Welcome John, thanks so much for being our latest Featured Artist. As one of the Animation Supervisors on the upcoming film The Chronicles of Narnia, your schedule must have been quite busy recently.  Taking time to speak with me is much appreciated. Would you mind introducing yourself to the Strut members?

            Nice to be here Tim, thanks. I’m an animation supervisor at Rhythm & Hues Studios in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles. I graduated in 1995 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in Computer Animation, and came to Los Angeles to work at R&H soon after that. I’ve been at R&H for almost ten years now and have had the pleasure of working on a wide variety of projects here with some very talented people.

Q:  Lets start with your most recent film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It looks like a stunning film. What were some interesting stories you could share while working on this project?

            Thanks, Tim. I should start by saying I was only one of three animation supervisors on the show, and I’ve got to give big props to anim supes Matt Logue, Erik deBoer and of course Richie Baneham, our animation director here at R&H. They were at it for a long time and really made the animation and the team what it was.

            Anyway, my role with the show actually started back in 2003 when we were approached to do a test for Narnia when it was still in the formative stages. I get handed a lot of tests when we are bidding features because I have a fairly quick turnaround (usually ;).

            For the test, which was of the Mister Beaver character to some dialogue from another film, we only had a little over a month for everything from modeling to animation to finished light/comp. We had a small team, a modeler, a rigger, an animator, a lighter etc., which enabled us to communicate very effectively and work quickly together, and in the end it all came out rather nicely. Other studios also submitted similar tests and I’ve heard they were all outstanding as well. This was almost a full minute of photoreal linear character animation with dialogue, and all the studios did it 2K for film if I recall, so the level of detail had to be fairly realistic within our time constraints. Bill Kroyer was our animation director for that test, and he really helped bring a certain level of personality to the performance as well. Ultimately the studio liked it and we got the job.

            Once the job itself was underway, we had a whole multitude of challenges besides Aslan, including the battle sequences, the hybrid CG/human creatures, and the integration of the human actors with the CG characters. One thing that really helped us initially was the development of what we called a “Character Kit”, which was a type of scalable rigging system that could be applied to any of the 67 characters we had to animate for the film. This ensured that the controls of any creature would follow the same basic naming, layout and guidelines, minimizing the amount of time an animator would need to get used to the character and speeding up our overall workflow. Another useful tool we used was a type of “Multiple Character Interface” which would allow animators to “check in” or “check out” rigs from heavy shots with lots of characters, and would commit their latest animation to a centralized shot database and then use it to animate a low-poly stand-in or “proxy” which would replace the fully rigged character. This was especially useful in the battle sequences where many foreground characters were keyframe animated mixing with background characters generated by Massive.

Aslan had over 300 controls, more than any other creature R&H has ever done I think, and many of these were related to facial work. It was a fine line to walk preserving his leonine aspects while imbuing him with Aslan’s personality via Liam Neeson’s voice. To maintain the sense of realism we discuss in the next question, we had to animate many more facial muscles and controls than on a standard rig, so one of the main challenges was staying organized and keeping track of all the keyframes of the facial controls that interrelated to each other in terms of anticipation, follow-through, and muscle control. At first it was a somewhat daunting task, but as we worked more and more with the rig we found a rhythm in his personality that allowed some prediction as to what controls would be needed for each type of shot. Each animator here has the ability to save personalized channel sets of commonly-used controls on a per-shot basis, as well as chunks of animation they want to store for later use. If a channel set or animation chunk was deemed useful, animators were encouraged to trade them with each other or notify the supervisors to have them officially put in the central job data repository. Building up a consistent central animation library in this manner helped us standardize Aslan and the other characters’ animation and personality to a great degree.

Q: Many of the shots in the “Chronicles of Narnia” have really impressive animation on the characters. A realistic approach seems to have been necessary ; what was the animation approach you used on this film?

            Well, of course realism was the order of the day from Andrew [Adamson], so we really studied as much reference as we could get our hands on. On a job like that it’s hard to stress enough the importance of observing and learning your subject matter.  From video footage to biomechanics lessons, we got to know the physiology and behavior of lions, horses, bovines, etc. inside and out. But of course we also read and re-read the original book(s), and also studied video footage of Liam Neeson’s performance as he read the actual lines for the voice of Aslan. It is a demanding style of animation as well in that principles like mass, weight, timing, etc., have to be thoroughly believable and grounded in real-world physics, while still capable of turning in an appealing performance that’s “in character.” In fact, one of the key challenges with any team as large as ours is to bring everyone into the character’s mindset so that the performances are consistent in personality across shots and sequences, getting everyone in the team to “think together” as Aslan. 

 Q: As an Animation Supervisor at Rhythm + Hues, I would assume you are often sharing key pieces of advice. What would be some of the best advice you often find yourself sharing with your crew?

            Here are some tips I find myself giving out fairly often:

1. Work from the center of gravity down the chain
2. Keep it simple, don’t overkey if you don’t have to…but don’t let the computer animate for you either
3. Big things can move quickly and realistically if you give them enough anticipation, follow through and overlap
4. Mind your phrasing, keep things readable and don’t let it get swimmy or mushy
5. Always remember where the audience should be looking; use your line to direct their eye to the action

            And don’t get too attached to your work! : ) Seriously though, revisions happen all the time and you need to “bend with change like a reed in the wind.. >>