Pitfalls of the Student Animator (Part 1)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the process of learning animation. I know from being a self-taught animator some of the things that both helped and hindered my learning path over the years. Watching some students really flourish has been inspiring to me and made me realize the importance of critical thinking as it applies to learning.

 

Plan.

Every semester, I get several students who hand in really jittery sloppy work. When I ask where their reference material is, either video, sketching or even verbal description. The answer is always, ‘well, my working method is straight ahead’

Let’s look at this for a moment

Straight Ahead Action
Straight ahead action is so called because an animator literally works straight ahead from the first drawing in the scene. This process usually produces drawings and action that have a fresh and slightly zany look, because the whole process is kept very creative.

I firmly believe that good animation, especially at a student level, comes from planning. Even if you plan your shot in detail and execute it straight ahead, you have clear idea for your goals. Ultimately, I don’t believe in straight ahead for CG unless you’re working on a section or are prepared to keep wiping out what you’ve done and keep at it until it works. CG animation lends itself to planting down poses and working the middle and unless you’re a genius and can see 10 steps ahead (like the stop motion animators I admire), it’s hard to get it right. Part of knowing whether your planning is working depends on….

 

Feedback.

There is an art to both giving and receiving feedback. Interestingly, in my classes, the loudmouths seem to improve the most.  One of the secrets of teaching is that by getting up in front of a group of people and being forced to critique their work, is that it forces the teacher to have to clearly articulate both WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN’T WORK and WHY. If you let yourself be open to feedback in the planning stages, you’re letting yourself be open to fixing the concept of your animation early on. Whether it’s how your feet plant in a weight shift, the initial key poses, or whether the gag is even funny. Early is better than later, before you commit to your decisions. At the Academy, I’ve heard students say that they don’t feel comfortable critiquing students because the people they help will get amazing reels and land that last remaining spot at Pixar. It really doesn’t work that way. In fact, the opposite is true. If you develop good relationships with your peers and help level each other up, you’ll learn how to collaborate as a team (yes, animation is a team sport) and will help each other out once you’re at a professional level. Having a generous attitude towards critiquing not only makes things more pleasant during late nights at the lab, but it also helps develop your skill in articulating and describing animation. Believe me, trying to explain animation principles to game designers and producers is a skill in itself, let alone talking to other animators.

The dark side to feedback is to learn how to filter it. If you ask 10 animators about your animation and get 10 different answers, the feedback isn’t useful. Maybe your blocking isn’t clear and you need to refine it to even get to that stage. Maybe just show poses and concept. Asking for specific critique is useful, especially as everyone has different working methods. Also, there’s a subjective side to it, so sometimes taste is a factor. If you ask 10 people about your animation and 5 say there’s a weight problem and give you 5 solutions, acknowledge that’s the element that doesn’t work and figure out the best plan of attack for resolving it.

If feedback hurts your feelings, be gracious about it, step back, then process it. A good lesson was a friend of mine who started at Blue Sky. I asked him how it was receiving feedback from guys like Mike Thurmier. The answer was, “..well, brutal, but I look at it this way. These amazing animators are taking the time to tell you how to make your work look great. I just write down everything they say, figure out how to do it, and it’s like a recipe for great animation”

How smart is that? It’s easy to respond to feedback with ‘but…’ – We all tend to do it. Of course we had valid reasons for our decisions, but if those decisions don’t work, it’s time to rethink them and come up with better ones. Or find a way to clarify those decisions so they’re readable.

 

Partial Posing.

This drives me a bit mad. When you look at classic animation, it’s all about these elegant and clear key poses, and then the uber-pose, the Golden Pose that can sum up the entire scene in a single pose.  At a glance, I can look at a Norman animation, with unposed hands (I was going to do those later) and unposed shoulders, neck at default, and it always reads to me as a missed opportunity.  Often, the whole character isn’t posed. This works in animations that are more procedural, like a quadraped walk cycle. The reason it bugs me is because in keying part of the spine here, the fingers here, the bicep here and so on, is that when you change your timing, you break ALL THE SUBSEQUENT POSES IN YOUR SCENE.  I’m not a fan of partial posing, but if you’re going to do it, plant down your important, immutable key poses, otherwise you’re at a severe disadvantage in retiming your scene.