SyncSketch co-founder, Bernhard Haux, recently joined Terry Ibele on the Animation Industry Podcast – a weekly show featuring interviews from today’s leaders in animation.
The episode featured Haux and Ibele enjoying a discussion about a wide variety of topics, including the state of the animation industry as a whole and Bernhard’s background in animation, ranging from his education in Germany to his almost decade long stint as a character TD for Pixar. The pair also take a deep dive into SyncSketch and what it was that drove Bernhard towards the idea of creating a synchronous media review tool, plus their plans for the future.
Read a short excerpt of what you can expect from the episode below:
At this time I was working in the States with Pixar, but I was still teaching animation students in France. The trouble that I had was that the students there tried to send me their shots and QuickTimes via emails, etc. I tried to open them up and have a desktop screen session with Skype, but back then those sessions weren’t as good as they are today – you would see every third second and there wouldn’t be a way to draw over stuff – and I thought that this is just really difficult to exchange feedback. I used to load their work into after effects and share my screen where I could draw over frames, but then there would be confusion about which frame they wanted to discuss and they had no control; it was just a really terrible experience, teaching that way.
One day I was playing volleyball with my friend and SyncSketch co-founder, Phil Floetotto, who is the creator of Traction – Pixar’s production tracking tool – and so I told him how much of a pain it was to review remotely: “I wish there was a way to synchronize media files and then, instead of synchronizing the image data, just synchronizing the metadata of what you’re doing to the file – scrubbing, drawing over and just doing that.” And he said, “That sounds like a fun project”. And here we are!
About the Animation Industry Podcast
Hosted by Terry Ibele, the weekly podcast now spans over 100 in-depth interviews he’s done with a very cool selection of artists from animation and related industries. Episodes cover all areas of the industry, including storyboarding, writing, animating, directing, visual development, game design, and more. Guests have included the notorious JJ Villard, Spike & Mike’s Spike Decker, Disney Director John Musker, Sony Lead Animator Humberto Rosa, Cuphead’s Tina Nowracki, Frederator’s Fred Seibert, Tumble Leaf’s Scarlet Nelson, and many others from major animation studios all over the world.