Carlos VILCHIS

My main role is to be an employer. I need to find more people with great expertise. It’s not related to the expertise you get with the artistic side, like practice or the things you develop when you do a lot of practice, like drawing or things like that. It is rather related to the formality that the masters in Mexico improve. People here in Mexico are very common in major lead roles or major roles in the business. They have more experience or common sense because they got a master’s degree.

So for me, if the person can have a master’s degree and a more specialized perspective of how things work in business, in business, in management, of course, it’s good to have a really good percentage of creative experience, of course. But, in the creative field, you can be a person who has a lot of experience in the creative field. But you don’t have experience in producing, managing or organizing people. That’s why I would like to find a master with creative experience.

So for me, there are three main areas for the businesses I’m in. They need to be developed more than the traditional higher education programs in Mexico.
The first is the direction of animation production or animation production in general, because students and universities understand everything about the practice and the artistic process. But animation production is big business. It’s not just about doing design in Maya or above a costume, it’s more about managing people, understanding the quote, dealing with our process in the industry. In Mexico, the few people who have production management experience are people who have spent a lot of years because they understand excel or things like that. But there are few people in the industry and, of course, they have very good salaries, but it is very difficult to find people to gain experience in this field if they do not work four or five years in a business.

I’m personally trying to find two people right now, and I haven’t found the right person because they’re not formal, because they don’t understand how to quote, manage time, etc. So this is the first. The second is visual effects supervision. We have many students. We have a lot of people who understand creating visual effects in visual effects software like particles, compositing, etc.

But supervising or having the role of set supervisor is something that is just years of experience. And it’s an experience you gain by spending time on production and film sets. It is therefore very difficult to find someone with the experience to work closely with the production team of a film on set while having experience in BFX. Only a few people in Mexico have this experience, and they are obviously over 30 years old. And these people have a lot of experience on set. So another part of a program like this would be to blend those two parts of film production and make an effective proposition on set, which would be great.

The third point was related to this new industry which began to develop very rapidly. Is it the real-time animation direction or the real-time technical direction? Because all university programs only teach traditional animation with traditional renderers. It’s usual. It is something that is 50 years old. I studied this when I was 24 in Spain. It hasn’t changed. But the real-time animations have changed. So we don’t have real-time production experts.
We don’t have experts who understand the difference between a traditional animation pipeline and a real-time animation production pipeline. So that’s another part that I think will be essential to do with more people who specialize in the master.

From my perspective, it’s in the ability to do that specific thing because the knowledge is there. The company shares the knowledge that is there on the Internet and in many guides, in many documentations. They know how to be developed by teachers. But the ability of someone who’s got a master’s degree to go through different stages, say, to prove that I can do it, that I can manage a production, that I can oversee a production, or that I can do a production of Real-time animation, is the way to prove that this person has experience compared to normal people in the industry who have learned in the traditional way. This is how I see the cheapest steps and share them with this master.

This Masters in Creative Media may become the most important thing the industry needs.
We are in Mexico. The way we see people who have masters or postgraduate programs is more of a person who has acquired a lot of experience, thanks to good or very good schools.

We have an example here in Mexico. Ipade is the most important school for masters in commerce. So media people are like the equivalent of business people in Mexico. So I think a school with a master’s degree in “creative media” or all those industry-related subjects will be essential to succeed in this ecosystem. In Mexico, there is the normal artist, the normal traditional technical artists and the people who pass a master’s degree with a level of specialty. They therefore enjoy their management role in companies. That’s how I look at it, for sure, from my point of view, if someone comes in with a master’s degree in this field, I’ll think that person can have a bigger role in the structure of my business than a normal artist, because like I said, normal artists are like the people who make the daily content and they are the key decision makers in a business. Like I said, real-time graphics will make content cheaper, faster, and better for the entire industry.
I think that in our country, we are not Canada, we are not France, we are not the United States. We are a country related to the production of large quantities of products like the automobile industry, the iron text industry, and so on…

So I think this technology will improve our industry in Mexico to have a large production. You don’t need to have the most expert artists in the world, but you can successfully use real-time rendering to improve the quality faster and more cheaply in production, animation, film, video games, etc But you will need to have this person experienced in this technology to manage people. So I think it’s kind of an industrial revolution that will help Mexico produce content more easily and cheaply.
Of course, in my role as a motion capture expert, we know that motion capture has allowed for faster animation, preview, and real-time content with better quality.

We are now seeing people who want to have real-time digital humans on Instagram, talking with people in live sessions. So this is the new wave of content that’s not just for TVs or movie theaters, but for Instagram and Facebook too, and you have to deal with how to make animations faster and better on digital humans. So I think motion capture is another technological revolution and of course the opposite of modeling traditional 3D modeling is weak, it’s very artistic, but it’s slow and expensive. The photogrammetry process is another way to improve quality that you can do. Reverse engineering modelling. And a lot of video game and animation studios have proven they can improve by 70%. The quality and time spent creating characters or storylines for creative content using photogrammetry versus traditional methodologies.

Place these people to have lead production management because they will have a better understanding of the production process or lead role. So they can have contact with my clients, because sometimes it’s easier to be outgoing and to manage with our clients, the heads of studios, the heads of production. They need to be in contact with more mature people on that side.

So yes, it’s more than an opinion. That’s my opinion. I think it’s a brilliant idea. I think it is very important for our country. I know there are a few masters in Mexico, but they are not the directors or the owners of the company. We don’t see a difference between traditional artists and people with a master’s degree in the industry. So I think if this master can move forward to have a specific profile and a specific reputation, to be a more experienced person with a key role in big productions more than just artists, I think it will be a great success for our country and for our industry. And I can bet maybe for the whole South American continent, because you can have people from Colombia, from Peru, they will want to get this kind of master’s degree in Mexico, and they can seek it.