John Kahrs Spline Cast - Polish
This may be the first interview I did. Its with animator John Kahrs. John Worked here from 1997 to 2007. He was nominated for 2 annie awards for his work on Monsters and Incredibles. His work on the films was always among the best. It had a great sense of weight, physicality and a high level of polish. I thought it would be good to interview him to help with teaching and just to talk to him about his process. John recently left Pixar and is now working at Disney Feature Animation.
Enjoy. Again, sorry for the lack of sound quality.
It was recorded directly onto an ipod
Download: John Kahrs Spline Cast
Anonymous
He seemed pretty hesitant to give away his technique, but it sounds like he uses typical layering, starting with the root, refining the motion until its complete, then moving onto something else. Even though I saw pete doctor do it this way on the dvd extra with woody getting from under the bed, I still cannot for the life of me understand how u can get strong personality from the character by working in such a systematic way. If the motion ultimately isnt what the director wants, doesn’t it mean u have to start from scratch? it seems pretty risky, and u must know how to read the graph editor PERFECTLY in order to get the best results from layering. His analogy of the flashlight moving in the dark was pretty neat though. Thanks Adam. Even if they don’t like to share it, please continue pushing the “whats your secret?” approach to interviewing animators, it really does help!!
Anonymous
sorry, I meant Andrew!
magnus
Thanks Andrew, this is awesome!!!
Andy Conroy
Great post! I am inspired!
Anonymous
So freaking awesome, thanks a bunch, Andrew! perfect timing!
Cat Hicks
Hi Andrew,
My name is Cat and I am a student at Ringling. I know I’ve never commented on the SD blog before but I’ve been a long time subscriber and an avid student of the material you graciously supply us with. Anyway, this post came just at the right time for me, as I have currently just broken the blocking phase of my latest animation! John’s thoughts on reading the motion through the bulk of the body first are great! I love the analogy of the light bulb in the dark. I have polished by isolate selecting the torso before but had always included the legs. It’s amazing to hear and realize that not even those are needed. Anyway, THANK YOU for deciding to post this! Great timing.
-Cat
Robb
Wow, until you said that, Cat, I hadn’t realized that that was what he meant!! I assumed he was talking about the same isolate body/legs technique that we’re seen around here before!! But it literally is just a moving box!! This really does help to “untangle” the knot of my animation a bit more!!
Great interview and the persistence in questioning really pulled out some cool stuff. Thanks x 1000000 for sharing!!
X O X O X O X O
Robb
Nate Lane
great stuff! thank you so much! would love to hear anything you got regardless of quality
Olivier Ladeuix
thanks for posting this Andrew. At the end of the day the interview matters more than the quality of the sound. I can’t believe you have been holding onto this for 3 years!!!
Don’t worry about the quality. Here it is fine. We can still hear what John says.
Once again you did a great job as interviewer.
Is the podcast stopping in 26:14 though? the sound is fading on “they just kind of feel it” then it is silent till 31:34
Could you do a recap on all those great scenes you and John were talking about?
Olive
Dr. Gordon
Thanks for the kind comment Olivier and everyone else. The Interview does keep going on, but I had to cut it off due to some information that was not pertinent to the interview. Sorry there is no lead out, I will add something and update it. Again thanks to John Kahrs for letting me post the interview.
-Andrew
RD Sarna
Thanx for another great SplineCast!
Learnt alot from it.
Bobby Pontillas
I love hearing great animators speaking about the work they admire from other great animators.
Thanks for the posting.
Rob
Andrew -
Don’t apologize for the audio quality. This interview is GOLD. Thank you so much for this one. I’ve listened to it six times already, and I’m still picking up new things from it!
mella
Good interview!
Vince Gorman
Great intereview, Polishing seems to be an ellusive thing to me. I remember seeing Kahrs on the ‘incredibles’ DVD and thought he seemed quite skilled. Anyway, I have a question, when he was talking about refining the torso without arms/legs, is he just doing this after blocking. So, he is starting out pose to pose on the whole body while blocking,? and then refining from the inside out. Thanks again for the great interview.
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k. borcz
well it’s downloading….and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it! What’s the whole “Polish” thingy? Maybe I’ll get it when I listen to the audio. Thanks for posting it.
Mike York
This spline cast was AWESOME! Thank you so much for sharing this.
Rick
For a second, I thought this podcast was about Poland.
Larry V
New to the site, per the recent article on CGSociety w/ Andrew, and I’m really enjoying the interviews. Thanks so much!
Graham Ross
Would you guys mind doing a post on polish?
Leander Schock
Hey! I really love your podcasts, please keep them coming. Especially this one had very interesting stuff, I especially liked the idea of looking at the torso without arms and legs - great idea.
Question:
How much poses or animations do you recycle between each other or from one shot to the next?
Do you share a hand-pose or facial-pose library for each character or generic walk and run cycles) and then build on these, or do you start everything totally from scratch?
Elliott
Oh snap!!!I thought i was hardcore but John and Doug are deep!!!! I want to get like that with a shot…tweaking things that nobody will even see….the day i get that passionate…i know im on my way!!!
E