Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/119349
Animation•Career new character named Gia that I led throughout the production. Working with Gia was very satisfying and incredibly challenging. In a movie framework, the animator needs to understand the role of the character in the story and how to best express that through animation. It's also equally important to make the character entertaining while successfully portraying its arc progression. That meant a lot of groundwork with early shots, getting feedback from the directors, and trying to create a mutual understanding about who she was and how she would act in certain circumstances. These were often done with video reference that I would act in myself and then record, and later show during the dailies as part of the blocking process. The key thing we were trying to accomplish was a character that the audience could relate to, but at the same time, give her a bit of spice and keep her unique. Back in 2008 when I worked on Turok for the Xbox 360, I had a similar challenge with the enemy Raptor characters, but the requirements and execution were quite different. We needed the player to really be afraid of these things and be satisfied when they were able to kill one. A lot of different animations were tested for the same idea, such as alternate versions of the same attack and multiple deaths. There was also an extensive collaboration with engineering to figure out exactly how a player could shoot a Raptor so we could have different animations to show reactions from different weapons or from different directions. There were no direct dailies sessions to review the work that was done; rather, it was play-tested as much as possible by different people. We really just wanted to have the Raptors be clearly identifiable and the player excited and challenged each time he or she met one. However, you couldn't say there was any real story arc that we tried to create for them via the animation. Despite using similar or identical software, such as Maya, across many animation studios and game developers, there is still a strong existence of proprietary systems, particularly at some of the older feature animation studios, including Pixar's Menv (Marionette) and Dream Works' Emo. These systems generally exist to support specialized character rigging pipelines that were developed before the mainstream availability of commercial software, but also to support proprietary functionality and to provide ownership over the authoring software for the companies in question. These systems are relatively rare, however, and well-established companies, such as ILM and Weta Digital, use Maya to author the majority of their character rigs and animation with notable success. My time at ILM was made considerably more successful because I had been using Maya for approximately seven years for game development before I started at the studio. It was a natural transition from game development because the essential workflow of Maya, its interface, and its programming language were still the same. Essentially, the requirements of the work at ILM were vastly different from previous game work, but I knew the methods that were needed to produce them. Following ILM, I was fortunate to use DreamWorks' Emo on a number of feature animation productions. Emo software required an entirely different execution of my animation knowledge, leaning more toward a traditional 2D drawing-based approach to animating. This switch in technique was somewhat a symptom of the requirement to show progression of a shot to a director, but was very closely tied to the working framework of the Emo software. be dramatically complex, yet they are continually emerging and change considerably based on the kind of game being created and the kind of animation required for the game. Animation as a Career With the immense popularity of animation training available today, there are more and more animators entering the job market and looking directly to film and game development for their careers. Both seem to offer wonderful opportunity to the new animator. The games business has become well known for employing multiple teams of animators on permanent contract positions to fill the requirements of the project. Traditionally, game animation has served as a good way for inexperienced animators to quickly progress their skill set, as the products generally tend to call for manageable cyclic animation that allows the artist to concentrate on the artistic While animating the character Gia in DreamWorks' Madagascar 3, Cameron Fielding strived to keep her interesting and unique. To understand her better, he would act out scenes for video references that were later shown during the dailies as part of the blocking process. I strongly believe that Emo taught me how to think through a shot, and made me a much stronger animator. Where the game industry tends to differ substantially from feature-film production is with delivery of the animated content – integrating that content into a game. This is usually done through proprietary systems and changes substantially from studio to studio. Animators are usually required to set up move trees that describe how animations blend from one to the other based on circumstances in the game or player input, but also they have to contend with far more complex configurations, such as attributing elements that are controlled dynamically by the game engine, including cloth or inverse-kinematic controllers. On the whole, these systems tend not to fundamentals and get good at what really matters early on. Being active in an environment where animation technology is developing exponentially also exposes animators to different approaches to creating content and vastly different requirements for that content, which would rarely be encountered in traditional feature animation context. Positions for film and visual effects animators generally have been considered harder to secure because of a perceived need for experience with acting scenarios or complex choreography sequences. Due to the nature of character animation in movies and the need for acting, this is generally true; however, there are also clearly fewer seats available in the feature-film industry compared to the games business. It is also important to mention that March/April 2013 CGW0313-GameVfilmpfin.indd 39 n n n n 39 3/14/13 12:51 PM