About David & Stray Keyframe

David Thomas

My name is David Thomas, I’m a Welsh animator and have been working professionally in Feature Film Character Animation for most of my career in France. In my day-to-day job, I animate characters bouncing around the screen. Companies I’ve worked for include Illumination Mac Guff, Mikros Image, Mac Guff Ligne, Jungler and Fortiche Productions. Some of the projects you’ll see my name in the credits for are Arcane: League Of Legends (the Netflix series), The Secret Life Of Pets, Sherlock Gnomes, Sam Sam, as well as a few others (my IMDB is here). If you want to read more about how I came to be an animator, I wrote about that a bit more in this article on how to become an animator.

This is my most recent animation reel:

What is StrayKeyframe.com?

Stray Keyframe is my blog and that’s the third name I’ve chosen for it. If you see other names watermarked onto my images, it’s because of the two other names I gave to this website. I’ll try to resist the temptation to change the name a fourth time.

I chose this name because I’m a stray in several ways. First of all, I come from a small town in Wales (Britain) and somehow I ended up living permanently in France, along with my French wife, French cat and French house-plants. Secondly, animation isn’t my first love, I ended up finding animation by accident. I trained to be a musician, artist and graphic designer before I ever found animation. Animation happens to be the main artistic thing I do now but I often stray into other areas of art like painting and drawing. I find all artistic things interesting and so write about more than just animation, even though that’s my main area of knowledge.

On top of all that, finding and dealing with stray keyframes is part of what I do in my job as an animator. Sometimes an animation won’t look quite right until I find that stray keyframe and put it back on the right path (I wish it were that simple).

Who is this website for?

To be honest, this website is mostly for me. I need to write things down because if I keep it all in my head, it turns into a big mess. I’ve always understood things better after writing them down and seeing as I write at such length, I thought I’d try to make it useful for other people. Knowing your eyes are on this makes me want to organise it better, which helps me as much as it might anyone else.

If you like art, you’ll probably like this website. If you like animation, you might like this website even more. Or maybe you’ll hate everything about it and want to throw rotten vegetables at me… the world is a cruel place sometimes.

Can I use your art, animation or writing?

Email me and I will consider it. But generally… nah. If you do copy, redistribute or do anything else with my stuff without my permission, I’ll probably hate you and I don’t want to hate you.

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