Sava Zivkovic - director and CG artist

Sava Zivkovic is a Director and CG artist based in Belgrade, Serbia. Born in 1989, he graduated from the Belgrade University of Arts in the department of Interior and Furniture design. Having developed a strong passion for film and animation, he decides to take on this career path and focuses on motion graphics, architectural animation and all things CG. In late 2017 he started his directing career at Axis Animation and continues the collaboration with Glasgow based studio, working on AAA game cinematics as well as never ending development of personal IP's.

We were eager to find out about Sava's work and thoughts. We had great time speaking with him. Sava's will have a presentation about his work at CGA conference on 16th and 17th of November.

Your last couple of pieces have been released in a role as a Director at the Axis Animation studio. Are there any advantages of working with the established studio like Axis, or do you more enjoy the total freedom of your early days and personal work?

There’s two parts to this answer. On one end I absolutely love working with Axis, for multitude of reasons! Apart from the obvious one, like getting to work on AAA titles you’ve admired over the years and being a part of their development, the most rewarding part for me is getting to work with an amazingly talented team of people and learning from them. The upside compared to personal work comes from detaching myself from production, which was sort of weird at first, but I started to enjoy that detachment more and more. Now I get to do what I love the most, which is the bare bones creative aspects of the project, and not have to worry about how the hell am I going to model that or render this.

With personal work however I still need to figure out how the hell am I going to model that or render this, but the point to be made here has to do with ownership, and no matter how big of an IP you’re working on in AAA is, it’s never quite the same feeling as it is when you’re creating something yourself. The excitement, the uncertainty, the thrill and the things you learn from personal projects cannot be measured, and the overall value you get as a creative is why I’ll always find time for personal work.

Whole interview on the link below.