Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1188718
D E PA R T M E N T 41 KEYFRAME When Story Artist Sylvia Lee begins working on a sequence, it usually begins with a conversation. The story team will read the script and the directors, in this case Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, will identify specific beats they'd like to see within the scene. The artists return back to their desks and begin roughly sketching out initial ideas. "We usually get a week to work on our scenes, then we pitch in front of the story team and get feedback," says Sylvia Lee. "You try to address [notes] in another week then pitch again. When it's good to go, you send it to editorial." The process is straightforward, but the artistry comes from the personal interpretation often drawing from one's own life. One scene Sylvia Lee worked on was a flashback where Anna and Elsa's mother sings them a lullaby. Lee drew from her experiences with her own mother, trying to channel how safe Lee felt when she saw her mother's loving gaze—infusing her drawings with authentic emotion. WINTER 2019 41 Other considerations included whether the audience would be able to track Gale through a scene, zooming back and forth. The animation team also needed environmental props for Gale to interact with and to anchor the movements. Normally, the environments team works later in the pipeline but, in the case of Gale, both departments had to collaborate much sooner in order to ensure the various props were put into place so that the animation team could clearly depict Gale's personality through these exchanges. Getting the right performance out of Gale was another challenge that required a creative technical solution. Animators, technical directors and software engineers met twice a week for almost a year to talk about ways to streamline the rigging process, which led to the development of a new tool called Swoop. "We animate Gale by animating the path on which she travels," explains Software Engineer Hannah Swan. The intuitive tool incorporates two major components: the shape of the path (how Gale moves across the screen) and the timing of the path (where it lingers, how long it takes to zip from place to place). "We wanted to make a tool that is easy to use, easy to experiment with on the performance, and easy to change," she says. Rather than dialing in numbers to create the rig, the new tool allowed the animators to quickly draw a curve or a path for the leaf, or whatever else was attached to it. The artists could lock off segments using anchors and manipulate small sections. The idea was to streamline the number of steps it took to complete the rig and speed up the creative process, says Swan. They also created nudge and smudge tools to make it easier for the animators to manipulate the path and applied the functionality in virtual reality so an artist could create a path and see how it moved while in the respective environment.