Jose Vaz (aka Zez Vaz) is a freelance 2D animator who has been working remotely for over 10 years. He manages a small team of creatives at his company, Toma Creators. He and his team create professional Animated Explainers and Music Videos, primarily using Reallusion's Cartoon Animator. One of his recent projects is the Walter Precipitous - A Short film.  The project features Walter - a water molecule who sets off on a journey of self-discovery. Through his journey, the audience will be immersed in the hydrological cycle. The project is also published on the Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) website as an animated educational resource for natural science teachers. There is an excellent behind-the-scenes video that goes into detail on the Cartoon Animator 5 pipeline used for production.

Renderosity: What is your background as an artist? What got you involved in digital art?

Zez Vaz: I studied Graphic Design in the 2000s in Portugal at a time when Illustration or Animation was not seen as viable career choices even by my own teachers. I got a taste of digital animation in that course. I realized I was able to do it which led me to go study Animation in the UK. Since then I started freelancing mainly working on Motion Graphics Design for commercial purposes.

2D animation is a specialty of yours: What is it about 2D that interests you so?

I enjoyed drawing as a kid and growing up in the 1990s meant that most of the cartoons I watched were 2D animations, especially Cartoon Network, Hanna-Barbera, Disney, and even Dragon Ball Z. In that sense, it might be that my interest in 2D has something to do with nostalgia! The other explanation is more technical: working with 3 dimensions on a flat screen is something that truly confuses me, so I focused on the 2 dimensions.

What kind of computer setup do you have? 

I use an Apple Mac Mini M1. I will be switching to a laptop computer MSI Katana | Intel Core i7-12650H | GeForce RTX 4070 | 32 GB | SSD 512GB, with a XP Pen Deco.

You collaborate with Toblerusse in Canada: how did you meet him and what is your communication setup with him? How do you work on a project together?

Toblerusse connected to me through the platform Fiverr, where he was looking for an animator to produce a short film for his wonderful poem about the water cycle. I fell in love with the poem and at the same time, I was learning about Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator. I thought it’d be a great opportunity to start using the software. In less than a year we created the 8-minute animation along with my teammates at Toma Creators (Sound Designer André Cardoso; and Illustrator Mariana Vaz).

We started a YouTube channel and kept going with more educational videos.

Toblerusse and I have weekly video meetings and keep in touch on WhatsApp to plan production schedules. It's been an amazing feeling for us to see the views going up on the YouTube channel!

CTA 5 is such a fun program to work with: how does the program help you achieve your production goals?

When I first started animating it was hand-drawn traditional frame-by-frame, extremely time-consuming. Later, I switched to digital with Flash which was obviously faster. Then I started using After Effects which was the most powerful and fastest software I had worked with. In 2021 when I tried CTA 4 I was stunned that my work experience had gotten faster and easier. What a powerful and simple program to use.

Odd question: what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a Palaeontologist due to my love of dinosaurs. Jurassic Park had come out when I was 7 years old.

-Lastly, I’ve been personally struggling with rigging in CTA 5 (my own problem, not the program): Do you have any tips for those who are learning how to rig? Is the svg format the way to go?

Sure! My main tip is to look for specific solutions in Reallusion’s CTA 5 Manual. Also, Reallusion’s YouTube channel has tons of important tutorials and sometimes other YouTubers in the community like Boxels will also have some amazing tips. If possible, SVG format is definitely the preferred way to go. Vector character files are lighter and you can zoom in forever without losing quality.