Bridge to Industry Talks – Sacha Beeley

One of the last lecturers to come in and talk about all things animation was Sacha Beeley – CSM graduate from 2018 and animator represented by Strange Beast.

I’d been aware of Sacha’s work before – her graduation film, Big Toast, was on the Character Animation site when I applied so I’d seen snippets of it before. Sacha discussed her journey into the animation world – how she studied BA French and Italian at BA before finding her way here. Her graduation film above got the attention of It’s Nice That, who published an article on it, before she got approached by Blink Ink, Partizan and Strange Beast for commercial work. She would go on to work with Nexus, Mailchimp and Bloomberg Business Week before signing with Strange Beast. She got the attention of Strange Beast by sending her work over to directors at Strange Beast who would then send her CV and portfolio to producers who could hire her. Much like Sophie Koko Gate, Sacha has worked on an ident for Adult Swim. She’s also worked on various commercials such as a Lemonade Insurance ad and a Gillette Venus ad ft. Princess Nokia.

It’s not just commercial work that Sacha works on – she also has been working on her own film, Clamato, a 5 minute film set in a Greek Island where her character Spoon finds their identity. It’s been something she worked on in her spare time (evenings and weekends), she tries to strike a balance between personal practice and commercial work to stay financially stable.

In regards to finding inspiration, Sacha always keeps a sketchbook of character designs she comes up with. They are weird and wacky, and as she continues to sketch, she might think of scenarios to put them in (its how Spoon has ended up in her Clamato film). She has fun making short animations, recording her own voice or animating to music and creating wacky videos. In her Gillette ad, she had her own LAVs recordings she sent out to animators to reference. Her early style is inspired by Pokémon, Krtek, Vintage Soviet Toys, the Simpons, Adventure Time, Regular Show Oblina and more, whilst she got influenced by Sophie Koko Gate, Jamie Wolfe, Anna Firth and Suzan Pitt during MA.

Finally, Sacha gave us links to places to make ourselves known in the industry – After Hours, 24 memes per second, Discord Channels, Skillshare, Hellavision Tellavision, TAIS and more. She also came over to look at our showreels if we had any ideas or had been editing them and just show off our projects as they were. We had a lovely chat about how my project was going, and I showed her my showreel where we ended up replaying the short animation below multiple times, as I did a frame-by-frame breakdown of how the shot was made. Sacha believes I should be okay getting a job in the industry, and I highlighted if she needed any fast animators, I’m available.

Sacha’s talk was insightful and lovely, and hopefully I might be able to keep in contact for future work.