Monday, July 21, 2008
The Awesome Knight
Batman has changed the way I feel about filmmaking. I can't say anymore. Find yourself in a theater soon if you are able.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Times That Try, and Test Too
First an apology; I started this blog to really be an inside scoop on an animation studio, but things in this business are tenuous, complicated, and don't really allow me to show you as much as I'd like. And I've been a little lax on posting. I'll try to make up for that a little bit here with an update of everything on our plate right now.
1. We are working on a TV show for Sci-Fi Channel, creating 11 CG monsters. That project is great because it allows us to utilize a lot of the R&D we've already done on the subject of non-bipedal characters, and also because the monsters are of a huge variety which means great for the reel. It becomes difficult for a studio to rope in the kind of 'out there' creative work that you'd love to work on; first of all, it's very few and far between that awesome creatures of such total variety come around in this business, and second, because we deal with the same Catch-22 on the studio level that animators deal with in their personal careers. That is, without photoreal, non-human creatures on our reel, it's hard for us to find clients willing to award us that kind of work - so how do we get it on the reel? What ends up happening is you have to create tests.
Like I tell my students at AnimationMentor.com, testing is an immensely valuable excericise for animators. When you are the one in the seat creating the performance, everybody agrees that there is no replacement for experience. Best to start immediately creating a library of actions and motions that you can pull out of your 'bag of tricks' later. In fact, I have seen shots awarded to animators who have a similar test on their demo reels, or just whipped up in free time with the star character on the show. It's that important. Testing trumps seniority in 9/10 cases. And best of all, nobody can take it away from you. So next time you are thinking to yourself, "What would a person running for their lives look like on the moon...?" test it. Take just an hour to see where the keyframes are falling, where the problems arise, and how this motion differs in even an infant state from every other shot you've encountered. It will make you a better animator quickly.
Like I said, we have many cartoony, bipedal characters on our reel. But in order to land this client, we needed more. So we designed a test. The idea was that the client would be given a little bit of a studio tour online, and that it goes slightly awry, all shot Cloverfield style. Maybe you should just watch it:
We got the job. Now look for our work gracing next season of "Destination Truth" airing on Sci-Fi channel this fall. Luckily there was a little time to dedicate to this test, as we were finishing up a big client and had a few weeks of hiatus. This is one of the common problems of running a studio though. I find myself constantly trying to balance contributing personally on the work at hand to make it the best it can be (and also because our reputation is redefined every single project we undertake), and looking for more work for the future. The latter involves lots of time outside the studio walls, and a cash investment in what could later turn out to be just another expensive business lunch. At my studio, we have eliminated much of the beauruecracy that plagues the mid-sized studios, and have the creative and technical know-how to compete. I'm confident of that. It's the schmoozing and the contacts though that will grow a budding CG company.
2. I'm still pushing hard to produce CG features in-house, and you hopefully get a break-the-service-cycle plan in action. My two feature scripts are out in the big bad world now, and I'm talking to producers and development companies about getting them both off the ground. This can be a long process though. However, there's still a very good chance that a feature could happen (though not my own) even before end of summer. I like to remember that Walt Disney kept his animators on through the War doing propaganda films and whatnot, just to keep the team around and still working. This feature that could come in this summer that is not mine I see as a really good opportunity to hire some of my AM grads and students again, put a team together, and turn them into a crackshot group of animators, ready for a bigger project by the time one of my scripts gets produced. What a dream that would be. I'll keep updating on that.
3. The short film version of my feature story "Picked" is going ahead nicely. A rigging intern name Alan is kicking serious tail on a first-of-its-kind rig, and you will see pics and animations of that soon too. I originally wanted the short to be part of a pitch tool to get the feature made, but in all honesty, that is seeming a little superfluous now, after watching the behind the scenes workings of feature animation deals. It won't hurt, of course, and the rig that we are using is going to give us a huge edge on non-bipedal characters (see #1 above), so we're going ahead with it anyway.
Well, that's it. I'll be better about posting in the future, since a lot of these things are quickly developing.
1. We are working on a TV show for Sci-Fi Channel, creating 11 CG monsters. That project is great because it allows us to utilize a lot of the R&D we've already done on the subject of non-bipedal characters, and also because the monsters are of a huge variety which means great for the reel. It becomes difficult for a studio to rope in the kind of 'out there' creative work that you'd love to work on; first of all, it's very few and far between that awesome creatures of such total variety come around in this business, and second, because we deal with the same Catch-22 on the studio level that animators deal with in their personal careers. That is, without photoreal, non-human creatures on our reel, it's hard for us to find clients willing to award us that kind of work - so how do we get it on the reel? What ends up happening is you have to create tests.
Like I tell my students at AnimationMentor.com, testing is an immensely valuable excericise for animators. When you are the one in the seat creating the performance, everybody agrees that there is no replacement for experience. Best to start immediately creating a library of actions and motions that you can pull out of your 'bag of tricks' later. In fact, I have seen shots awarded to animators who have a similar test on their demo reels, or just whipped up in free time with the star character on the show. It's that important. Testing trumps seniority in 9/10 cases. And best of all, nobody can take it away from you. So next time you are thinking to yourself, "What would a person running for their lives look like on the moon...?" test it. Take just an hour to see where the keyframes are falling, where the problems arise, and how this motion differs in even an infant state from every other shot you've encountered. It will make you a better animator quickly.
Like I said, we have many cartoony, bipedal characters on our reel. But in order to land this client, we needed more. So we designed a test. The idea was that the client would be given a little bit of a studio tour online, and that it goes slightly awry, all shot Cloverfield style. Maybe you should just watch it:
We got the job. Now look for our work gracing next season of "Destination Truth" airing on Sci-Fi channel this fall. Luckily there was a little time to dedicate to this test, as we were finishing up a big client and had a few weeks of hiatus. This is one of the common problems of running a studio though. I find myself constantly trying to balance contributing personally on the work at hand to make it the best it can be (and also because our reputation is redefined every single project we undertake), and looking for more work for the future. The latter involves lots of time outside the studio walls, and a cash investment in what could later turn out to be just another expensive business lunch. At my studio, we have eliminated much of the beauruecracy that plagues the mid-sized studios, and have the creative and technical know-how to compete. I'm confident of that. It's the schmoozing and the contacts though that will grow a budding CG company.
2. I'm still pushing hard to produce CG features in-house, and you hopefully get a break-the-service-cycle plan in action. My two feature scripts are out in the big bad world now, and I'm talking to producers and development companies about getting them both off the ground. This can be a long process though. However, there's still a very good chance that a feature could happen (though not my own) even before end of summer. I like to remember that Walt Disney kept his animators on through the War doing propaganda films and whatnot, just to keep the team around and still working. This feature that could come in this summer that is not mine I see as a really good opportunity to hire some of my AM grads and students again, put a team together, and turn them into a crackshot group of animators, ready for a bigger project by the time one of my scripts gets produced. What a dream that would be. I'll keep updating on that.
3. The short film version of my feature story "Picked" is going ahead nicely. A rigging intern name Alan is kicking serious tail on a first-of-its-kind rig, and you will see pics and animations of that soon too. I originally wanted the short to be part of a pitch tool to get the feature made, but in all honesty, that is seeming a little superfluous now, after watching the behind the scenes workings of feature animation deals. It won't hurt, of course, and the rig that we are using is going to give us a huge edge on non-bipedal characters (see #1 above), so we're going ahead with it anyway.
Well, that's it. I'll be better about posting in the future, since a lot of these things are quickly developing.
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