Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1188718
WINTER 2019 17 O N T H E J O B JULI MURPHY TIMING SUPERVISOR, PARADISE PD Murphy started her career at Colossal in San Francisco, working on commercials before moving to LA in 1990 to work on the first season of Rugrats, where she learned sheet timing. Currently, she's working on Paradise PD, which is being animated in Harmony at the Bento Box Atlanta studio. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR JOB? Working in Harmony is new and different! My only exposure to the program before was a few months on Bob's Burgers several years ago. We are evolving a new method to communicate with the American animators who luckily speak English but do not work with traditional X-sheets. The line producer pitched the job to me as, "We're not sure yet how we're going to do this," so of course I said, yes, immediately. WALK US THROUGH A TYPICAL DAY. Every day is different! I am usually working on three episodes simultaneously and helping the retake department sort through take 1's on a fourth episode. I have two experienced timing directors working with me, Phil Cummings and Swinton Scott. Generally, we split the shows between the three of us. WHAT IS THE BEST PART OF THE JOB? Harmony gives you the ability to draw right into the animatic, add poses, change timing, and play the new version back immediately. It's a total rush—instant animation gratification and a far cry from waiting overnight for film to be processed at the lab. The other best part: We have a great, hardworking and super friendly group. Many of them are new to me, and most are younger workers. WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES? The tug of war between higher quality and meeting deadlines. It's an eternal struggle. Ultimately, we all have to compromise by doing the best we can in the time allotted. HOW DOES YOUR WORK INFLUENCE WHAT WE SEE ON THE SCREEN? If we were building a house, timing would be drawing blueprints for the animators to bang the nails. It's partially artistic, partially technical. We tell the animators when actions happen, how many frames every motion is for all character, FX, or camera moves. We add many thumbnails to the timing, either in X-sheets or a Harmony file, breakdown poses, extra expressions or hook up poses the board artist didn't have time to put in. Timing is a critical part of animation otherwise you have a big, beautiful, comic book. Bad timing can screw up a great board and good timing can add subtlety to a weak one. Timing makes a joke work better, or a character dance on the beat of the music. HOW HAS YOUR JOB CHANGED SINCE YOU STARTED USING HARMONY? The biggest change is not using paper and pencil for timing sheets. My pencil sharpener at Disney broke a couple years ago, and there were no replacements left in the studio! Everything is sent digitally around the office and to the animation studio. "Shipping a show" takes just a few minutes to zip the files, and press send. Another difference is learning what information is most helpful for the Harmony animators, and what we might be spending time on that is now unnecessary. For instance, I used to focus a lot on the lip assignment because if it's wrong, it can be an expensive retake. But as the mouths are very easy to change in Harmony, I can focus on drawing more poses into the animatic. Workflow is similar: After the animatic is locked, the track is read and lip assigned, then we have a few weeks for timing. When I'm done, I just post the file to the studio server. what's been given to you, and you can plus the action. We're kind of like these weird wizards who speak a certain language. DESCRIBE WHAT YOU SEE ON AN X-SHEET WHEN YOU ' RE WORKING ON IT. An exposure sheet marries the soundtrack and the running frame count of the picture. You're basically tracking at what frame an action is happening, and so each sheet is 80 frames—[just over] three seconds. You're going to see a lip assignment, you're going to see the animation action, and you're going to see the camera moves and FX all on one sheet so the studio is able to look at the design pack, the storyboard and exposure sheets and they'll get all the information they need to draw and generate the final image. If the storyboards are not as jazzy as you'd like, sometimes you plus it to give it more life. WHAT DOES YOUR TYPICAL DAY LOOK LIKE? First, I get my coffee! Depending on the day and how much footage I have, I try to give myself a kind of a daily quota I want to accomplish. To launch an episode, we do a design breakdown, and all the department heads go through the episode and call out what they need. Once that happens, I get the final board and the final animatic. Personally, I do the lip sync first, assigning lip positions to the phonetics that are on the sheets. Not everybody does that, but I [like to] get familiar with the sections that I'm working on. Then I'll go back and just do action, so that I'm really concentrating on the action of the characters based on the storyboard. WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE PART OF THE JOB? When you can sneak in certain little things that punctuate a joke or a gag. I do enjoy bringing to life the original vision that the creators have. I'm also one of the few positions that is able to see pre-production and post-production. When the footage comes back, I get to sit in on the retakes, see what I gave [the Korean studio] and see how they interpreted it. Then I can get better at communicating with them. I can get better at my craft. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES? You're kind of working in a vacuum until you see the footage, and that process, especially when I first started, was really weird—to wait three or four months to see what you did. Oftentimes, that's the first hurdle that you have to get over because you've already done four episodes before you get the first show back. You're well into thinking that something was working. You have to adjust.