[knocking]
[door opens]
[speeder bikes whirring]
Hello, my name is Alberto Martínez Arce,
and I'm a senior animator at Industrial Light & Magic.
Just being able to create new things every day.
Digital characters, digital humans, digital dragons, robots,
and what I do is just move them around as if they were puppets.
I make them interact with each other or with the actors on the screen
and make them feel like they are alive.
I was born and raised in Mexico City.
Mexico is such a great country,
and my dream was to one day work in the movies here.
I have a degree in graphic design, which helped me in many ways.
At the end, it's kind of like everything is visual
and just learning about composition and rhythm
and how things get transmitted into people through something visual.
That was kind of, like, a good baseline.
There's a bunch of 3D software that you can make animation in.
Um, we at ILM use Maya.
At the end of the day, those tools are kind of like tools.
And, uh, you have to bring the creative part into them.
The math comes from dealing with curves
and dealing with controllers and that sort of thing.
Programming, sometimes, depending on what you're doing.
On Avengers: Endgame, it's the moment you have Spider-Man
activating the instant kill, so you got all the legs coming up.
What I did in that shot was animating all the characters coming in to Spider-Man
and the way he had to use his weapons or his legs
to put down all the enemies.
That shot took more than a month, month and a half.
There's a lot of things you can do as an animator.
There's feature films, where everything is digital.
There's video games, virtual or augmented reality.
Interactive books, even just like videos on YouTube.
Keep it short, keep it sweet.
Usually about a minute, two maximum.
You try to show all your best work.
Your worst work that you're showing is how you're gonna measure.
If you have multiple ones, but they are like, "Eh, okay,"
that's not gonna be as impressive as having three or four shots
and they are, like, super cool.
Like, every time you show it to somebody, try to make it a tiny bit better.
You kind of just add layers of subtlety.
Tiny things, like contacts or fingers on surfaces
or the way things undulate on the wind
or the way the hair moves around
or the way the body shifts with motion from one side to the other.
Just tracking everything into beautiful arcs and the way things move.
Sometimes ones get shy and they're like, "No, maybe my work's not good enough."
But sometimes it is, and sometimes that's exactly what they're looking for.
Most of the work that I show for all my jobs that I got,
they came from showing things that I did on my personal time.
Just stay focused and no matter what happens, you just try to get there.
Sometimes that's exactly what it takes to get in the door.
Get in the door.