I am finally able to post a link to the trailer for Spec Ops: The Line which premiered at this years Video Game Awards. It was a great project to work on with a very talented crew. I walked away with some great friends as a result and that’s always a positive. The trailer was created at Tronic Studios here in New York City and we have had to keep it tight lipped for over a year now. The animation was a combination of mocap and hand key shots. Some mocap was useful, but some shots were completely hand keyed. Well without further delay:
Change is coming. That is literally my attitude right now with my work. After animating my latest test animation “Eat”, I was felt burned out and unsatisfied. I learned a lot on the shot, but I learned something more from the frustration. I want to share this little story because maybe you share a similar situation to mine and this posting can let you know that you aren’t the only one.
Anyone close to me knows my love for animation and the arts in general. I am obsessed. My wife knows this better than anyone. I have been working after hours to try to build a portfolio to land myself a staff job at a studio where I can animate high quality shots all the time. Commercials rarely allow that kind of schedule, so in order to improve, I animate after hours. What does “after hours” mean? Well, I get out of work on average at 8pm – 10pm. I get home an hour later, and spend at least an hour with my family until they go to sleep. This is my “after hours” time. When its about 11pm or later I try to do some sort of work. Either animation, illustration or just learn something new to help at work. I can only put in two hours or so because I have to wake up at 7am or so. My weekends end up becoming work days. I have basically given up my social life for a long time to pursue this desire I have for visual storytelling.
Back to the story…My wife, being the amazing person that she is, noticed that I was feeling particularly down after finishing the test shot. We spoke about it and tackled the root of the problem. (Enter moment of clarity). For years now, I have been making work that is geared to appeal to a very specific audience. I spent my entire time trying to figure out the perfect performance, the perfect audio, the perfect design, etc to appeal to some unknown artists who decides my fate. Take it from me, this is the wrong way to go about it. I realize this now, and I wish I would have seen this earlier. I watch schools like Goeblins and I am blown away by their ability to create such fresh and new styles year to year. Nothing that looks even close in style to the cg style we have come to see from each feature film studio. This animation business is competitive and the pressure to produce constantly is overwhelming. This is multiplied in commercials, where the expectations are extremely high but the deadlines are unbelievably short (this is another posting all together). It was only natural that trying to appeal to others would leave me unsatisfied and not confident in my work.
This lead me to my new outlook. Last week, I decided to start from scratch. I started doing the work I like to do. Trusting my perspective on what I find entertaining and interesting. If the people respond to it, awesome! If they don’t, that’s ok too! How many times have you LOVED something you saw and yet your best friend HATED it? That’s what makes art so great! Your experience and interpretation is unique. It’s yours. So this is the beginning of something new for me. I have literally started with animating a bouncing ball in 2D. I am also going back to learning about values in the traditional 2D, so I can take my illustrations to a new level. Back to basics. I hope this new attitude and perspective will shine through on what I work on from now on. I already feel liberated and my obsession has hit a new high.
Here is my latest test shot called “Eat”. It has been a long time since my last personal test. I highly recommend it. I think it’s a great opportunity for growth and experimentation. I try to approach each shot with a goal in mind. My goal might be to improve on a principle of animation like timing. For this shot, my goal was entertainment value. Hopefully you watch it and laugh (I’ll even take a smile).
My favorite lecture while attending AnimationMentor has to be Doug Sweetland’s talk on “Entertainment”. He didn’t sit and animate (not that I didn’t love those lectures too!), he spent the majority of the time just talking about how important it is to make your work entertaining. I can’t sit here and type out all my notes, but watching that lecture literally changed my entire perspective on animating. My new approach is to focus on entertainment and then work to make sure everything else supports it. With each new shot, I hope you can see improvement in my work. This is a never ending journey to get good at this craft. Hope you enjoy and forgive the bad lighting/rendering!
Sorry for the lack of posting! Especially following my last posting proclaiming that I would try to post more often. Things have been hectic. I have been hard at work trying to work on my portfolio. I am pushing hard to get a staff job in feature film.
That being said, I just finished animating a new test shot and I wanted to share some of the process. I was looking for an audio clip with some punch to it. My wife and I are secretly obsessed with the movie “Just Friends” (yes, you read that correctly). Every time the movie is on TV, we are glued and laughing away. I ended up buying the DVD and looking for a clip I found entertaining. I then started to just listen. Over and over.
I can’t stress the importance of planning. It was something that I learned at AnimationMentor. It was stressed so much and the more I animate, the more I understand why they pushed the idea so much. I don’t recommend doing your first animatic in 3D. It’s too time consuming to see if it’s going to work. Grab a pencil and paper (or in my case a Cintiq and Sketchbook Pro), and just thumbnail it out. Nothing special. Draw stick figures! You just want to make sure the idea has potential before investing tons of time posing out characters and dealing with cameras, etc. And without further adieu…my poorly drawn animatic:
I am extremely excited to remind everyone that Ice Age Dawn of the Dinosaurs is coming next week on July 1st! I had the pleasure of working with the extremely talented crew over at Blue Sky Studios for almost 6 months. It was grueling but I learned so much from everyone there. Please head out next week and support the amazing crew for all our hard work! Here is a poster for the movie in case you haven’t seen it yet. Click it to head on over to the site:
After wrapping up at Blue Sky, I was lucky enough to jump on a quick commercial over at 1st Ave Machine in NYC. It was definitely a cool project to work on and I can’t wait to see the final product. Now that I am on a small break from work, I am going to slowly update the website with some older material first. I added 3 commercials that I worked on under the “Animation” Page. Keep checking back for updates!
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