Fuzzy Timing

There are shelves of books concerning Animation theory and technique available, and reading them allows an individual to benefit from the experience of others, standing on the shoulders of giants to increase our own grasp of the craft. Ultimately, however, the actual craft of Animation is something that can only be appreciated through application and labour. Every piece of work is unique and there are always personal discoveries to be made. While somewhat laborious to recount, (please forgive the long-winded post), I made an interesting observation recently that got me all Animation-dorky/excited. Let's call it fuzzy timing - it will make it sound very important, but really I just made that up. (Copyright Shorey!)

A little while back I was working on a shot with Astrid as the main focus. It was a great chance for me to observe, analyse and attempt to incorporate small gender-specific details in to the performance. I didn't want it to be over the top or obvious, (it's really easy to do), instead favouring a natural female feel to reinforce the main acting beats. I decided to have the character unconsciously flicking her head to clear her hair from her face in between the lines of dialogue. I've seen this little gesture from lots of people with long hair and bangs. As an aside, it is my observation that people with finer hair will head-flick if they can, but those with coarser, heavier hair have to use their fingers to accomplish the same thing - heavier hair needs help to get it of the way. Most of the time people don't even know that they are doing this. Interesting thing #1.

(password: education)

As I said, I wanted the flick to be its own thing, and not a gesture tied to the dialogue, for which I had already made other choices. The line is, "He flew away the second he was unleashed!". Acting it out, the most natural place would be before or after the delivery but as you can see I didn't have that option, with a tight edit at head and tail.

I blocked in the hair flick along with the rest of the acting and showed it to friends. They liked it, but thought that the move was an accent to the dialogue, rather than its own little thing. Ack! I played around with the flick timing for a good while, finally admitting that I would be unable to truly separate the ideas given the constraints of the edit. The gesture stands, as you can see, and it still works, but it means something slightly different to my original intent. Balls.

So why the different interpretation? I had a long conversation with my pal Mark, and we came up with a couple of conclusions - interesting thing #2: the types of sounds within the dialogue were making it harder for me rather than just the fact that it was dialogue. 

Check out this audio breakdown:

"THE-SEH" and "EESH" are examples of long, soft sounds with fuzzy™ ins and outs - I would have to give them more frames around their occurrence to separate the hair flick gesture than I would with harder, more staccato sounds. The fact that this dialogue happens to contain lots of the fuzzy stuff made their influence across the dialogue all the more pervasive.

Another observation that Mark made is that the acting performance required for the shot has a level of energy and tension that makes it harder for the head flick to stand out with its own intent. For example, if this were a less energetic shot then a head flick would maybe stand out regardless of where it sat in regards to the dialogue. There we could use contrast in energy to our advantage.

Due to my being a huge dork I found this stuff fascinating. I am not sure if anyone else will appreciate the technicalities of such a minor discovery, but it certainly made me more jazzed to discover this, and the reasons behind it. Even if I didn't succeed 100% in my intent, at least the shot looked OK in the end.

Thanks for bearing with me. If you finished this super dorky post I award you 1 gold star.

December 2011 Animation Reel

Hope you like!

Rani's Animtips

Rani's tips are also a bit long for the Twitter format to do them any justice, so here they are!

1# Put on your editor hat before you start animating

Look at the WHOLE sequence and see how your shot fits in, the timing/pacing of your shot and acting choices will all be influenced by what shots come before and after yours. A shot might not be funny by itself, but the same shot put in context can be hilarious.

2# Be Original in every way

With your posing, facial expressions, hand shapes, acting choices. If you're a beginner, do the basics / clichés... Get them out of your system first. This Quote from "Save the Cat" explains why: "True originality can't begin until you know what you're breaking away from.". So practice, practice, practice!

3# Don't be Afraid!

If you're building a house of cards, the more time you invest, the more protective you are  because you don't want the whole thing to topple over. When switching from step to spline, we tend to feel the same way. Fortunately, there is an antidote, it's called "save scene" Ta-da!! We forget that working on the computer is non-destructive, so both our work-flow and approach become so conservative that we end up missing opportunities where the animation could've shined. When this happens, I find the best thing to do is to save you scene, give yourself 30 minutes and just "get in there" and be brave with your curves. If it doesn't work out for you after a while, just reopen your saved scene and start again, VIOLA!

4# Don't Act the Emotion

When filming reference, It's common for us to "act sad" or force ourselves to feel a certain way....that almost never works. The trick is to "think" about something sad until you actually feel sad. Feeling is a by-product of your thoughts, so trigger your mind first.

#5 If YOU don't feel it, THEY won't

When do you know your reference/take works? When it evokes are reaction from you. if you look at it and chuckle, then there's a high chance it's funny. If, on the other hand, you look at it and assume its funny... why would anyone else laugh if you didn't!

Bryce's Animtip

Bryce sent me his Animtip to put on Twitter, but it's such a good one that I couldn't do it justice if I shortened the text to fit the 140 character format. Here it is, presented in its entirety:

Always remember that all this stuff used to be hand drawn.

When blocking, ask yourself if you'd be able to hand this off to someone else to finish?  Is it clear enough?  Are all of the key poses (drawings) the best in the scene? In case the person you hand it off to can't draw as well, or perhaps understand the intent as well, will your poses save the scene?

Is your timing tight enough?  If two frames are really similar to one another, and not telling us anything then why draw both of them?  You'd probably only want to draw one and use the other one to tell us something else - something more interesting.  You'll give yourself more time and space to sweeten other moments if you take all the unnecessary drawings out. If you wouldn't want to draw it, then it shouldnt be in your scene!

-Bryce McGovern

So good!

Merry Madagascar Reel Writeup

Of course it's taken me ages to begin writing this post. I put the video up and then sat back, basking in the warm sense of accomplishment. Time ticks by and I still haven't done it! Oh well. Here goes.

I don't know how interesting this is going to be, but I wanted to write a little about my process when it came to creating this work. The Merry Mad short was made for TV, but with Feature assets and crew, to a Feature level of quality! This really comes across in the final product.

For my own part I was given work in two sequences: in one the zoosters run in to the lemurs, who are then "attacked" by the Red Night Goblin (Father Christmas), and in the other the animals set off a house alarm trying to deliver Christmas presents. As you can see from the reel below, my shot range was wide, running the gamut from purely physical, to physical acting, to a few pure acting moments. This is good!

The shot that took me the longest time was that of Julian barrelling his subjects out of the way as he scrambles up the beach. I always felt that the shot was too short and very busy but the action and camera was pre-determined, as was the cut length. It is hard to register Julian's impacts with four lemurs in two seconds, but I did the best I could to track Julian's head through the shot, cheating it in screen space in order to improve the read. There is no computer inbetweening here - every single frame and pose is critical to the read, and thus is hand keyed.

A quick aside, if you compare Madagascar to Mad 2 (and Merry Mad), discerning viewers will notice a slight difference in the look and feel between the pictures. This is due to the amount of motion blur. Mad 1 featured very little blur, whereas subsequent Mad projects had what I consider to be a more "normal" CG feature approach to the technique. Both have their pros and cons. To me Mad 1 looks unique for that reason, being more like a traditional cartoon. It is great to being able to showcase fast motion. The downside being that it's harder on the eye, and will quickly wear the audience out! Softer blur fixes this, but you tend to lose detail in blur....

...which is exactly what happened in this shot. I have multiple Julians in this shot so that I can have arms and legs in different crazy places in the same frame, but unfortunately they are lost in the motion blur. Thinking further down the line in the production process is something I should have been more conscious of!

Julian makes it back to his lemur front lines and begins to direct the "battle" from the safety of his trench. His giving orders quickly put me in mind of Lord Horatio Nelson and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, two of Britain's most famous military commanders. Both have paintings commissioned featuring their hand (or empty sleeve) stuck into the front of their uniforms.

I don't know if that was the thing to do back then, but that was the pose I wanted for Julian. Obviously I over-thought this way too much, and yes, I did get made fun when pitching it in Dailies, but it's a fun idea and made it in to the short! (I still get called Lord Shorey on occasion because of this). Julian picking a lemur up by the head and shaking him was also a me-original. Though it made the shot harder, it is more fun! Bringing something unique to the work and improving on the already excellent story boards and layout is always a great feeling.

You know when you watch those making-of's on film DVD's where superstar people showcase their amazing work having put in seemingly no effort? That's not me, and I envy those guys for my reality is very different. I am very attached to the work and the ups and downs that manifest themselves over the life of a shot. You can refer to the DVD's for the ups. Let's talk about a down - the shot that had me so frustrated it made me get all toddler over it.

Oh Gloria. Why did you have to run on ice around a corner at top speed whilst shouting? You don't make it easy for me, do you? I could not get that cornering right for the longest time. The physics is tough in itself, but the shot is also fast-paced and I was struggling to get her shape working. It put me in a foul mood, and I ended up wailing, "I can't do it!", at my cubemate Lou late one night. He sat down with me and on paper had me break down the physics of the body first then add in the limbs, coming up with the key pose, mid-action. Back on the computer I removed what I had, putting the new move in, and while rough, it totally worked. In five minutes we had solved it. I must admit to feeling like a bit of tit for all of the swearing and hyperventilating, but it's amazing what a mate and some composure will do for you when you're stuck. So not like the DVD's then.

I think these are good representatives of my work on the show, all of which you can see here - all 38 seconds of it! If anyone still reading this has any further questions about the work I will try my best to answer on this blog - and before 2018.

Looking back on this work, my response runs from 'Good' to 'Meh' as each shot plays through. Nearly three years on I am a different animator than I was back then, and hopefully a better one! With the benefit of subsequent experience and the distance that comes with time the successes and flaws are readily apparent to me, as I'm sure they are to you. Still, it's good to look back and remember my thought process and how it influenced my approach at at that time.

Thanks for reading.
-Lord Shorey

Merry Madagascar Reel

Sometimes it becomes tough to write an Animation blog and not have much footage to show. I write at great length regarding fairly involved stuff, without much for the readership to see. Clearly there is very little of my work easily available to discuss, all of which is under copyright restrictions. This post changes all that. The studio kindly granted me approval to post my work from "Merry Madagascar". This is a big deal, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to display studio work on my personal blog space.

If you can't see this directly, here is the LINK TO VIMEO
The password is "education". I welcome questions about the work, so that I have more to write about!






 

Twitter Question: Reels

Adam sent me a question via Twitter:

How do you decide on and what makes a good acting sequence for a demo reel, and what are the big no-no's?

I'm guessing that since we're talking  about "acting" and "sequence" our pal Adam has something specific in mind - a piece of a short film or possibly a series of contiguous shots from a larger body of work. We'll get to that, but first a word about the reels themselves: reels should always feature your best work. Be proud of this thing that you are sending out, and if you're not absolutely sure that a particular shot is selling your skill in the best light, then put it aside. A short, great reel is better than both a longer, average one, and also a short one with lots of greats shots and a few glaring sub-standard ones. Your excellence per shot has got to be maintained across the reel. I refer you to my previous post on "A Good Reel" as a starting point for this topic.

While that post covers the majority of considerations for reel selects, we can still talk a little bit about Adam's question specifically, since it brings up a few points that might be handy to know.

A good candidate acting sequence for a reel should feature a range of emotion. It doesn't need to be super flashy, but in-character and compelling to watch. Something with high highs and subtle lows would be great. You can always show single beat shots of both to exemplify your acting range.

To get even more fancy, a physical acting sequence would really bring all of the Animation principals together. In my opinion it is the hardest type of work to deliver, with important acting beats sitting on top of believable physical animation.

Let's take a quick looky at Adam's "big no-no's". I don't really believe that any content is inadmissible in any general way, but personally I would omit any shots that are S-L-O-W.... If you have a 1200 frame shot with the first 800 frames being a fade-in on not-very-much, then why not cut in at the point where the action happens? Don't be afraid of shortening shots to highlight work and keep the overall tempo of the reel up. That will make those busy people who have to review your work positive, attentive and invested. That's the name of the game, after all!

Welcome to the United States

Six years in the making, and the Green Card I've been waiting for arrived in the mail. It's a huge relief as the wait has felt interminable. It certainly counts as a significant career event, and has a huge impact for this "alien" living in the US. In short, this change in status allows employment flexibility, (not that I need it), and more importantly to me, the ability to freely travel internationally. I have all of the day-to-day benefits awarded a US citizen, having been judged by the Immigration Service to be a person of some lasting value to my employer, and worth keeping around. Result!

People focus on securing a job in a US Animation studio, but you read very little about residency in the long term and the everyday impact of being a foreigner. Work visas are OK for the first year or two, but as you spend more time in the US their limitations become apparent. Friends on O1 visas have to renew their California Drivers Licenses annually, and these are now tied immigration status.

There are two main application tracks - through marriage to an American citizen and through employment through company sponsorship. I undertook the latter route, which will be the focus of this post.

Practically everyone will arrive on a work visa, (usually H1-B or O1) with a fixed expiration date and during that time the decision will have to be made about jumping into the Green Card application process. The first hurdle is having your employer approve the sponsorship process. Many small and medium sized shops simply won't have the resources or bandwidth in HR to accommodate such an undertaking. Even the large studios may not wish to sponsor employees if they crew up with short-term contract hires, giving the extended application time frame. I am extremely fortunate to work for a company with means that hires for the long term, and sees the value in permanent residency for its employees.

There are three employment based routes to a Green Card - EB1, EB2 and EB3.

A quick note about the particulars of the process. There are three main parts for EB3 (EB1 and EB2 skip the first part, I think) - labour certification, work authorisation and finally adjustment of status. LC is the process of proving that there are no qualified US workers for the position being offered. WA provides its holder a legal right to work in the US, and involves some medical and background checks. Finally AOS seals the deal and grants permanent residency.

People who meet EB1 requirements are exemplary in their field, with international recognition or awards. It is possible for Animators to win Emmys or Annie Awards or have tons of supporting documentation and thus be eligible. There is no queue for application through EB1, and applicants can possibly obtain a Green Card in under six months!
EB2 requires higher education requirements such as Masters degrees or Doctorates. The twist is that the job description must require such qualifications, rather than individual achievements. As an example, I have a Masters in Animation but my job does not require such postgraduate study, for it is quite conceivable that another person with no formal Animation training but masses of natural talent could do the job just as well or better than me. This track is probably better suited to technical roles, but at present there is no wait time for EB2 either.
If you work in the US and have a sponsor but can't meet the strict requirements for 1 and 2, you will end up in EB3. It is in this track that long processing times stretch out the application for years - a result of annual quotas and a huge queue. The one upside to EB3 is that if you're gainfully employed for the duration of the application the chance of being approved is high. It just takes a loooong time.

The protracted time frames involved can make it difficult for many in our line of work. The modern professional animator is a migratory creature, rarely staying 5 years+ at a single studio before moving on to new opportunities, either for advancement or at contracts end. The Green Card application can be moved between sponsors, but that would certainly be an added complication to any job application. One more thing about transferring sponsorship. EB3 labour certification is location based. A successful application in LA cannot be transferred to New York or San Francisco, for it is tied to the labour market for that region. If you move cities, you will need to start again. Grrr! Now you can see why this is an arduous route for Animators!

For me, going through the trials of the application process was certainly a worthwhile one, since I knew that I wanted to continue to learn my craft at the studio that first invested in me. Now I can concentrate solely on Animation stuff without this hanging over my head.

I hope that this is useful for those thinking about such a long term move. It is a challenge. Good luck!

A Good Reel

Via Twitter, Kimberlee asked:

"Any tips on what should be on a character animation reel?"

It would be a simple task to answer this common question with a smugly facile answer - one ultimately not really that helpful at all. I will do my best to avoid that, and think it would be best to take a look at the overall situation before talking about the specifics of reel creation.

On the applicant's end this person wants to be considered for a character animation position at a company. They have some or no industry experience or higher education qualifications and want money in return for moving characters around a bit. This is a good time, and, as a result, these fun jobs are in high demand with other people also wanting that money for moving characters around a bit. Our one applicant will have to stand apart from the others applying and impress those assessing our applicant's suitability for any open positions. We will also assume that our applicant doesn't have any friends/contacts already at the company, to whom they can submit stuff.

I don't have a ton of experience in the recruiting side of things, but I will assume a probable scenario on the studio end in how applicants are spotted and ultimately brought in. I am also assuming we are talking about one of the larger studios in Feature Animation or Visual Effects, though I expect it's the same for most companies out there looking to hire animators.

A studio is full of very clever people, some of whom whose job it is to find excellent candidates for open slots based on the needs of production. Applicants send in reels and CV's/resumes which are looked at by these Recruiting peeps. This is the first test a reel has to pass. Many are weeded out at this stage for there are lots of applicants.

The possibles are passed on to the Anim department for review by those high up in the chain of command. They are usually super busy which full schedules and maybe fiery swords of power. The recruiters have made their lives easier because they now don't have to see so many reels - the possibles. The sword-wielders will closely examine each submission, discuss the work and ultimately make the decision to interview or pass. I believe some places may also have a watch list, going so far as to keep an eye on candidates with potential that aren't there yet.

At this point let's recap. SpiffyA has an animation reel and wants a job. StudioB needs to hire but is very busy; has people whose job it is to separate the possibles from the rest before passing them laterally to the creative and production superiors who are the decision makers.

Content

What can SpiffyA do to ensure the best possible chance of making it through the process? Now that we have our context, this is where we actually try to help answer Kimberlee's question.

I would imagine that a reel of content coming in cold has probably 60 seconds to impress, and with maybe another 60 seconds to seal the deal if you're doing well and those watching like the first 60s. The animation has to stand out so putting best work on first is a must. Being honest and brutal with your own work will allow you to judiciously place stuff in the timeline for maximum effect. Hit hard with your faves, keep the quality up whilst demonstrating acting and physical animation ability and then end on a high note. The reel is better being short and sweet than longer with work you are unsure of.

Think about the intended reactions to your work - you want to direct them as well as you can. I would think that "Wow", followed by, "Great" followed by, "This person is consistent and multi-talented!" is probably the ideal over a 1-2 minute reel.

The work needs to be finished animation, but the rigs or models don't necessarily need to be high quality polished examples of computer graphics or its traditional analogues. Good work shines regardless.

While it is always important to be original and unique your work, these days it is doubly so (if that is possible) because many people use standard rigs like those given out by AM. Stand out from the rest and hammer through rig fatigue with tip-top animation!

Regarding Presentation

For the material, keep it simple. A clean title frame with name, phone number and email should bookend the animation.

I would expect that most reels are still reviewed via physical media, most notably DVDs. Keeping things as simple as possible will allow the disk to be played easily at the studio end. Before submission check that the DVD works on a number of stand alone players and computers, since authoring disks is still a somewhat unreliable task.

If I were submitting work now, I would also post a copy of the reel online on something like vimeo or youTube and include a link in the DVD case. If the disk fails to play then it is a good fall-back option for those about to review the work. Candidates can help the process by being prepared!

Designing nice cover art for physical media is always fun, and shows you put effort in to the submission, but I wouldn't say it is a necessity. Again, simple and clean is fine - it is the work that is the important thing.

CV's/Resumes should be similarly clear and easy to read. This is a separate skill to that of the animation stuff so I won't go in to it here. Don't forget to put your nationality (and visa status, if applicable) on it when applying internationally. Immigration stuff is a big issue and I would imagine that knowing as much as possible early on is a good idea.

___

Phew! This is a very long-winded answer to a one sentence question, but I believe that giving the process some context will help make things more successful for everyone. In my imagined scenario SpiffyA did all of the above and went off in to the sunset hand-in-hand with StudioB. Probably doing a double bounce walk or something. I hope this helps.