, share animations and it became essential when working from home started. I’ve been using it to share links of my work for review with professionals over LinkedIn and it’s such a great tool to be able to do that.
What tools are you using currently?
What tools are you using currently?


How did you find London SIGGRAPH and BYOA?
How did you find London SIGGRAPH and BYOA?
I think the biggest challenge has been maintaining communications, I didn’t realize how much communications changed because since leaving university, I have never worked locally in a production studio – it has all been remote. I think those short conversations with peers or perhaps a project supervisor to get feedback have been an important part of the old workflow. We’ve definitely had to learn how to communicate in new ways. I think it highlights the importance of getting quick and accurate feedback. With SyncSketch being in real-time, it has definitely managed to replace those quick chats.
Primarily for communications, we’ve been using Zoom and Discord for meetings and messaging. For this production, we are also using Shotgun for the tools, Toon Boom for the 2D animation and then Nuke for the digital compositing. In attending the “Bring Your Own Composition” session, I was introduced to SyncSketch. That was the first time I ever used it and I actually didn’t know the updates would be live, it was an amazing surprise. Seeing my idol compositors, Josh Parks and Hugo Guerra, drawing on my shots in real-time was so exciting! It really opened my eyes to what was possible with tools available for remote collaboration.

With the Savannah College of Art and Design being in Georgia, USA and me being currently based back at home in Kazan City, remote working has really impacted my projects. Due to the pandemic, the college switched to e-learning and an online format, so we have students from all around the world logging on and working on this project. A lot of them are based in Savannah, some in other parts of America, in Hong Kong and I have a couple of friends on this project in the Philippines and other parts of Asia. So, it’s really amazing to see this collaboration but it has been tough. You don’t get instant feedback when you are collaborating.
At the moment, I am currently working on this 2D animated film for my college. The main goal of the film is to replicate the 2D lighting process of the movie Klaus. I was tasked as the compositor to build the 2D lighting pipeline so that we could get 2D volumetric lighting in a 2D film. That’s been going really well so far. It’s been very technical, in the sense that I’m doing a lot of programming in addition to compositing for the film. It is still in pre-development, and the story is still in development, and we’re still working on a title, but it is really exciting.
In previous projects, I was using Frame IO but since the event, I now use SyncSketch because of that live update feature. Getting live feedback is really important when working remotely; it’s tough to get feedback when you know in normal circumstances it would be instant and you’d be side-by-side with the person critiquing. Working with a review tool like SyncSketch is definitely the next best thing.