Become a VFX Creature Animator | Interview with Tony Mecca

hey guys it's tony mecca i'm an instructor here at anime school i teach animating appeal and entertainment and our brand new vfx creature course i've been an animator for over 15 years i've animated in major feature films vfx movies and games currently work in theme park design at universal creative and hope you enjoy this little q a on what it takes to get into the vfx industry and a little bit more about adam school's new vfx creature program yeah so i i always um since you know really really young wanted to get into special effects in in making movies and you know i used to put those uh ravel model kits together you know where you get to paint them and kind of glue it all together and obviously loving star wars and that type of early visual effects so when i started to learn a little bit more you know after jurassic park came out that oh it's now probably going to go to the computer i always assume that i would be a modeler so uh learning you know maybe texturing lighting modeling things like that and when i went to college i you know kind of you start as a generalist you dip your toes in a little bit of of everything and i really just fell in love with animation right off the bat even from like the bouncing ball it was like oh i just thought creating like a still frame of although that's really cool you're actually bringing soul to something so uh i i always knew i wanted to work in special effects movies you know uh things things like that but didn't really know it was gonna be animation until i actually started formally training in it and that's how i got into it the first job that i ever had um was right out of college i worked for a video game company called high voltage so i got to work on the family guy video game right that was just a jump right into it you know all hand key to animation working with the animators on staff at high voltage and fuzzy door who did the show so learning a lot about that type of a style how you know the falls are like one frame and then you're done and really kind of exaggerating that and then went on to uh america's army you know so i went from uh kind of super cartoony all the way to combat simulation and then uh a few games called conduit and conduit two where they were more of the sci-fi adventure stuff so i i really started in in games right out you know right uh right from the get-go so i so starting in games i i went to another online animation school while i was working in games specifically tailoring you know feature film stuff like adam school does uh and then i got hired right into rhythm and hughes which was great so uh i got thrown right into vfx right away and not using a plate before in my entire life rhythm and hughes does uh a a training or they did at the time a training program where you spend two weeks in their training department learn about the plates and they don't use maya they use voodoo which is an awesome piece of software uh rhythm and hues dreamworks and pixar all have their custom animation software it's not maya based for the most part and so learning voodoo and you know went right into mr popper's penguins uh and uh worked on a few movies there worked my way up to lead animator at rhythm and hughes uh jumped then over to blue sky so back to kind of full cg animation worked on a few shows there epic and rio 2. and then back to vancouver this was all happening all over the world where i worked as a lead at digital domain i'm on fast and furious 7. next monday's the future past um ryan gosling's movie lost river and then went to image works where i worked on hotel transylvania 2. so went from super hyper realistic back to the gendi style of insane you know pushed animation and you know really is a you know i've been crazy enough to go back and forth between multiple different animation styles uh and then from there i actually went down to florida to work at magic leap which is a top secret tech startup it was one of the first you know tech unicorn companies and can't say a lot of what i did there but it was a lot of behind-the-scenes next generation animation stuff um and then uh was able to you know make the jump to universal because theme parks are awesome and i never in a million years uh put two and two together of you know you write a lot of these attractions and you're like yeah these are all movie-based attractions they're all you know they have a lot of of media of technology of show syncing and then of course you're on a you know a ride track and all the way since universal started doing uh the back to the future ride and et you know they've been kind of at the pinnacle of technology for for movie special effects when it comes to uh you know integration with theme parks and uh so you know kind of jumped into that role where i'm on a few of the teams in universal creative that are in charge of designing the next generation rides attractions lands i work with media universal is um universal creative obviously owned by universal which owns dreamworks and illumination so i get to work a lot with their ips and their animation crews and of course you know a lot of the other vendors we use are your typical aaa level vfx studios for all of our attractions so i get to be exposed to all different types of animation and animation technology which has been really cool well when it in in terms of animation itself so it's still good to concentrate just on animation you know for now i know there's a lot of other studios um that do hire general lists you know like there's a lot of smaller studios that do this but in terms of animation because i teach the vfx class here as well as the um you know i taught body mechanics for many years and um uh character entertainment and appeal here as well which is you know more about the story and more about getting the right acting choices and being in an actor rather than just going over the 12 principles of animation and distilling that inside of your shot but really it's it's about you know you can know a little bit about modeling that's fine a little about about lighting you know understanding what the other elements are in making what you're doing whether it's a game or a film or theme park attraction you know whatever you want to get into um but really honing your skill set in animation if you want to be an animator so you know don't spend 50 percent of your time trying to light your shot and figure that out right you really want to get um your your concentration focus on just the animation portion of it uh me being a huge techno nerd on the side and modding all the stuff and building a water cooling system and all this kind of crazy stuff that was just a bonus you know uh being like a huge geek uh but it's it's always about having that raw talent and understanding of being a storyteller and an entertainer right um i always tell my students i say look if you have two identical reels and you have one one reel that is the 12 principles and it's like you nailed it you absolutely oh it's beautiful you have overlap and it's polished and it's oh the finesse that's inside of there and you have another reel that is pretty good it's really nice animation maybe lack some polish but is hilarious or got a dramatic reaction or or made the viewer feel something 10 times out of 10 that's the person that's going to get hired right of course based on world location and all the stuff going on you know there's a lot of other factors but if it's even you know even between the two in terms of location viability things like that um you know learning entertainment and and learning uh how to be a good animator is is the hard part right it's easy to learn the 12 principles and and go over and how to smooth arcs and make clean curves and things like that it's what can you do with the craft that makes it you know new and and unique and that can be in your story right just a few shots that you did some of these shots are only a few seconds long so you know my advice would be be interested in other things definitely be interested in things outside of animation right i mean walt disney said you know it's about the illusion of life and if you don't have one how can you create that illusion right don't obsess over animation uh and and we've all been there you know we've all been like oh my god pixar disney it's blue sky you know and then that's all you talk about to your friends your friends are shot up right go do other things go live your life travel experience do things outside of animation because those are the stories that you're gonna bring in to your animation in general and that's what's important about it so step away from the computer step away from even movies or games go try something else go do something else because that's the experiences you're gonna bring into your storytelling and that's what's really important um in terms of adam school concentrate on the animation i've had some students be like oh i'm gonna take this and modeling and this at the same time you do one and you do a really badass go learn other things but do the one really good um so you don't necessarily need to be a generalist uh but just make sure that as you go through anim school whatever you're concentrating on if it's 3d animation really really really you know hit that home so with creature and and vfx animation um a few key key differences usually in in vfx it's done for live action so you have a background plate that's already shot now of course that can change they can do set extensions they can do paint overs they you know comp artists are are crazy they can do some amazing stuff that does not exist if they haven't shot it but generally you're within the constraints of what was actually shot on the set so you can't move your camera all right so when you're inside of a full cg environment you have a lot more kind of playroom to stage shots to move things around to re-stage specific things and especially at the end you can kind of polish your camera and you know work with that uh you can't with the effects at all uh one of the other main differences is generally right and everything in an animation is you know general or principle there's there's always you know exceptions to anything that we teach but generally the directors come from live action right so they're used to getting instantaneous responses they're used to directing an actor or an actress and saying do it this way okay stop do it this way up let me see this one come in here and they can play a lot in in set to get the performances and the things that they need uh they they generally don't come from an animation background there are exceptions of course but they generally don't so when you present animation a lot of the times you can't show things like step mode you just can't because they're not going to understand it you're going no no the animation's supposed to be smooth you see it's gotta it's gotta move like this why is it teleporting all around i've actually seen that note before interestingly enough um this kind of this character doesn't teleport it's like no i'm just trying to block it out and show you so you know working uh especially in this course with splocking and and getting the basic motion in there first plotting it out and then of course on the entire creature side of things learning how to animate things that don't necessarily exist uh the the ability to learn from the references you can gather uh very importantly the references you take yourself and how to combine that and fill in the gaps so uh there's also a lot of reduce in vfx a lot of the times a director will ask you uh okay show it to me this way this way from the top from the bottom from the left from the right up down uh do a backflip non-baffle version and you're doing like 10 different versions because they want to react to what they like the best usually in full cg animation you have your storyboards you have your animatic you got a nice layout um you can you know have a little bit more time to explore your shot and really explore that video reference and then really get into the acting where vfx is like no no no just show it to me 18 different ways and i want to see it go so uh we we learn a little bit about how to get the fastest idea that you have out there to take a look at what it looks like and adjust quickly so in terms of workflow they are pretty different um in terms of animation skill set a lot of it translates over you still have to keep in mind of everything that you learn the basics of you know animation but uh yeah the workflows are are a little different in terms of execution it's uh you know you you see some beautiful vfx animation right absolutely gorgeous animation and you're like man that must uh you know they must have spent months and months and months on that it's like well yeah they did but that was just version 17. you know so it uh it definitely still demands the highest quality because they have budgets that are the same as animated movies if not more so uh so you you do have to hit that level of quality um but usually in a much more condensed time frame because you're doing three or four different things another workflow difference is usually in full cg animation you are um working on just kind of one shot at a time right so you get your shot you work on it when it's finished you work on your next shot or sometimes if you're lucky you'll get a entire sequence you have three shots in a row so you kind of work on that entire sequence and v effects because usually the directors are not on site because vfx studios are a force service studio for a production company the director might only review once a week or once every two weeks sometimes once every three weeks so a lot of the times you'll be working on three four five six shots at once in different parts of the movie so uh you're you're really learning to bounce between different things different creatures different characters so uh you really learn how to animate really quickly at a high high high bar quick in uh in vfx um with the creature class you know we definitely focus a lot more on uh doing that kind of muscle memory right so we we always break things down everyone you know everyone asked me like wow you know creatures are so complex they're so complex you have to learn all this type of stuff in quadrupeds and multiple it's like no no it all comes down to the bouncing balls everything all comes back to those dang bouncing balls because we start by planning your shot out with just spheres that's it you know how do we get the character from point a to point b doing the action that we want having the performance that we want out of that particular character and how do we break down that motion and that um performance but the body mechanics behind it just on spheres right so starting with that first so we do a lot of talking about rotoscoping spheres over animals i have my students do that for a majority of the entire class because it builds that kind of muscle memory of if you don't have the perfect piece of reference how do you connect this to this well it's got to go like this well how do you know it goes like this well because when i did the squirrel that way i combined it with the squirrel and the skunk and the chipmunk and the lizard and then that my brain is kind of telling me it should work like this and you're like yeah that's from the practice and the muscle memory and and and and really learning how to connect those pieces together and um you know using yourself as a video reference a lot of it is is adapting to what the performance is right and this was done at the very very very beginning even on jurassic park if you guys watched the original making of jurassic park narrated by james earl jones from the 90s first thing phil tippett had his animators do is get away from the computer go away do not look at the computer don't touch it don't touch animation thumbnails nothing brought them into acting classes and said everyone get in the room act like a raptor look around how does that act how do you guys act how does it when you enter a room what do you look at what does a raptor do how does it interact with other things and there's such great footage of them even in the parking lot acting like gallimimus is jumping over like you know ilms parking lot and then you look at it in the shot in the film it's the same timing it's the exact same timing and it's just adapted onto that character right nobody's uh if you're doing a raptor for jurassic park nobody's like you know like grave one of our characters part of the class is we don't ship you a grave costume right you don't like get that in the mail and uh you know put that on and you do your you know video reference for that it's adapting that performance and that gusto and those mechanics onto a character that doesn't exist so we go over a lot of that in that class not to say that it differs that much from the traditional cg method but a little bit more so because the characters are completely usually not bipedal or have any type of human uh you know anatomy to them so it's it's one of the key differences in the in the vfx class to me it's it's always about creating the unknown from the known right and there's there's a very interesting um kind of phenomenon that that happens especially in the animal kingdom and a lot of it is is what is usually referred to as stranger than fiction right so um spazz williams get you know gives gives a talk a little bit about how yeah i i always come back to jurassic park because i'm like these guys figured out so much i i love it um where they talk about like they were watching a cheetah in in slow motion and it was going you know 60 70 miles an hour and its head was locked like an ik and you look at it and you're like i know that i know what i'm seeing is real but if you were to adapt that into a cg character it would look fake it would look completely fake so really understanding that you do still have to exaggerate and push and and and make up a little of what needs to happen even if you have the perfect reference um because that's part of the entertainment right so if you're doing things like animals that are you know supposed to be indistinguishable and just kind of live action then a lot of the times what they'll do is they'll just kind of use roadomation to rotoscope off right my argument is always willing to just why not shoot the dog like shoot an actual dog or a cat or whatever just you know but sometimes animals are big jerks on set they don't do what you want so you have to make them cg you know um but it's all about finding as much reference as you can and combining it together so a lot of my students you'll see it it just looks crazy on their first few assignments because they have video reference in all the corners over here and it's like all right i'm using the weight from here the jump from here the timing from this one i love the way when the lizard looked up this way so i'm going to use the lizard's head from here combining that together and then they'll go in there and then pepper in video reference of themselves and then i want to turn the corner to look really mean and then i want to get this attitude there and i want to throw my weight down and and and combine that together so it's it's the skill of knowing you're never gonna find the perfect video reference ever and this is true even in regular cg you can't just you know google my shot says this here's my script how do you animate this in maya for it to look amazing then i get a tutorial everything you animate is going to be new every single new thing that you're animating you're you're inventing it right it's a performance that doesn't exist so taking as much reference and as much information as you can and then adding that little bit of spark on top of it exaggerating things a little bit even when we do digi doubles in film um if you wrote a scope over the stunt double sometimes it looks fake and it's weird because you're like it's literally what the human did like what the heck you know but when combined with that lens when combined with that action when combined with the medium of putting something that at 24 frames a second in this dream state that we call a movie um you need to exaggerate that a little bit you need to add a little squash and stretch you need to push things and the same is very true on creatures right you you sometimes have to push things away from the reference because it just looks cooler right and that's one of the fun things about creatures is sometimes it's not about how accurate that creature would be if it does something that's super badass and people are more caught up in that entertainment level of it it's like well we're gonna pick that take because that was awesome you know but it truly is about taking all of the reference you can from the animal kingdom yourself other you know how you normally take video reference filling in those gaps and then adding the flare to it right because you just don't want to rotoscope over something that exists in reality because it's already there right we want to make something fantastic so we go over a lot of that in the class um you know how to take video reference what to take from what how to combine those you know things together and uh yeah the students have a lot of fun with that just not taking one piece of video reference and saying we're gonna execute on this taking 20 or 30 different things and then mashing it together into something awesome so usually um so for example like mr popper's penguins right um when i first started they had an entire library of uh and i forget his name but he was the person that was in charge of the penguins at the san diego zoo and they had the film crew go out there and the vfx supervisor go out there and just get like we were like penguin experts it was like i never knew i never thought i'd spend like three days watching penguin videos but it was like and when they do this and when they're mad they do this and when they're happy they do this and this is how far the arm goes and the leg goes and you know things like that um and then you usually will have the leads and the supervisors before the animation crew comes out create that lexicon of animation so for example on snow white and huntsman um for months before the characters you know or characters the animators came on and we had the entire full crew of animators we were just doing a bunch of like walk cycles for the pre-rigs we were doing um there's a quadruped it was a biped i did oh my god months and months of just bird animation right creating those libraries and what worked what didn't so a lot of that is the leads and the supervisors creating those you know we we call it like a like a pre-movie r d at first so then when the animators come on they have things to look at okay here are some of the test shots that were done here are some of the the walk cycles that were done you know and and when you're getting your shot critiqued or worked on they'll sometimes bring that up and say hey look you know we really need to exaggerate this clavicle when it's moving or things like that but that's to work through you know the elites um and the supervisors to kind of help you with that but that's that's usually the when you go from animator to lead and supervisor that's usually what you're kind of more in charge of is coming up with how it moves and being a part of that exploratory process at first not to say that an animator can't come up with something in the middle of the show that just looks awesome and the director looks at and goes yes that and you're like that's not how the walk cycle is that's not how we decided that's not what you said yesterday that's not what it is and they're just like it's cool go for it let's do it that happens a lot too you know but you usually have a pre-production crew especially when the rigs are being developed you know so they can battle test the rigs to make sure that it can do what's kind of needed um to you know explore these characters before the entire crew comes on sure so um i i created i created the syllabus i worked with the the owners of um owner of adam school and we designed some characters uh we had some friends that worked at frame store go out in new york shoot some plates it was it was awesome but i i haven't seen uh schools really teach uh concentrating on creature animation in the uh realm of working with plates in the effects right there was a lot of okay we do a little bit of the walk cycle and body mechanics the last last assignment we do is just a regular dog walk uh at adam school and i had some students that were like dear god i never want to do that again i want to just stick with my carrot two legs is too many i want to stick with my acting and my drama i don't care about this dumb dog and i'm like that's cool whatever it's not your jam you know and then some students be like are we gonna do any more of this this is this was like a lot of fun this was really cool i like that a lot so uh just there there was a need and i think still is a need in the industry to have students that are starting out in the industry or wanting to hone their skills really really have a place that they can go to say okay i know this is going to be intense and i know i'm going to get thrown in the deep end a little bit here just like a lot of us did our first job in in a vfx studio um but have them a little bit more prepared you know knowing that a recruiter can look at their reel and say oh they have worked with a plate before oh they have some really impressive creature animation they do know how to lead a camera and and come up with some really fantastic motions um and and it's been successful so far i mean we've had a lot of cool placements of students that have been hired in both vfx and the the the game industry because sometimes the game minister just looks at that and i don't care about the plate stuff that creature animation is awesome bring him or her in let's interview you know i've had that happen a few times but you know it's really just about prepping the students so they can be a little bit more ready going into uh vfx and the tools and the workflows and the processes that they use so it's for anyone that's interested in learning more of the vfx side of things um anyone and and what's funny is uh we've had some students that have already worked in the industry or were currently working on a movie that wanted to hone their skills to that next level because the class sizes are usually smaller and i consider this a graduating mentor level class you do get a lot more one-on-one i wrote the syllabus so i can alter the syllabus uh we can move things around we can shift dates um there is no amount of work we won't expand on if you know you knocked this part out of the park we're only going to make the second half harder right we're really going to push the students to that so um i've had students come in that have worked with plates before and they ended up doing 15 characters i'm like there's no limit to the amount of characters i will make you put in this shot it will be awesome i i will push you to the max to students that have never used a plate before and have never animated a quadruped before uh and and they they ended up getting hired at a studio working on uh you know a movie that came out a few years ago that i remember watching at home and be like that's awesome my students work done this is great you know so it's it's for all levels um i i would say it's geared a little bit more towards those who have never done creature animation before or have never done vfx style animation before but we've had had pretty advanced students in here and we gear the syllabus to them too and it's great because students that are first starting out get to see how complex it can be and the students like anyone myself included it's always good to have a refresher back to the basics sometimes and really just re-grasp those concepts to remind yourself i'm over complicating this holy smokes let me go back to the basics here so um yeah that's really who the class is designed for um it's it's a really good question i get asked all the time and i ask myself this all the time too because i wish i knew when i was a student um it it's all really based on industry trends right um sometimes you have studios in vfx or in a full animation that have kind of mass exodus and they need people immediately that's happened at some major studios um the generally right and again this is based on where we are right now at this date and things can change in a year or go you know tip the scales either way um vfx studio is because of the amount of work that's needed and the amount of vfx movies that are coming out uh you know how many different superhero universes there are how many uh you know redos of movies there wants to be you know there there's a lot of vfx in these movies coming out um generally i've seen studios in vfx give junior shots you know a little bit easier than um your major full cg feature films do um so uh they they have the ability to kind of bring people in on shorter contracts too so if they've got two or three movies lined up and the first movie is getting ready to wrap and they need some support they can bring someone in to try them out to see how it works if they don't work you know go on to your next show if they do work cool you want to stay on for the next three or four movies which is usually you know the case um but it's it it seems at least now that because of all the movies coming and now we have a backlog because covet happens then we go back oh these movies gotta get made we gotta get some we got some movies going um that vfx tends to give juniors you know a shot they gave me a shot you know rhythm and hughes brought me in as a direct hire i didn't have any feature work i just had game work that had creature and some you know advanced schooling that i had and they gave me a shot in a few years i was a lead so um you know i i owe them a lot for giving me that shot and i see a lot of people in very high level positions uh in both visual effects and at the major animation studios that started out as just a all right try him out see what they do or try her out bring him in as a junior heck as a mid they look pretty good you know throw him on this movie throw throw him or her into the deep end and let's see how they do and the ones that you know rise to the top are still going strong today so um that's generally how it is in this in this day yeah there's there's two major things in getting hired especially in your in your dream job or what is perceived as your dream job is it's skill and then there's luck all right um luck is gonna happen okay because everyone has luck everyone has bad luck everyone has good luck um skill is not guaranteed that's what's not guaranteed at all so would you rather be really lucky with no skill or have high skill and when the luck comes you can combine the two together because believe me there are plenty of artists and animators out there that are very lucky they're born into hollywood they're born into the families they have friends they have you know that have all the hookups in the world and they still can't get into the industry because they don't have the skill set so what we're doing here at adam school is we're making it so you have the skill set so when the luck and the timing aligns it's a no-brainer for you to jump right in sure so putting together a reel generally is you you want to put it together for the studio or the industry that you are applying for and this is true even for um you know you can get kind of micro with this in the vfx industry and in the animation industry a lot of times my students ask me they say i i only have the shots that i worked on in school but i wouldn't mind working in you know vfx or working in games or working in full cg um i say it's about the order once you get into the industry and you have a lot of shots that are real you put all your vfx shots on i don't really have a vfx reel you have a game really you have a cg animation reel i i had three different reels depending on where i was applying when you only have um you know the work that you've done as a student i tend to advise my students to order it based on what studio they're applying to so if you did adam school and you have some great shots and then you did the vfx course and you you know came up with some awesome shots in the vfx course you're applying to an ilm or dd or frame store or dna or any of those start with the vfx shot right grab them right off the bat and know how to do this because then they can go cool vfx oh there's some other nice animation on here too great on the flip side you know if you're applying to a major animation studio or even tv or someone that doesn't do vfx still good to have it on there because it shows some good creature animation and body mechanics but start with the acting performance you want to get them right at the very beginning most recruiters or animators you know you have like 10 seconds on a reel you know it's like go to vimeo you hit it most of us don't even watch it with the with sound on right it's like on our phones we're busy we're doing something else we're in you know conversations so it's name first shot and then oh then you turn the volume on then you go back to see it again and you really kind of you know go through the reel to learn a little bit more about that particular animator but you know gear it towards the studio you want to apply to then i get the question well which one do i put on my site like i don't know the one that looks the best like whatever order looks good you know because generally when you apply okay um they're they're gonna say give us a link to your reel and you don't just put your website right you put here's the direct link to this you could have multiple videos or whatever here's my vfx real here's this you know sometimes students will particularly put a title card this is for ilm this is for disney this is for you know and then the recruiters feel a little bit better about it being a little bit more personalized to them and they expect the rule or the real rather to be what they're expecting you know but that's that's usually my general dumb or real advice on studios yeah in vfx and all my friends that worked in vfx um and and we'll watch this later uh will definitely be like you better mention this and that is patience is a big thing um because like i said there there is a lot of live-action directors out there that are uh reactionary and not visionary meaning they will want to see the creature in 17 different ways before they make the decision on which one they want to pick right because again in live action they used to say okay cut hey let's try it again can you can you exaggerate this a little bit more uh cut okay actually can you walk in sooner or [Music] they can l them out and they want to go through that process with the animator so um having patience uh having an understanding to know that um a lot of times your shot will just get cut that's true for regular cg as well but in vfx that happens all the time because vfx a lot of the times will start before principal photography is over so i was working on a movie before act 3 was even written yet that was fun uh so we're doing all this real act three we gotta kind of get on it and then you know shots got cut things got reordered things got moved around you know um a lot of the times on set they don't shoot the right things so you have to work with the comp department you have to work with um other you know lighters and things like that it's it's not just particularly isolated to animation not that you have to do any of that but you have to work with those departments to be like hey i know this thing that's a prop and i'm supposed to interact with i just you got to move it over you know in the place the vfx super be like okay we're going to digitize this over this way and then you're like hey can you give me just like a quick like thing so i know like where i'm moving this over please you know and then so working with those other departments and and really learning about the you know entire process i think is is is good you don't have to be an expert at modeling or lighting or rigging or anything like that but understanding what that is and understanding and and respecting all the other things that go into making a movie or an experience um just makes you a better animator right you don't need to be an expert at it like i am not a good rigging artist it bores me to tears i don't like it there's folks out there that are like yeah i'm rigging like unwrapping uvs to me that's like my version of hell i hate it other people are like it's a puzzle i love it this is this is great you know i have friends that are like you got any uvs you want to unwrap i'm like yeah here you know it's it's it's uh you know fun for them but you know understanding what the process is uh you know makes you a better animator because you can start making calls uh based on knowing that it's gonna go down a pipe to lighters and coppers and you know even stereo sometimes um so just understanding that but in vfx it's definitely patience having patience to know that you're going to be redoing it like 4 000 times and it's not your fault it's just indecisiveness just diving into using what is known to create the unknown i think that's one of the big themes of the class is taking everything you know or you think you know or the world thinks it knows about characters or things that don't necessarily exist and then mashing it together into something that you look at and go i believe that that moves that way right that's that's the key because you can look at something that doesn't exist and if it has bad animation on it you're like i've never seen that before but i don't believe it versus a successful uh creature animation whereas i i've never seen that before but i believe that it works that way right i definitely believe in that and that's one of the one of the key concepts that we go over in the class so like i said before the the class i i tend to keep a little bit less structured like an actual class and more like a mentorship eventually into a studio environment so we start out by talking you know how to use a plate how to do video reference how to do this type of stuff and eventually about halfway through the course i very much like to shift it into a straight studio you know thing i i will stop giving notes about arcs and timing and things like that and say hey we need to bump up the aggression here over this hey um it doesn't look like we're leading a little bit there hey we we need to ground this character a little bit more here maybe we slip on something and it and it skids just a little bit and it's less notes about you know um specifics that you would get from your animation lead supervisor or animation director and more about the notes you would get from a director which is not animation talk and more about the character and things like that um so bringing it you know graduating it from a course by the end of it especially the last you know month last few weeks the students should truly feel like they're having dailies with a director and the notes that they're expected to get from a director and translate that into what they believe is the right alteration enhancement or or change to make on the on their performance um i that's that's a great question i i loved teaching so i you know graduating to a senior and then a lead and then adam supervision um i i've always kind of had that itch of not necessarily explaining to students learning animation about how to do something or rather here's the steps you take to do animation or rather how to learn animation it's always been about if you're doing something a certain way that's probably okay and the right way to do it and people professionally in the industry deal with the same stuff uh i i can't tell you how many times even at rhythm and hughes at my first job you know before this i was like man a feature film they must have this figured out this there's got to be a tool for this there's got to be this again and you get a suit and you're like this is less tools than i had as a student like what the heck i just like yeah i gotta frame for frame all of this and just try to you know kind of figure it out um and and it's it's fantastic and and i get a lot of joy you know doing that i also love um the fact that adam school has students from all over the world i think that's so cool and being able to see the students kind of cultures come out in their in their acting choices and um in their video references and and learn a little bit more about you know how different things get perceived in different countries and personalities and things like that i think just helps the the school overall and helps the class because the class is really starting to see how other actions and animators would take an idea to final which is very much how it is in a in a studio right when you see your movie for the first time it doesn't feel like you're watching a movie it's just it's rendered dailies is all it is you know so you're oh you know you're you're looking through these shots going oh that was his shot oh that was her shot oh that was her shot wait how'd you know that was my shot you weren't in any of those dailies it's like oh but i see your personality coming through here i know that's one of your acting choices or you know um it's it's really funny to see students personalities coming through their acting because that's what happens professionally too right we we all talk about all these movies have you know the characters are exactly how they are throughout the entire movie and if you work on a movie enough you really start to see the the individual animators personalities come through in their choice it might be on model it might be with that character you know but you really start to see that's the expression they always make when they want to go get lunch that's the acting choice they made that's that person you know it's still it's still this character but you know you you really start to see that come through and i i really enjoy seeing that in students i i love seeing their video reference and getting to see how the acting affects their their choices and how their culture affects their choices which is you know only makes me a stronger animator and a stronger director and i i like that anim's school exposes that to kind of everyone and it's it's super important because movies are supposed to be you know global and and movies are getting more more more global and there's more cultures and different parts of the world being featured in animation movies vfx you know everything and and having uh exposure to that in a school like this that's worldwide is just awesome

Channel: AnimSchool

Views: 1,344

Keywords: animschool, vfx, vfx creatures, vfx creature animation, vfx for films, how to animate creatures, animating with plates, animating with creatures, animation creature, animation, become a vfx animator

Id: XRbqBdUEO3o

Length: 41min 50sec (2510 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021