What Spline Do You Use?

In the next couple of posts I am going to talk to some animators and ask them how they block a shot. One of the big questions is what kind of method is used to block in work. How do your poses transition from one to the next? Do you do a pose test where the computer does not interpolate  the in-betweens? This would be called held or step key transition splines.  I have seen every type but I thought it would be interesting to take a bit of a random survey. In the next days we shall see the result from you and then talk to animators at Pixar.. In the comments section I would love to see answers from people out there in the world. If you could answer in the following order:

Industry: (ie Games, Features, FX, TV, 2-d, Motion graphics etc… You can even mention the name of the place if you want)

Years in Biz ( Student, 0 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 plus, old timer)

Blocking Type: ( held knot, Spline, Linear, Combination, layered etc..)

The object of this survey is to see how people work and how it relates to how long you have been working as well as what you are working on. Feel free to add any thing else in the comments .

Thanks,

Andrew

New Doc!

KC Roeyer is joining the ranks of Spline Doctors. Kc was a student of mine over 5 years ago at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. He was in the Pixar internship. After he headed down to Disney to work on Bolt among other projects. KC is now part of a group of former academy students that have started up the program there again. I look forward to reading some of his posts. We may have another doctor joining us as soon as he is ready…hint hint…

Animation in Brazil!

I had the great opportunity to teach a class for the first time in South America! It was a grueling trip to get down there (26 hours door to door getting there and 39 hours back (dont ever use wholesale flights.com!) I taught two days but the experience was one of the most rewarding things I have been a part of. Brazilian animators are craving knowledge. There is so much life down there!  Like much of the world, animation education is not easy to come by in South America and not many can afford to be a part of online schools. This was an opportunity that came to me 2 or 3 years ago when a small school in the middle of the amazon asked if I would skype in for a lecture. Its amazing to see what is going on. So many people are passionate about animation there. The class was held at the University of Fortaleza. A wonderful college with a great media program. I want to thank Claudio and his wife Rachel for putting this together. They run a small great school in Fortaleza called art&cia. Anyway, I had a great time and I hope the students did as well.

Character Development

Its been a while since I posted. I wanted to talk a bit about character development in terms of a feature. When you get on a film early, part of the process is to work with the riggers and make notes on models. Much of this is testing out how it moves and things like how the crease of an elbow looks. For me one of the more interesting parts is defining and exploring character. How do you get going? I find a good place to start is Reference. Fish, Superheros, Monsters, Rats, Car etc… They all have things we can study. For Finding Nemo, one of the more interesting things was learning to Dive. Ok, it didnt really help me animate my shot better, but it did allow me to have fun and relate it back to the work. We learn alot from experts in particular fields of study…. fish people, locomotion experts, race car drivers, etc…  He told us about reef fish that row, and some that were flapping fish. This small detail helped us make the characters physical and move differently. We had a fish tank that we referenced with many types of fish. All that helped. Visits to the Aquarium provided such a huge reference point for us. Once the reference was done we first tried just animating a fish. Some of the things we learned from that were what made a fish feel like they were in water. Fish have no slippage for instance… They carve through the water.  We noticed things like the surge and swell of the current affected the realism. Small details like that really brought it to the next level. What I really am trying to say is that understanding how to take aspects of the real world and put it into the work and to what degree is key. We noticed that we had to push the movements of the fish a bit and put a bit of squash and stretch into the body to make the characters feel fleshy. There were so many things I learned on Nemo, the most important being that if you are having fun at what you are doing, the work is more inspired. Also, working with a team, everyone pushes each other to the next level. As students, its so important to talk to the guy or girl next ot you.

-Andrew

Planning

Tom Gately Shows Anim Interns a Strong Pose

The nine old men would say “spend half your time planning and the other half animating. While this idea is hard to uphold, the basic idea is true. Going into a shot blind is like not studying for a test or stretching before a race. Clear planning, forces you to really think about what is important in the shot. Every time I animate straight ahead, I fall flat on my face and waste a lot of time figuring out what I set out to do in the first place. It really must become part of your routine. It is so important because it creates a foundation, something you can fall back on. I was always amazed at the planning that Doug Sweetland went though before he animated. He drew so many different ways of doing the same thing through thumbnails. Then he went off to record himself. Most people do video reference these days. It’s no big secret. The hardest part is to not rely on it to closely. You want to use the best parts. Another thing I have seen animators do is to write down what the shot means to them in a sentence… Where is the beat change? What is the most important thing in the shot? You always want to be asking these questions. If I have a character sitting in a room and the point of the shot is for them to be upset, I want to create a back story as to why. Maybe he is lost, maybe his his heart has been stepped on. How do I relate that to something I experienced?  What is the deeper meaning? If you animate simply the cliche of upset, there is not heart or pathos. Dig down deep and pull out something personal and it will show up on the screen…. Follow a ritual of solid planning and you will add a new layer of complexity to your work.

-Andrew