What’s Been One of the Most Challenging Projects You Worked On?

The single coolest thing about working in the animation business is that every project is jam-packed with its own set of challenges to overcome. Every sequence in that project has its own group of characters and performances and obstacles. And each shot within that sequence is overflowing with its own dizzying array of decisions, choices, and difficulties.

As such, this job never gets boring. Not even a little bit! You're constantly learning about new things that apply to one scene or another - be it dance, kung-fu, acting, car-racing, or how airplanes work. This is a career where you are basically signing up to be a student of EVERYTHING for the rest of your life, so buckle up for a nonstop adventure of new ideas and topics to research!

That said, if I had to choose one project as the most challenging, I think I'd have to pick Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. I worked a lot on a character called Devastator, and figuring out how he was going to form together, rise up, and head off to rip down the pyramids was easily the most complex thing I've had the chance to work on, but also one of the most fun things I've ever animated!

Luckily, ILM has some absolutely incredible creature rigging geniuses (a word I don't use lightly) such as Kaori Ogino and Keiji Yamaguchi. Kaori rigged the creature, probably the most complicated rig ever done in CG, and Keiji was instrumental in helping animate some of the actual transforming geometry of the tractors coming together to form our big baddie.

Of course there are a lot of other people who come together to create something like Devastator, it certainly wasn't just the three of us, but I really felt the pressure on that character, both internal and external (I wanted it to be as cool as possible, just like everyone else did!) and as such, I have to say it was the biggest challenge I've faced.

But how cool is animation as a career when the biggest challenge is also the single most fun experience you've had in that career?

Man... sometimes I really love this job.

Thanks for the fun question!

Shawn :)

What Are Some Tips on Creating Effective Key Poses?

A strong line of action through the character would be one of the first things to work into the pose. Avoid the dreaded straight up and down torso, you know, the torso that looks like there is a metal rod going up the spine. Work in C shapes and S shapes, to give some curve and interest to the spine. This will help you start to build weight into the character. Oppose those hips and shoulders, and get some bend in the knee(s), position one shoulder lower or higher than the other. Chances are, if the weight is not working in the pose it won't work once you start splining.

Look for contrast between your poses. Unless the acting is very subtle, the character won't be in the same shape for the shot. Use reversals in shape, as well as moments of compression (squash) and extension (stretch)to add texture.

Remember, the key poses are your main storytelling poses. Be sure that they support the key beats of the shot. They may signify a change in the character's emotional state or a change in posture or screen position. And they must be clear.

Say you wanted to find the keys poses from a scene starring Tom Hanks. You get out your scissors and slice up the film, as doing this to a blue-ray would be extremely hard. Now you search through all the frames looking for the extreme moments that tell the story of what the scene is about. These will be the frames that are the most clear and readable. And most of the time you will probably be looking for the extreme change in facial expression or body posture.

The face is super important, when we go to the movies we aren't watching Woody's left arm. But let us not forget the importance of body language. When I block a scene I key the character from top to bottom, including the facial expression and phoneme. I want the pose to be a complete picture of my intent for that character at that point and time. Often times however, before I add the face I will focus on the body alone. Is the body communicating my intent effectively? If I watch my blocking with no facial animation of any kind...is it working..is it clear? Once your character has strong, clear body language, the facial animation is the icing on the cake.

Guest Blogger Ray Chase

Reader's Question: How Do You Figure Out the Correct Timing of Your Work Just on Paper?

Personally, I use thumbnails and Flipbook during my planning stages. I quickly explore the poses and breakdowns I want, not worried about drawing mistakes and only concerned with how clear it reads. Flipbook just helps me experiment with the timing of the poses I've figured out on paper, and it's a more intuitive alternative, at least for me, than shifting around that thin red keyframe mark in Maya. Once that's down, I pretty much use that information to transfer into Maya.

How would you go about figuring out the correct timing of your work just on paper? I usually never know until I've seen it in a sequence of some kind, and that's where Flipbook plays its hand. So, something that I think may only need 5 frames on paper, may possibly need more or less. How can you ever be sure when you haven't seen any kind of playback?


Again, this is a personal workflow choice that may change as you gain experience. Animators determine their shot timing using a variety of methods, the most common is using video reference. Your reference will give a good basic idea of the timing of actions and poses. Just remember that as an animator you are exaggerating life, not copying it directly (rotoscoping), so don’t use the exact frame count timing of your reference. Instead, use it as a guideline. Dialogue shots also make timing easier because you have audio timing on which to base the actions. For example, you know that you have 10 frames between the time the character says “You are..” and “…the plague” so you base the character’s “hits” around those 10 frames.

Many animators use the blocking pass to determine their timing. In the same way that you may adjust a frame hold longer or shorter in Flipbook you can grab a blocked pose in your 3d software and shift it left or right in the timeline and playblasting it. You stated Flipbook is more intuitive which is why this is a personal workflow choice, there is no one right answer! Use the workflow that accomplishes the goal in the shortest amount of time! You don’t need the “correct” timing established before your begin blocking (or possibly first pass of splining) your animation. You should have a good idea of the timing but there is nothing wrong adjusting your poses 1-8 frames in either direction during your early passes. But, if you have to adjust your poses 20+ frames to fix the timing, then either you have a really slow shot with no movement or you don’t have enough poses blocked! Again, don’t spend too much time determing the “correct” timing in Flipbook if you are only going to adjust it again in Maya as you move from blocking to splining.

Finally, timing is something that is learned with practice and experience. In the beginning, you may use Flipbook to plan your timing but after a few years you may just know how many frames it takes to move a hand/foot/etc to the pose you want!

Happy Animating!
Animation Mentor Staff

What Should a Young Artist Do to Prepare for the Professional Animation Industry?

With so many blogs and web sites devoted to animation, there is a wealth of information available. I run through my list every morning to stay up to date on the many happenings.

When preparing your reel, it's a good idea to know a bit about the studio to which you are applying. Under the umbrella of the "animation industry" there are studios working in fully animated feature film, television, FX for live action, games and internet. While there may be some cross over, many studios have specific things they look for on a reel.

Speaking of reels. Never, ever, ever put work on your reel that does not belong to you. It seems like common sense, yet I have heard of it happening more than once. It can be quite frustrating to get rejection letters, I know, I have my own pile. But your reel represents who you are and what you can do. To try and pass another animators work off as your own, is fraud. Don’t do it or the animation gods will become most displeased and frown upon you for a thousand years….or even longer.

Once you are at a studio be prepared for “crunch time”, that glorious time when everyone pulls together to finish a project. The length and severity of crunch time will vary by studio and project, but know that it’s rare for a production to go from start to finish without some sort of crunch.

Meeting deadlines is important in all industries and the animation industry is no different. Depending on where your working you may frequently have reasonable deadlines or ones that are not so reasonable. Regardless, you will need to get your work in on time. Being consistently late will certainly put you on the naughty list and who wants that? Practice good time management to help you stay focused. If you have a week to complete a shot figure out when you need to have blocking approved, when you must be splining etc, in order to hit your target date. Having your own mini schedule will keep you on track and make your coordinators very happy.

And finally…upon landing that first gig in the industry, don’t ruin it by being a jerk. People in the professional animation industry like to work with nice, fun, modest people. You don't have to bring in donuts everyday to win over the hearts of your coworkers; although if you want to, I like chocolate. Check any ego at the door, be open to learning, listen, ask questions, have a sense of humor, be respectful of varying points of view, be part of the team. Studios want to foster healthy, positive, team-building environments.

Guest Blogger Ray Chase

How Do You Traverse the Fine Line of Always Creating New and Interesting Poses but Keeping the Actions as Simple and Readable as Possible?

How do you traverse the fine line of always creating new and interesting poses but keeping the actions as simple and readable as possible? How do you know if you have done “too much” and need to simplify?

Interesting, exciting, emotional, communicative, dynamic poses should ALWAYS be your goal in every scene. That's the absolute core of what we do, so it's great to aim high and shoot for the stars when it comes to poses that will communicate the character's emotions and actions as best as possible.

However, you bring up a good point that it's SO easy to go overboard! Creating poses is so much fun that the simplest of actions can turn into the wackiest animation in history if we aren't careful.

The trick is learning how much is too much. How far is too far?

Truthfully, your sense of what will "read" best to the audience will continue to improve as you get more and more experienced with animation. However, there is one trick that you will always continue to rely on to some degree, and is the best rock-solid way to find out if you have pushed your poses and ideas too far:

ASK SOMEONE!

Sounds simple, right? You'd be surprised how many students and newer animators avoid this absolutely essential step in their animation process. Feedback is the key to not only learning animation, but excelling in it, and there really is no other way to know if your ideas and poses are reading clearly than to ask around and see what people think!

Remember, your animation is being created to be experienced by an audience of people with vastly differing backgrounds, beliefs, senses of humor, moods, etc. The eventual audience is completely unpredictable in their makeup. Because of that, there is literally no one who doesn't have a valid opinion on whether or not your animation makes sense to them.

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston write in the Illusion of Life that they would sometimes even show their animation to the janitor if they were working late at night to get an opinion on the work. That janitor didn't know the first thing about overlapping action, squash and stretch, force, or arcs, but he sure could tell them if he understood whether or not the character was sad, or what actions the character was meant to be doing.

Anyway, when it comes to poses, I come from the school of thought that says to exaggerate something more than you think it should be exaggerated, and then double it! This has helped me a lot to push my ideas (particularly the timing and poses), but the reality is that it usually means I need to tone things down here or there in order to make things more clear or to fit the style of a project. Luckily, poses are always much easier to tone down than to push further, so it's best to go a bit too far than to have to shove your animation further in tiny incremental steps over and over until your supervisor is pleased.

So I would certainly recommend that you aim high when searching for fun poses, but be prepared to tone them down when necessary, and actively seek feedback from your peers, your family, your supervisor, or even the janitor, because every single one of them is an invaluable resource to find out when you've gone overboard!

Hope that helps - thanks for swinging by the blog!

Shawn :)

Is It Better to Animate Pose to Pose or Straight Ahead?

In my experience it has been useful to use a combination of pose to pose, layered and straight ahead. I use them all!! Shall I explain? Oh yes, I shall. So when beginning a shot I will use pose to pose to map out the performance of the shot. I will use stepped keys to do this so that when the animation plays, it's popping through the poses. This allows me to focus on the key storytelling poses, to create nice silhouettes and to work on contrast.

I think of the pose to pose pass as the comic strip of my shot, telling the story through key images. After establishing my keys I will take another pass adding in breakdowns, all while staying in stepped. I want to make as many decisions as I can in stepped mode so that when I move out of stepped and into spline there is less chaos. Chaos is a noun -- a state of utter confusion or disorder, like when animation is taken out of stepped blocking too soon resulting in mushy movement of virtually everything on the character.

With the shot blocked out and broken down, I change into spline mode (I actually use plateau in Maya) and begin to work in a layered method. I like to work from the inside out, hiding everything on the character except the hips/torso since that is from where, all the movement is driven. Once I'm happy with the hips and torso, I will switch layers perhaps moving to the head or the arms.

Straight ahead animation is usually something I will only do on things like floppy ears, tails or clothing. Here I'm starting on frame 1 and steaming ahead through the shot. Since my straight ahead animation will be driven by the body animation, its super important to get the body working first.

That's how I incorporate all three methods into my work flow. I find my approach to be very efficient, however it may not be the ideal approach for everyone. Developing your own work flow, one that works for you, is an important part of the process.


Guest Blogger Ray Chase

What Are Some Extra Goodies to Add in Polish to Make the Animation Stand Out Even More?

What are some extra goodies to add in polish to make the animation stand out even more (eg. head squash and stretch…)

For me, the single biggest thing is pushing my arcs into something clear, fun, and pleasing to the eye. There's nothing like some beautiful arcs on the wrists, feet, nose, props, etc., to really bring a scene to life and take it from looking acceptable to looking great!

Other than that, especially in visual effects animation, which is the medium I've mostly worked in (animating characters who need to live in the same frame as live-action actors), the key is subtle complexity. It's finding small ways to add little secondary things that bring the character more fully to life.

Things like having a character swallow, and the intricate neck muscle movements that go into a swallow, for example. Or putting in breaths into the scene - expanding the chest a bit, etc.

As you say, you can also get some great extra mileage out of squashing and stretching the head slightly, if the style of the film is appropriate for that. In a more realistic film, you could get that feeling out of squashing/stretching the fleshier parts of the face while keeping the skull itself more rigid, but it's the same idea - giving the overall character a heightened feeling of being organic and fleshy.

All of these sorts of things - micro eye movements, muscles flexing/relaxing, ear twitches on an animal, toes squishing against the ground, etc - these all can add to the overall complexity that will help the character feel even more alive without sacrificing the subtlety of the performance!

Shawn:)

What’s One Step That Is Often Overlooked in Student Animation?

The step I see missed time and again is that students transition out of stepped blocking and into spline too early. What was a nice blocking pass with some strong poses has now turned into a mushy pile of chaos. The poses are still there, but now the character slides and drifts from one pose to the next. Now it is possible to take the goo and mold it into something decent, however it will probably take extra time to do so with a lot of trial and error along the way.

Now, I understand the eagerness. The shot is mapped out...you have your keys....let's get it moving!!! Well slow down there skipper. Blocking IS animating. Take a look at those keys and how much room you have between them. Guess what will happen if you convert to spline now? Yes, that's right -- Maya, the goofball inbetweener, will fill in those gaps for you in the most literal and boring way possible. God bless Maya for wanting to help, but you are better off making those decisions yourself.

Once you have your key poses in blocking, take another pass adding some breakdowns. How will you transition from one pose to the next? Make decisions up front..you can tweak later if you must. The more decisions you can make while in stepped, the less mess you will have to deal with later.

Guest Blogger Ray Chase

Reader's Question: How Common Is It to Use a Flipbook or PAP to Plan a Shot?

I was wondering about the software tools you mentioned. How "common" is it for an animator to use something like Flipbook or PAP to "plan" a shot before even touching the 3D character (Sort of like animated thumbnails, not necessarily polished hand drawn animation)? Is that way of "planning" realistic in a bigger studio setting, or do most animators stick to thumbnails on paper? I was also curious as to how you're supposed to figure out what poses happen on what frames, but using the "real-life" timing makes perfect sense.

Everyone has a different workflow and if you can quickly show your ideas using Flipbook or PAP then feel free to use them. Just don’t spend too much time in those programs where they becomes detrimental to the planning process. Your sketches should be a quick way to plan ideas without wasting too much time in software. With enough experience, you will likely discover it is easier to show all of your ideas on paper than spend the extra time (even if it is 30 minutes) animating them in a 2d software package. Plus, at many studios you already have 2d animated version of the shot called an animatic (essentially a moving storyboard) so it may not be necessary to recreate the shot in 2d with your own sketches if the animatic already shows your intentions.

Animation Mentor Staff