Today we’d like to introduce you to Angus Oakes
Hi Angus, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I’m from a small town in Colorado called Lyons, about 15 minutes north of Boulder and the gateway to the Rocky Mountains. My childhood was active in sports, soccer, basketball, and backpacking, which led me to discover my passion for dance around age 10. From then on, I was a hip-hop dancer, competitive and performative, joining teams throughout middle and high school and competing in various competitions around Colorado.
In 2017, while I was in my first year of High School, I had the opportunity to live for 6 months in Hong Kong with my family. I didn’t want to give up dance for such a long period of time, so I found a hip-hop studio there and decided to continue practicing. Although none of the classes were in English, I found myself incredibly moved by the difference in how dance was treated. Back home, I was used to treating dance more as a sport: intense hours, lots of cardio, less feeling, and more strength. Hong Kong, however, forced me to see dance as a medium of self-expression: controlled movements, feeling the music, letting it be about your internal self rather than how you look to others. I accidentally found movement art where I had been seeing work and exercise for so long. This experience now only changed dance for me but granted me a much stronger connection to art in general. I started choreographing my own dance and explored movement as a medium for expression.
Interestingly, this experience also awakened an interest in visual art. Animation, in particular, interested me because I could explore the movement of dance and the internal feelings of it without restriction. In my junior and senior year of high school, I began to teach myself animation and animation software, such as Blender and Adobe Animate. Fast Forward a few years, and I started my first year at CalArts (in the Experimental Animation program) with no real artistic education outside of my dance experience and what I taught myself in those few years.
Experimental Animation at CalArts introduced me to a world I had never known or experienced before. I wanted to try everything: stop motion, 2D traditional animation, paint on film, under-the-camera animation, and CG, and used everything together to create my first two films (Lotus and A Place to Sit in Bliss). Now, entering my last year at CalArts, I am mainly a CG artist/animator, but still love and use mixed media in my work. Ironically, dance has fallen more and more out of my life in college, which makes sense considering I am learning so much else, but I imagine it will come back in the future, and I will always feel a strong connection towards it.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
One of my biggest personal challenges was convincing myself I was worth to go to art school. Teaching myself and not engaging in a real traditional art education in high school (and throughout my childhood before for that matter) made me incredibly doubtful that I had what it takes to be an artist. Coming into CalArts, I had no real sense of the basic principles, like figure drawing, color theory, composition, perspective, etc. I always just made it up and taught myself based on what looked “good” or not. To my delight, I learned Experimental Animation does not really require a strong foundation of that type of skill. The program aims to help you build your artistic voice from wherever in your journey you are, which allowed me to continue developing what I was good at without shunning me for what I lacked.
COVID, of course, was another big obstacle to maneuver around. Lockdown in the US happened at the tail end of my senior year, right when I was beginning to hear back from colleges. I ended up deferring my first year at CalArts at the very last minute in August when it was announced all classes would be online. When I was in Hong Kong, I did online school for those 6 months, and it left a very bad impression that I wanted to avoid at all costs going into college. I took that gap year to really develop my understanding of CG, also went on a solo backpacking trip in the mountains (which ended up influencing a lot of my work and films at CalArts). On top of COVID, the animation block at CalArts ended up flooding over the summer in 2021, pretty much destroying all facilities. They ended up renting out a corporate office in the local mall and turned it into cubicle desk space and a temporary facility. It wasn’t until the fall of last year (2023), that the animation block construction was finally completed.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My personal work is very interested in nature and self-expression. Growing up in Colorado at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I have always gravitated towards the nature and ecosystems around me and frequently explore their relationship to humans and the inner self through my work. My film, Lotus, captures the inner feelings of dance as a flower moving through different mediums, and my most recent film, A Place to Sit in Bliss, uses landscapes and plants to capture the feelings of being in a relationship.
I have a huge passion for CG, and it use for digital art, filmmaking, and visual production. My films are mostly CG but with mixed-media elements, meaning a lot of my work is done in compositing and getting different mediums to cohesively come together and complement each other. For CG I specialize in Blender and Houdini and use After Effects and Premiere Pro for my postproduction compositing.
I also have a strong passion for real-time audiovisual art for shows and concerts, as well as projection for installations. I love to use my knowledge of mixed media with an emphasis on CG to mix and composite video live using Resolume and Touchdesigner. I recently worked on the annual CalArts Halloween party to create custom animations to project and manipulate in real time.
How do you define success?
To me, being successful means being happy and stable. I want to be able to live and support myself and others with the work that I create, and achieving that feels like the ultimate success.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://angusoakes.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/an.gusoakes/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@angusoakes6834?si=PSlLhVnnDORDyrnU
