Interviewing Idols: Florian Thamer
UK-based 3d artist, Florian Thamer, is an artist who can do a little bit of everything! His website is a flurry of brilliant work, from general motion design to brilliant 3D animation. Crazy detailed 3D imagery, and a true passion for 3D design — his work is amazing.
Florian has done a little bit of everything. I guarantee you’ve seen his work online, maybe on his website or Instagram, or maybe it’s because he’s worked with so many studios and companies. His work has been shared all over; with plenty of Behance awards to his name! His work is of fantastic quality, and his website is a dream to sift through — and I know I’m not just the only one who thinks that! Having worked with studios like Rokabye, Los York, The Mill, MPC, FutureDeluxe as well as brands like Adidas, Nike, Activision, Adult Swim, Microsoft, Sony and so many more to name! Florian is someone who can get the job done!
Why does he inspire me?
Being a 3D & Motion CG Generalist is something I very much aim to be. Seeing so much incredible work out there online, really makes me want to learn as much as I can. Be a ‘Jack Of All Trades’. General motion, simulation, VFX, and a whole host of programs to go along with it. It’s what interests me the most, and seeing artists who clearly can do a bit of everything is something I love to see. Florian’s portfolio is a lovely depth of work to look at. From his work for Bulgari on huge OOH productions, to working on video games such as Call of Duty.
I’ve been in the 3D space for years now, consistently looking at the latest trends and projects, and Florian is one of those artists that I keep seeing! His name features on the credits of some amazing projects, with the campaign made at Rokabye for Made comes to mind. Elegant lighting and texturing, mixed with some lovely smooth motion animation. Just a space above this on his website is his work on COD: Black Ops Cold War. Some really cool work that shows off the breadth of his talents! Working on a film or video game has been a dream of mine, and seeing work out there done with the same tools that I use daily is such a confidence boost!
The Interview part
I was lucky enough to be able to ask Florian some questions about himself and his career. I hope this’ll give you a little bit of an insight into his life, personal and commercial as well as his design process. It’s not every day you get to interview an idol!
1. Who are you, and how you started your journey into the world of design?
Hey Charlie! I guess you could say that I’ve always been creative, and I loved playing around on computers. When I grew up, I think my parents would’ve liked me to go to an engineering school and become something “proper”, definitely not an artist of any sort! Because of this, I went to engineering school for a couple of years and learned about electrical engineering and informatics, neither of which I was really interested in. I ended up getting terrible grades and didn’t enjoy it. On an open day one my professors told my parents that I’m probably better suited doing something more creative. I think this affirmation from a random physics professor was enough to go look for a job in the creative industry (of which there isn’t much where I grew up).
I appenticed as a pre-press-technician, where I did a lot of retouching for print, lots of fashion, beauty, and product photos. I worked in that field for around 10 years. When I moved to Vienna (and was unemployed for a bit) I sat at home one night, at my PC, and came across this software, After Effects. I was absolutely blown away by some tutorials I saw, and went down this rabbit’s hole where I watched tutorial after tutorial for months. I had no idea about design! All I did was photo retouching and montaging images for packaging. I found this guy, Andrew Kramer, on Youtube who’s content was so compelling - like if I try really hard I can somehow work on a Hollywood film just like him. He’s showing how to do it right there! I can do this! Full-blown Dunning-Kruger effect.
After working there for a while, I found a job as a photo retoucher at an agency. It was part-time, so I essentially had 20 hours a week of spare time, and used the time to learn more motion design-related. That’s where Cinema4D comes into it! The agency realized that they could use my new skills and were super supportive and even paid for a film-making course at the SAE, which is a private uni in Vienna.
A couple months later I hacked together a showreel of all the 2D and 3D animation tests I did and a couple of 2D explainer videos I’ve done for the agency and applied for an internship at a studio called Eat My Dear in Vienna. They were kind enough to take me on and let me work on some actual client work, doing some intros for Austrian docu-TV shows and car commercials. After the internship was over I freelanced with them for a bit and moved to London. I had zero idea about the industry in the UK, and didn’t really know any studios. So I googled “motion design london” and sent probably about 15–20 emails to all kind of places, introducing myself as a freelancer. I loved ManVsMachine’s work, so they got a special email. I signed off with an attached picture of a cat wearing a cowboy hat; I didn’t even get a reply (it still hurts, it was so funny!
In the meantime I worked for Eat My Dear for a couple of months on a little sequence for a big Hollywood movie. It was also where I learned an important lesson about working on feature films:
don’t get too attached to a cool gig, sometimes they just get cancelled and months of your work disappear forever.
One of my first UK freelance gigs was with MPC, an agency known for their work on big AAA blockbusters films. I worked in their design department , doing a commercial for single-use vape pens. I wouldn’t work on that kind of job nowadays, but I needed the money and experience and MPC were amazing to work with. It was all like a big family and most people went to the pub after work, I made some really good friends in that time. This is where I really fell in love with the work hard/play hard culture of London. You might sometimes work until 10pm but you go for a couple pints afterwards and everything’s alright.
At the pub is also where I made most of my connections, met other freelancers, who also work somewhere close by (there were lots of creative studios around Soho in London). It was great meeting all these people, as they gave me so much info, and some tips on which are good places to work for (and which ones to avoid!)
I worked mostly for places in London, some abroad until Covid hit. At the time I was working at Spov on CoD:Black Ops Cold War. Luckily I was booked until the game was released (which got postponed by a year if I recall correctly because Covid made everything take longer). After Covid nothing was the same anymore. We had our son during this time, which put a lot of things into perspective. London work culture wasn’t as attractive as it used to be, but also nobody was working in all the cool studios in Central London anymore, everyone was remote, so me and my partner decided it would be a good time to move away, she got a job offer in Plymouth, so we moved here a year and a half ago and I love being by the seaside. It wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. All my clients are remote, I rent a desk in a shared office (mostly so I’ve got a reason to put on pants in the morning) and in summer I can go for a swim during my lunch break.
I do miss London’s social life sometimes, but being so close to the amazing nature around here is 100% worth getting a couple less pints in.
2. Could you give some insight into your creative process?
I think the hardest part of my process is to get inspiration. This goes for my personal work but also professionally. I get distracted easily, so finding time and space to look for inspiration is very important to me. When I do find inspiration, it’s often at random. Sometimes before falling asleep, a song, some lyrics, or something I’ve seen on the internet. Once I have found something that inspired me to create an artwork I’ll usually try to get in some sort of flow state where I just do some rapid prototyping. Rough setups, just to get it out of the system. Once that’s done I can spend hours on end just tweaking numbers and iterating over color/shader variations until something looks the way I want it to look. I never really draw anything up beforehand and go straight to Cinema or Houdini, very rarely I sketch something up first, mostly only when I’m not at a PC and have an idea, then I’d scribble it down somehow so I don’t forget it.
The second hardest part for me is actually executing concepts till the end.
I have tons of unfinished experiments, some that interested me for a while but never ended up finessing enough to feel like they were ‘finished’.
3. Where do you get your inspiration for projects? Who inspires you?
That’s a question I ask myself all the time. I feel like social media has kinda numbed me to appreciate good art, and also made me lazier when it comes to seeking out cool inspirational work from other people. Back in the day I would browse Vimeo regularly to see which projects other people were releasing but since they’ve gone all-in on being a corporate video platform you can barely use it anymore. Pinterest also used to be a great way to find inspiration but I haven’t used that in a long time, I think that’s now unusable because of AI overwhelm, right?
I feel like a lot of cool motion work was shared on other social media like Twitter but that platform seems to be broken beyond repair if you’re not paying for it. I haven’t really used IG that much in a while to see what other people are up to, just because it’s mostly ads now and you don’t get any engagement on your posts if you don’t constantly post all the time. It’s frustrating, but there are some properly good artists out there! I’m still very much inspired by some classic CG legends like Gmunk and Ash Thorp, the amount of creative output they produce is mind-boggling.
Going out into nature also always inspires me. When I used to live in London I was very interested in the brutalist architecture you can see all over town, which I sometimes incorporated in my work. Nowadays, living close to forests, vast landscapes, and the sea is something that I want to explore more. Seeing physical art is very important.
Sometimes you go to an exhibition that has nothing to do with what you do but something in there tickles you in a way that you end up thinking about it for a long time afterwards.
For example I went to this Anish Kapoor exhibition at Modern Art Oxford a couple years ago, and there was something about the colors and textures in his artwork that were just so inspiring to me, probably not in the way that the artist intended, but I ended up taking lots of reference photographs of red-orange-yellow-black color gradient’s and close-ups of the textures of his paintings.
For physical artwork, you have to be physically there, to see the artwork, to feel it, it doesn’t invoke the same emotional response if you look at pictures of it online.
4. What are some of the largest challenges you had to overcome during your artmaking process?
In the last couple of years the biggest challenge has definitely been - how to find time and energy for personal artistic practice. I have a 3 year old son and I have yet to meet a parent who has the energy to spend another couple hours doing art after their workday. I’m trying. But it’s mostly single-digit hours per month.
Last year I got myself a pen plotter, which brings my artistic practice a little bit into the physical space. I find it a lot easier to focus on something that happens at least a little bit off-screen, even though the design process is still for the most part in Houdini.
Recently I’ve gotten into 3D printing, and I’d like to expand and do more physical artwork. The older I get the more I’d like to get my hands dirty, too much screen time just ain’t it!
5. Do you have any big designs/projects in the works or anything that excites you about the future of your career?
I have some big projects cooking in the background at the moment, which I can’t talk about right now as they’re not yet set in stone. But I’m very excited about what this year will bring and hope it’ll propel my career forward a bit. I’m also working with one of my favorite artists right now on an exhibition which is a little bit of a dream come true and hope that that’ll be something I can do more of in the future.
6. Your artwork is incredible, and as we all know takes some serious dedication to make! Is there something you’d really like to make?
Thanks, that’s very kind! I’ve been very lucky to be in some really great teams over the years, without which none of my work would’ve been where it is! I’d generally love to work on video games or films again, but I think what would be a dream job would be visualizing particle collisions inside the LHC, some string theory stuff, for a Hollywood film. Some sort of science content, but with artistic license.
If you read this, CERN, hit me up!
7. What is your passion beside Animation/CGI work?
Now i’ve moved out of London I’m hoping to find enough time to learn how to surf and skate properly. Last summer was a bit meh, so fingers crossed that by the end of this summer, I’ll at least not feel like I’m a useless big bag on a board anymore!
Besides that I love spending time with my son and wanna give him all the opportunities to become whatever he wants to be in his life,
as long as he starts learning Houdini as soon as possible!
8. I’m sure you’ve been asked plenty of times before, but what’s your favourite piece?
I loved working on the music video for The Seige — Back Up. I learned a lot working on it and it pushed me out of my comfort zone for sure. It’s a shame they released the video using some non-finished shots instead of the finals but I’m proud of the shots in my portfolio, so all good!
Working on CoD: Black Ops Cold War was just a blast through and through, even though I never ended up playing the game. It was an incredible experience, and we put so much thought and love into every aspect of our work. Every asset, every document on every pile of papers in our sequences has got its own little story, it was just amazing seeing so many people really giving their best and trying to make something that’s really enjoyable for the fans.
9. I see from your website that you’ve done some tutorials, is that something you’d like to do more of?
For sure! When I starting learning Motion Graphics all the knowledge was essentially free and it feels like in recent years more and more is gated behind paywalls, which is a shame. If you’re a student or just starting out and can’t or don’t want to commit to buying knowledge like that. Even people like me, who can afford to spend a couple of pounds here or there don’t want to sign up for 10 different patreons. In my opinion, subscriptions have always been an anti-consumer business model and in the tutorial space, it’s nothing different. I do understand it’s tough times for everyone and people are looking for side hustles to pay the bills. I’m just not a fan of it.
10. Do you have any advice for students trying to get into the world of 3D and Digital Design?
I would say experiment with different mediums, software and try using different tools to solve problems in different ways, for example, do something in After Effects, then in Cinema, and then Houdini, maybe even do it as a stop motion piece if you want. You’ll find that certain skills are transferrable and you don’t have to be scared to try new things. Every tool will have it’s own set of benefits and you’ll discover a lot of additional interesting ways of creating something.
When I started learning Houdini I started to understand C4D and AE in a whole different way and now going back and forth between the programs I do it in ways that I would have previously not thought about.
AI is on everyone's mind right now, we are all talking about how it’ll affect the industry. Frankly, I think if you’re doing a 3D/Digital Design degree right now it’s probably a good idea to keep up to date with recent technological advancements. Skills that were absolutely necessary for the last 20 years might not be so relevant for a job in the industry in 3 years.
Also: Be unique.
Thank you again Florian. You’re a huge inspiration to me!
Thanks very much, it’s been a pleasure!
If anybody wants to reach out or get in touch with me, they can give me a follow on Twitter or Instagram!
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