Sometimes it’s hard doing the same shot for the ‘Nth time, but you’ve got to reach inside yourself and make it exciting or at least interesting every time, otherwise the performance will die. It’s fine to be proud of your work, and every animator should be, but it’s also important to keep in mind the vision of the director, who is ultimately responsible for the final shot, and their interpretation of the character’s motivations.

 Q: On the flipside of that question, what would be some of the key advice you have received in your career which helped get you to the point you are at today?

            One thing I learned early on which has helped me immensely is to keep an open mind about a performance or shot, because there are as many ways to do a shot as there are animators, and even though your performance may be excellent, if its not what the director wants you have to be able to pull out an equally excellent, yet different performance. So when the director says “Why don’t you try it like this?” I’ll go ahead and try it because it may be a great idea, but I’ll never know unless I get over my preconceptions and really give it my best shot. That was something that has really helped me throughout my career.

Q. I’d like to discuss your animation process. When you set out to animate a shot, what are the steps you take to bring your character to life? What do you do in order to get the best possible performance?

            As I mentioned before, you can’t look at enough reference. It’s really crucial. So I often will spend an afternoon when I’m starting a job just watching all the reference in the online library over and over. If there is a lot of acting involved I will act out the scene in the mirror, or videotape myself acting it if I want to keep a version online for further reference. Then I usually will do what we call the choreo pass, which is really basic blocking and timing. Once the director and/or/client has signed off on the choreo, I’ll start refining, usually with pose-to-pose, and then start offsetting curves and doing more straight-ahead as the scene progresses. When I get to that point I always work from the center of gravity out, animating the base first, then spine, neck, legs, arms, fingers etc. and using my initial poses somewhat as templates, offsetting pose key frames and overlapping actions. When the director has signed off on the general animation, I usually go through a couple of cleanup passes for any detail work, and then send it off to our technical animation department, where dynamics, cloth and similar simulator effects are handled. There is often some back-and-forth as simulations are adjusted for the final render, and I sometimes do one more “beauty pass” on it to adjust for any visual changes the sim may have wrought. Once it’s in the lighting pipeline we are usually done, but there may be deform or sim issues that are only brought to light in the rendering pass that we will again have to go back and fix. When the client signs off on the final rendered shot is when we are really done with animation.

 Q: Often a character is required to not just be animated properly but to actually ‘act’. What advice do you have to make your character act or show emotion?

            Yes, IMHO of course acting is probably one of the single most important skills for an animator. Timing, weight, phrasing are all important, but they all go into acting. The animator that takes some acting classes will be ahead of the game, since animators really are actors inside the computer or on paper. A lot of good animators I know also do improv or some type of theatre. The animator’s ability to understand and emote with the character’s (and moment’s) motivation is key to the performance. I try to use a sort of method style where I’m relating to a similar circumstance or event in my life to reach inside the character’s situation. I will also watch a movie or show if I know there was a similar situation portrayed to see how the emotion plays out on the actor’s face. Anything I can do to better understand the character will help my animation in the long run

Q: When you are getting close to wrapping up a shot, there is always a bit of polishing that goes on. Do you have any advice that you can give or ‘polishing’ tips?

            Well, on Aslan we had a lot of polishing to do because of the high level of realism we were striving for. So while a lot of stuff like the mane and some intramuscular stuff was taken care of by simulations, we still had to animate a ton of tiny controls(especially in the facial rig) to achieve that level of realism. While most aren’t polishing that type of hyper-real work on a character, things we looked out for were: good toe-spread on each step, extremely accurate weight shifts, a balance of separation of the hips from the shoulders (which helped the sense of mass and weight), a lot of nuance around the eyes, especially with relation to the cheeks and brows, muscle and tensor firing, and correct footfalls amongst many other things.

Q: Animators are often known to study various films, television shows or other animations for inspiration. Do you have favorites you’d like to share?

            I grew up on Warner Bros. cartoons, Anime and Sci-fi movies, so those are some of my big influences. I also love foreign films, although I don’t see enough of them, but they usually give me a fresh perspective on the world which is always good.  Here are some favorite films and shows from my life in no particular order…

2001 - Stanley Kubrick
Cafe Au Lait - Mathieu Kassovitz
Snatch - Guy Ritchie
Science Ninja Team Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets - Tatsunoko
Groundhog Day - Harold Ramis
Baraka - Ron Fricke
Bladerunner - Ridley Scott
Raising Arizona - Coen brothers
Cowboy Bebop - Shinichiro Watanabe
Urusei Yatsura – Rumiko Takahashi
Delicatessan - Jeunet & Caro
Rushmore - Wes Anderson
Close Encounters - Steven Spielberg
Betty Blue - Jean-Jacques Beineix
A Clockwork Orange - Stanley Kubrick
La Femme Nikita - Luc Besson
Lost In Translation - Sophia Coppola
Fight Club - David Fincher
Spirited Away - Hao Miyazaki

Q: Every Animator often learns a few lessons that they grow from. Can you provide any examples where you really grew in your career either from a lesson you learned or a revelation you had?

            I suppose the main thing for me was realizing that animation is the journey, not the destination. No matter what I’m working on I always try to find the appealing aspect of it that will allow me to lose myself in the moment of pure creation. That, for me, is what animation is all about.

 Q: One of your hobbies is writing music & DJing. Does having a musical sense translate when you are looking for ‘beats’ when you are animating a shot?

            Sure, since timing is an essential part of any animator’s arsenal, music is a natural draw. (no pun intendedJ). It’s almost a cliché how many animators I know are also musicians of some type. It’s just a right-brain kind of thing I suppose. Animating dances are always fun, although we have had a few experiences where we have animated entire sequences dancing to a particular song, but the final soundtrack has a different song with a different tempo so the film editors have to try and “fit” our animation to the new song.

Q: A large part of Strut is providing a place for Animators to showcase their works. As an Animation Supervisor you must see a ton of reels. What advice do you have to artists when constructing their reels or portfolios? >>