Do You Have Any Ideas on How to Increase Productivity and Speed up Workflow?

A lot of the workflow issues will resolve themselves with time and experience. The more you animate, and the more you learn to work with different rigs and software, the more productive you will naturally become. As far as actively working on increasing your productivity goes, it’s very helpful to talk to other animators about how they are approaching different issues in their shots, and if you are working in a studio that has a “dailies” session every day, there’s SO much knowledge to soak up by viewing their progress.

That’s one of the big plusses of Animation Mentor, and having the students be able to work with different mentors as they go through the program - not only do they get the benefit of seeing how different animators approach shots in the lectures, but they also will get lots of great info from their different mentors as well. And as they work their way through the program, they will amass many different combos of skills – a toolbox, if you will - to help them create their own workflow.

Workflow is such a personal thing. There can be many different ways to solve a problem, but each individual has their own sensibilities that will make one method or another a more comfortable way of working. Some things will feel more intuitive than others, depending on who you are. The only way you can figure that out for yourself is to try different things that you learn at school, figure yourself out, or best of all, watch what other animators do.

You can also do other things, like make sure your shot is very well-planned. If you want to avoid time-consuming changes down the road on a shot, it should be very solid in the blocking phase. The timing should be extremely clear, as well as the poses, and you have to have the arcs, especially of the hips, very well articulated and smooth. If you have those ingredients, then you have a solid foundation. You can’t add higher levels of detail to the shot and expect them to work if you don’t have a good foundation. Adding polish to your shot will be much more of a breeze, and you’ll get that shot finaled much faster, and with a lot less agony. When your foundation animation isn’t working, you will constantly be going back to change things in later stages, and that will affect any other details you’ve built up since finishing blocking. You’ll end up having to re-do those details as well to work with the other changes you made to the foundation. It’s a nasty cycle that will not only *drive* you crazy, but will slow you down like crazy.

Guest Blogger Dana Boadway

What Separates the Good Animator from the Bad Animator?

There are a lot of things that separate a good animator and a bad animator. I will skip the obvious things like talent, speed, good mechanics, fundamentals, etc. There are a lot of animators out there that have all of those qualities. I know for me, two things that inspire me are an animator's attention to detail and creativity. Of course, all shots have to tell the story, sell the emotion, have good body mechanics, timing, weight, etc. What is unfortunate is that a lot of times a shot will have all of those elements, and then the animator will consider it done. I've been guilty of it myself.

A good animator will work his shots until they are good enough to be in the film. A great animator will take it that extra 5 percent past what is required and make it amazing. Feet don't land square to the floor most of the time, and fingers don't grab an object and then stop moving. Eye lids are constantly reacting to what is happening in the eyes, and the face has so many ticks and tiny oddities that it is overwhelming. The animators that blow me away always seem to take the time to add the small imperfections that make a shot feel real. Sometimes there are small details that you feel more than you see. However, if they weren't there it wouldn't feel nearly as sweet.

The other thing that really gets me pumped about a shot is an acting choice that I would never have thought of. Some animators are able to come up with ways of expressing an emotion or an idea that are wildly original but seem to not be out of place for the character. It is very obvious in those moments that the animator put in the effort to avoid the cliches and brainstormed until they had something special.

So, I guess I could sum up my view of a good animator as someone who has all of the skills but also takes real pride in their work. They aren't just trying to get their shots approved by the director, and they aren't running with the first idea that will work. They are not just trying to get four seconds of footage into the film. They are trying to create four seconds of inspired animation that will help elevate the film. I've seen animators that have been in the industry for many, many years and still labor over their shots that way. I am hoping that I can end up being one of them even after I've been doing this for a few decades.

Guest Blogger Travis Tohill

What Is Your Favorite Animated Movie, and How Did It Inspire You?

I think this will be a little disappointing, but I don't have a favorite animated movie. There are some films that made a big impression on me and probably made me begin to love animation, but it's not just one film - it's many.


For instance, short films made a huge impression on me. Not only one - many of them. I think short animated films are an awesome thing. And many years ago, they seemed to be even more special than now! Maybe because 20 or 30 years ago it was not easy to see them. There was no internet. There was no YouTube. You would have to go to a film festival, or sometimes in my school they would be shown in special screenings. And I fell in love with Norman Maclaren films, and many other films from the National Film Board of Canada. European shorts like the works of Jan Svankmajer. Nick Park films such as Creature Comforts and The Wrong Trousers. Balance by Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein made a strong impression on me, as well as Zbigniew Rybczynski's Tango. Well, and I LOVE Chris Wedge's Bunny - not only is it a great animation short, but it also was the first one that I worked on! These short films and many others were so inspiring! They made me see animation as a real art form, not just entertainment. I think of all the animated films I saw, short films were by far my favorite and I will always have a special place for them in my heart and soul.


Other than that, there are a couple of feature films that were really important to me. Jungle Book is one of them. I remember when I was little and my family took me to the theater to see it. I was maybe five or so, and I remember telling my mom how the movement was so much more detailed than in Saturday cartoons. The way things moved in Jungle Book was totally amazing to me. And the characters! The songs!


Toy Story was also a turning point for me – I was at School of Visual Arts in New York trying to decide between multimedia/internet type of stuff or animation, and when Toy Story came out, it was really hard to resist. It was really the best possible beginning for 3D in the big screen: fun story, great characters, very well conceived and done, using this amazing new technique - what a treat! It certainly was an important factor in my decision to become a 3D animator.


Another film that made a huge impression on me was Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki. I love the story and the characters. The type of narrative is so refreshing and it takes you to places you wouldn't expect. It is great when a film doesn't feel like “just another formula to get huge box office money” – it's so much nicer when a film feels original, special, truly coming from the heart. I think that shows respect for the audience and respect for the art form.


And of course, there are remarkable films made in CG and stop motion in the past 6 or 7 years. I love Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Horton Hears a Who. I had a great time watching Kung Fu Panda. I also love some of the more obscure stuff, like Mirror Mask, a live action film with some 3D elements, which I thought was very exciting and refreshing. And of course I absolutely love Coraline which was so wonderful and inspiring. I also liked the The Curse of the Were-Rabbit - so much fun!


As you can see, is really hard to nail it down to just one film!

Guest Blogger Raquel Rabbit

How and When Do You Clean Up Animation?

In traditional hand-drawn animation, the "clean-up" phase (usually done by someone called a clean-up artist), is when the rough keys, breakdowns, and in-betweens are "cleaned up" into nice, smooth solid lines and forms. In a sense, the clean-up artist is tracing the animator's
often rough drawings, but it's more than just tracing.

Even if you've never done traditional animation yourself, you've probably seen what rough pencil keys/breakdowns look like. Depending on the animator, they can be somewhat precise or thick, bold lines more concerned about movement than perfectly drawn body parts. Glen Keane, unarguably one of the best animators of all time, often has particularly "messy" breakdowns, but they are always very powerful, and clearly illustrate the pose, force, and movement in the body.

This is all a good clean-up artist needs to turn those rough drawings into the finished drawing we will see on the screen, but this is no easy task! The clean-up artist has to make sure the final line they are choosing is keeping the character on-model, is accentuating the proper facial expressions, is keeping things on nice organic arcs, etc. They work closely with the animator to ensure that the final product is what the animator envisioned, but it is truly a team effort, and the art of clean-up work is truly an art all on its own.

The best clean-up artist can take mediocre rough animation and make it look pretty darn nice, while a poor clean-up artist can ruin even the greatest animator's pencil roughs.

So, in traditional animation, the clean-up stage is incredibly important. But what about in CG?

At the vast majority of studios, animation is less compartmentalized for computer animation than it is for traditional animation. Whereas hand-drawn animation often would have an animator doing the keys and breakdowns, an in-betweener doing the in-betweens, and a clean-up artist polishing it all up, we usually wear all of these hats at once as a CG animator.

For us, the "clean-up" phase of the animation is pretty much exactly what the clean-up artist would be looking to accomplish in hand-drawn work. Once our animation is to the point where the timing is solid, the body mechanics are all working, the weight and balance is correct, the emotion is clear, the story points and character intentions are clear, and all of these things are nailed down, it's time to dive into our clean-up phase.

For me, the clean-up phase can actually be the most fun part, because it really can become a big puzzle to try to wrap your brain around. The biggest thing for me during this phase is to work on my arcs. In theory, my arcs should all be pretty close to working already (if I've done my planning and blocked my scene in correctly), but I almost always have some little arcs to fix or add, or find ways to make various arcs work better together (such as the arc the tip of a sword follows, and making sure that feels driven by AND interconnected to the arc the wrist is traveling along, which in turn should be related to the arc the elbow follows).

So, clean-up can be anything you do during the polishing phase. It's making sure the tip of the nose is on a subtle arc, or making sure all your face shapes are working together in a way to feel like one cohesive face rather than a ton of disconnected shapes. It's finding and fixing problems in your graph editor, or offsetting the weight just a tiny bit more to help your character feel that much heavier. It's fingers and toes and getting that nice whip action to look perfect on the character's tail.

Basically, in CG, people tend to refer to the "clean-up" phase as the time when you polish up all the little rough edges of your animation into a gem that truly shines. I can't stress enough that in my opinion, it's this attention to detail where you add that last 10-20% into your work that will really set it apart and help it stand out to recruiters and audiences.

Planning is a blast, because you get to brainstorm dozens of ideas and really work out the performance. Blocking is fun because you get to see those ideas finally come to life. But sometimes it's the clean-up or "polish" phase that can be the most rewarding, because all those little, tiny things you add can come together to take the animation to a whole new level, and even though an audience might not notice many of these little tweaks and overlaps and perfected arcs, they will FEEL them, and enjoy your work all that much more.

Hope that answers your question - Thanks for coming by the blog!

Shawn :)

Guest Blogger Shawn Kelly

Where’s the Best Place to Get Your Reference Footage From?

I spend a lot of time watching people. It's free and relatively safe if you're good at it. Once, I was sitting on a bus trying to read a book. Directly in front of me sat a couple who couldn't keep their lips off each other. I was getting a little annoyed when my eyes suddenly caught a man standing in the aisle giving the loving couple a huge dose of “stink eye.” It was gold. For the remainder of the trip, I watched this sour old man and played with different back stories and scenarios that led him to be this put-off by a couple of young lovers.

Local theatre is also good reference. Watching live actors is incredibly inspiring. You see what works and what doesn't, and you also see why. Movies are good, but there is so much care put into them that it's not always as rewarding as live theatre. Movies lack a certain energy and transparency that makes live theatre such a valuable reference.

Guest Blogger Mark Pullyblank