Summer Masterclasses in Animation/Story

Matt Luhn and I will be teaching in a few cities this year. We are both really excited and we are including new material for our talks. Our first talk is in Chicago. We hope to see you there.

www.vanarts.com/events/pixar-artists-masterclass-2012-chicago

New Look Coming Soon

We are reformatting Spline Doctors. Hopefully, it will be easier to navigate. Most importantly is the content. I will be recruiting some new Spline Doctors that are eager to share their knowledge. As always I hope to do some more Spline Casts. Here is a peek at the proposed slight makeover. Please add your comments and feedback and what you would want. One thing you may notice will be some space for ads. Yes… in order to keep the site running I will have to make room for a little ad space. It will be minimal, but its required to keep it going.

Thanks for the support.

-Andrew

The Mountain

Every shot can be seen as a mountain that animator has to climb. Some go on that mountain without the proper gear and bad weather comes quick and blows you farther down the face. This happened to me recently. I find that whenever I cease to do the work of planning a shot, I get lost. I think “How the hell did I get this job?” The shot becomes like a lump of wet clay that I am trying to find form within. There are drawbacks and some positives to this. The drawback is that you are not clear. You have not found the idea yet. You are searching for everything from strong poses to ideas that are not mediocre. The good thing is that it does force you to dig deep and pull out the good stuff if its there. Some of the things that can make it easier for you to get out of the “Base Camp” of your shot are having a second opinion. Another thing is to get a jolt of confidence. I was speaking to animator/director Mark Walsh the other day as he was telling me the story of how the great Freddie Moore started a scene. He would walk into the other animators offices and say something like ,” Tell me how good I am fellas”.. Oh, your the best Fred, remember when you animated this and that and so on… Fred would smile and walk out and begin his scene…OK, maybe it did not happen exactly that way but he needed a boost of confidence to take on that new challenge. Animation is hard. One of the things I remember clearly in the early days at Pixar was a certain genius animator’s  shots. That animator, who shall remain nameless, struggled so hard to get the perfection he wanted. He thumb nailed, blocked and reblocked, polished and re polished, yelled, cursed, threw tantrums and so on. It was literally like climbing up the face of Everest, but when he got to the top, all was forgotten. The shot was the thing you remembered…. Not the pain, the deadline, it was the moment. We all make the same mistakes, but its important to know that we have to stay students and keep climbing!

-Andrew

Over Acting

How can we tell if a scene we are animated is overdone? Are the gestures to big? Is the scene upstaging another character? Is that character to broad or not giving enough? This topic came up at a talk I was at. Its fascinating how closely animators and actors think about the same problems. When I asked the actor what over acting was, she commented that its when the character does too much or does not know there place is within the scene. It can be many things such as pulling attention away from the other characters. It can be as simple as a character over doing something as simple as picking up a glass. When we animate, we are usually going bigger and making things read more. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to watch out if the character is doing too much. We always need to look at the character throughout a sequence. Steven Spielberg once said to George Clooney ” You could be a star if you stop moving your head.” Or it was something close to that I believe.

So how do you know if a scene is over acted? Ask yourself some questions: How would it look if you acted the same way as your character? Is your character taking away from the general idea of the scene? Did you bring in an extra set of eyes to look at it? What is the emotional center of the character and scene? What really drives that character and would your character do that?  Is the style of acting you are doing fit the project you are working on? Think about a film like Amadeus or Pirates of the Carribean. These are roles that require a bit of an exaggerated character. It fits the style of the film. I’d love to hear what you think and for others to pass along any tips or comments.

-Andrew

BRAD BIRD on NPR

A fellow animator found this interview.

Here is the direct link — LINK