Art by AnGalynn Chastain
ABOUT US
About Level Zero
Rigging Level Zero started in 2013 as a Thesis project by MFA candidate, Kori Amacker, at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The idea was to address a gap in Rigging Education that Kori noticed during several years as a rigging tutor. The majority of students she saw were animators, and many of them either strongly disliked or struggled with the subject matter. It became obvious that the material was not the problem, so much as the amount of it. Learning to rig a character is a lot of information to assimilate, particularly if you don’t have any desire to pursue rigging in the future. An idea was born: to widdle down the unnecessary material and offer just the bare bones of rigging. To teach only the fundamentals that animators and other CG artists could benefit from, without the stress or time needed for rigging an entire character.
The bottom line? Animators should know about rigging, but they don’t necessarily need to know how to rig.
Kori Amacker started as a character animator in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She suffered a mid-college life crisis her senior year, realizing she had been fatally diagnosed with a case of wanting to be a rigger. It was a tough time for the budding animator. Luckily, her friends stood by her; some even treated the poor girl with senior film models in need of rigging. She returned to SCAD for a master’s degree to focus on her new drug.
The addiction grew, as did the desire to help the animators she had abandoned. Her thesis project started to form, focusing on helping animators better understand rigging by widdling down unnecessary information meant more for future riggers than animators. Her friends rejoiced (we assume.)
Now Kori is working in the industry as a Cloth/Hair artist in Canada (so much for rigging, eh?) She started her career at Sony Pictures Imageworks, on the Angry Birds Movie and Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. She has since continued her industry adventures at Scanline VFX, working on Justice League (where her inner DC fangirl is still flipping out.) She hopes to finish this thesis and actually earn that master’s degree sometime this decade.
About Kori
