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
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