Animation secrets
Discover how to speed up your workflow
Animation is inherently slow, expensive and laborious. So when animation workshop Anomalia held a twoweek ‘lab’ to create a 10-minute short with a team of 20 animators, called Poutnik, director Keith Lango had a tough task ahead: “A typical large Hollywood animated film requires a character animator to complete about three seconds of final animation per week. A team of 20 animators moving at those speeds meant that we would only be able to produce two minutes of animation in total – nowhere near enough to tell the story we had set out to tell.”
And this, points out Keith, doesn’t begin to address models, rigging, sets, lighting, rendering and VFX… it’s no wonder Pixar spends $1 million for every minute of a movie with hundreds of artists and technicians. “If you try to compete with that level of detail and quality with a small team you are doomed to fail miserably. At some point you must choose to work smarter, not harder,” says Keith.
Make tough choices
Detail is the problem, identifies Keith: “Each passing year leaves us with ever higher expectations of what will be seen on screen in animated projects. Textures will be more detailed, shading more realistic, models more detailed, animation more refined…” And you can’t cut back in one area to promote another as audiences will notice to the detriment of the film. “It's like an orchestra where a few instruments are out of tune. An incoherent artistic approach makes for an awkward, if not wholly unpleasant viewing experience. Our minds yearn for cohesiveness,” Keith explains.
If you take short cuts on animation, but keep highly detailed models and textures, then things look off. Cut corners on models and shading, but keep the motion detail very high and you may have a better chance of success, “however, then you run up against that three-seconds per week problem,”says Keith.
You need to find a working balance between artistic choices and a style that enables the team to work efficiently.
Keith made some key decisions, first to use black and white, “Colour and all of its complexity was now off the table.” Then, live-action footage was used instead of CG sets, the team animated CG characters and props on an empty scene with the video of the shot set to an image plane in Maya. “I shot all of the background footage myself using my Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera and my Nikon D7000 HDSLR. I shot the locations around the Pacific Northwest near Seattle, Washington where I lived. This made the acquisition of the background footage very affordable and easy and it let me develop the story by thinking through the scenes in my footage,” explains Keith.
Another key decision was to simplify the character designs. While the characters were CG models (rigged by students at Rigging Dojo), they would appear like 2D characters. “They were flat black, with simple blocky silhouettes, no mouths, no clothes and no hair. This simple, streamlined design meant that animators would not need to worry about a bunch of fancy extras,” says Keith, adding: “We boiled everything down to the core to focus solely on performance. By keeping them a flat black we didn't need to worry about deformation problems in the mesh when animating, because there was no shading on the characters to reveal them. Nor did we need textures.”
Lighting was next to simplify, with each shot a single shadow light to get contact shadows on proxy geometry for later compositing.
“Another choice was to animate at 12 frames per second instead of
Any CG animator knows the feeling of dread when they switch their stepped blocking animation to spline tangents – the energy, vitality and power of the blocking performance gets washed away