The Bouncing Ball That Changed Everything: Alessandro Savergnini’s Path to Framestore
How several mentorship workshops with Filippo Dattola built a career — from early fundamentals to a role at Framestore.
The Starting Point
When Alessandro started studying animation with Filippo, he knew next to nothing about it. He’d been experimenting on his own with rigs he found online, trying out walk cycles and simple exercises, but quickly realised his work was nowhere near where he wanted it to be — so he set out to find a mentor.
The Turning Point
It started during a session working through one of the most deceptively simple exercises in animation: the bouncing ball. Nothing about the exercise is technically hard. What makes it the first real test is that there is nowhere to hide — no character, no rig complexity, no story. Only timing, spacing, and whether you understand what gravity is doing.
That was the shift from animating mechanically to understanding the principles behind every motion — and everything that followed was built on it.
Animation Fundamentals Body Mechanics
The Path Forward
From there Alessandro completed all six phases of Character Animation back-to-back, then continued straight into Creature Animation and finished its first phase — building steadily from fundamentals towards production-level work, without skipping a stage.
Creature AnimationWhere He Is Now
Alessandro now works as a professional animator at Framestore, one of the industry’s leading VFX studios, where his credits include Prehistoric Planet (Season 3), How to Train Your Dragon, The Sheep Detective, and Project Hail Mary. Earlier in his career he worked at MPC — contributing to Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Disenchanted, and Mufasa: The Lion King — prior to its closure in 2025, and at DNEG, where he worked on Coyote vs. Acme.
Connect with Alessandro on LinkedIn.
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