Head of Character Animation on HTTYD | Animation Tips

I think the best animators are the most effective animators are the ones they love what advice would you give students coming right out of school that are trying to get a job how do you make a shot that entertaining I think there's a there's a way to go about this which is what's up everyone welcome back to how to become an animator I'm so Wade and today we're joined by Simon Auto which I will let him do his own introduction thank you very much for having me Simon I was the head of character animation on all three hats of Chinese dragon movies I've been an animator at DreamWorks for 21 years started out as a 2d animator and I'm now a freelance director fancy 21 years starting with 2d right yeah yeah I started as a traditional animator on the Prince of Egypt I was hired out of an animation school in Paris called the Goblin from which a lot of really great animators came and I was really lucky to get in even though I'm not French I came from Switzerland and yeah and there was this sort of dream come true to come to the u.s. and be an animator in one of the big studios how was being an international applicant and then getting in like was that as big of a thing as it is now or how did that work you mean the dreamers over in Paris I get well coming from Paris to the u.s. to work I think well I I was really lucky because at that time DreamWorks was just starting up and they had started working on the Prince of Egypt and now they were really I think they did their first day it was like when they were just finishing the first few sequences and now it's really about getting the movie done so for a year they have like a year a year and a half left and they needed people and because Kristoff's around world of growing it in and a lot of the other or French animators and animators who came from ambling in London and they had already hired some Disney animators they just needed to staff up you know another 10 15 people if not more and I just happened to graduate from that cool at that time along with fabolous Jubair and alex pv donned their - my classmates and we all three of us got hired to work here on the Prince of Egypt that's awesome you know it was a really lucky moment in time because then you know the gates opened and closed again you know visas were hard to get hard to come by like we've just gone through a drought where it was really it's really difficult to get people to come to the United States there's a lot of talent in Europe that can't make the jump and I've just happened to be ready at a time when when you know an exciting studio was opening up they're trying to do something different and I happen to just be one of those those kids that were you know ready to make the jump and and be thrown into the deep end it's quite quite an experience but it was an absolute dream come true awesome what kept you there so long I mean that's pretty simple I just steadily from project to project was able and allowed to do something that was more interesting than what I did before and of course it's also it's a great job it's I mean for the first 15 years or so I mean with exceptions of course but the core team of animators were always the same people you know you had James back see a crystal said I only had Jakob yen's he had people like that who were there all the time and so we were a group of people who were gone from movie to movie and the team like the studio was building toward something you know if for me went from being a junior animator to being a senior animator to becoming a supervising animator very quickly and then you know 12 years ago I was offered to be the head of character animation on the first half to Train Your Dragon and that was obviously an opportunity I couldn't turn down and luckily you know I didn't luckily it happened on that on that franchise and of course from that moment on How to Train Your Dragon became my baby - you know I know it's there's a lot of people who feel ownership over this for me I felt the personal investment in this and working alongside Dean the blonde bonnie arnold and you know all the people who worked on it like Nikko Marie and Pierre Aliyeva so like we created a little team we were a little team of people who loved working together and we felt that we were doing something that wasn't you know you run-of-the-mill animated movie and with every movie the impatient sort of continued to grow until now we've finally came to the end of it where we feel very accomplished I feel very accomplished for having having worked on that on these movies and having done something that I don't think is out there like that yeah are there any highlights aside from the animation the actual work like for you throughout that process are there any moments for you personally that stand out over that time I mean when the first movie came out actually I remember I think one of the biggest moment on the first movie was when I was invited to a and like one of the first test screenings where the film wasn't finished and we had just put in a boarded version of the ending where hiccup loses his leg and spoiler alert where hiccup loses his leg and and he basically is now an equal part to toothless you know they're both kind of incomplete characters and have to co-exist together and become this mutual symbiosis and seeing that previous screening and watching it with a real audience for the first time I gave me chills you know and and and then I think there's the series of highlights we're seeing the movie for the first time with John Powell's score or hearing John Powell score I remember hearing it we got like a CD or something where we could hear it and that we were blown away by that so things came together and along the way there were always these moments where we felt like wow that's that scene of that moment really came and and it culminated with on this third movie the sequence which was the first sequence we animated which we called first date which is the scene on the beach when this this weird surreal mating dance sequence takes place where hiccup is essentially surrounded the Bergerac who tells to us how to you know sort of seduce his his you know wife-to-be and and that was just that's a highlight for animators because it's entirely dialogue free and you have to tell the story through the right camera the right camera the right shot but mostly pantomime yeah about that sequence specifically since we won't spoil any of the movie here you have to watch it for that sequence if that's a lot of it some of it's in the trailer so we can talk about it mm-hmm what uh what went into like those choices there's like a lot of really funny moments yeah it's I mean like every scene every sequence every moment is a work in progress and you kind of find your way to what to a point where now you're satisfied with the scene and it's really hard to know when that moment is sometimes because we we we nudge that scene around so many times and even in its current form there were voices that said yeah I lose this shot add another shot trim it dance too long whatever added line of dialogue until we put it in front of an audience and you know it plays which is when all the voices go away generally but the way we went about the scene is obviously it starts with Dean script and and it was always the centerpiece of the movie there was a moment in the movie that Dean deliberately designed around music no dialogue and it's it was going to be always going to be a companion piece to forbidden friendship in the first movie when hiccup goes down to the beach and he essentially approaches to us for the first this was going to be the companion piece but in this case what was different is it's between two dragons and hiccup wasn't an onlooker essentially so the way we approach it obviously Dean wrote the script wrote multiple drafts there was a lot of there were at one point hiccup and Astrid were watching it unfold and I think it's when the decision was made for hiccup to do it by himself finally you you you were able to entirely focus on the interaction between the two dragons and you weren't so distracted with the dialogue between hiccup and Astrid because they both had essentially a different perspective on it you know Astrid was all for it and hiccup was hesitant at first in the first iteration and so this change is really important and we had boarded older versions different versions and they were on my the head of storyboard it some versions and and eventually the version that is in the movie was handed to a storyboard artist called Bolin boo shiva who's been a board artist on dragons too as well and an important part of our team and with some of the boards of tron and Bolin's amazing ideas of how this could unfold he found a lot of fun ideas like the whole idea that has just kind of turns into a helicopter and spray sand in through the light Fury's face or I mean there's there's basically there's a moment where you concede the scene now that you know you're going in the right direction and you keep adding to it or taking away and of course in editorial it takes turned and music gets added to it that changes it again so that scene was moved around quite a bit and then it from there I went into previous and previous had I mean camera basically had their own ideas about how the scene to play which was we want to feel the moment when finally it works and that's when the camera becomes much more fluid and alive and if you watch the sequence again you can you know that moment is when to first starts drawing with two fists stops listening to make up and he starts listening to himself everything else up to that is fairly static in terms of camera with a few exceptions but you feel that change so that then had to you know then and then of course the location also kind of restage to seeing that there's a lot of things that you think you got it in storyboards but no then once you put it in the actual set and with a camera language that you you know where camera we start thinking about camera movement as well and lens choices and things like that and then of course lighting and all that it comes later but that's when the moment where we took the scene and now it was about telling the story scene by scene through pantomime so the audience understands and essentially how you approach this is every scene has an inner dialogue like the character tells says something to the other character and toothless might say oh don't look up there you haven't seen anything you know there's a moment where she hears that hiccups up there and she turns around and can't can't see him and then she looks back to toothless and two things kind of you know barreling he looks back so we we then really with with a few animators blocked out the entire scene and that's generally how we approach those scenes which is a little different from dialogue scenes we knew what we knew that this 15 was going to be a tricky scene to animate and we really wanted to throw the top talent at the scene as well at the sequence and so what we did is we did the same thing for forbidden Frenchmen in the first movie kind of approached it so that we started basically blocking the entire sequence with a few exceptions some shots we knew were okay this is gonna be fine we know how to do this and we were maybe four or five animators who blocked the entire sequence through once and through that process we actually restage some scenes we added some shots we argued for you know kind of fleshing out certain moments and we progressed the scene forward and sent it up to editorial then looked at it in editorial it changed to sound effects of love back and forth but it was the first sequence we animated along with the scene leading into the sequence which is where the lottery leads to us out of the village but basically that scene was then sort of in its blocking form some shots at three poses others had 2025 poses we kind of animated the scene through and then started polishing it up and even distributing some shots to newer animators that just came onto the show and say hey can you take this and finish it up which is not something we generally do we generally have an animator block a scene finish a scene but in this particular case because it was such a gem and so important to the movie we wanted to do we wanted to take the best possible approach whatever it takes to make this scene magical was it like that also on forbidden friendship like he was similarly blocked how about you and yeah we did we actually that scene was already we were already a good six to eight months into production and we saw it it cost a pretty big challenge for us because when we saw Chris Sanders and I think Alessandro and Ron Borden and latinas well but mostly Chris and his boards we looked at his boards music there's no way we can do this with this character like this character is not designed to be an upright sitting googly-eyed character and then we said well why don't we challenge ourselves and the way we did that was to saying okay let's take the sequence out of the out of the production schedule and the pressure of getting it done and we just throw in one or two poses per shot and just design toothless with the the charm that Chris and Rose board had and our own ideas of this character and that's just basically do a storyboard version of the sequence and in that process we added shots we extended moments and I think the scene from layout to and through animation to final animation scene grew by like 30 to 40 seconds Wow so significantly longer and and we had support of Chris and Chris Anderson dean deblois and the producers and we just went for it and when we showed it for the first time everybody was really surprised and blown away how charming toothless can really be and that that kind of that was probably the key moment for for the success of the first movie it was doing that sequence like this and allowing us to really explore the interaction between two fists and hiccup and how hiccup falls in love with this beast and through that how we the audience fell in love with toothless which I think has now been proven you know seeing toothless out there for ten years with fans like toothless is an incredibly powerful character like there is an there's a fan base out there and the audience out there that really loves to phezzan it is because and we're obviously conscious about that the people love to us because they see their own relationship with their pets in it it's a very deep emotional connection that we have to our animals and toothless represents that that's my it's my intellectual analysis is probably something that's not as intellectual the design of toothless is pretty significantly different between the first and later movies the vision you look at like promos on the boxart and stuff is that like in part it sounds like this might have been because of that sequence like he's definitely more mean-looking in the first movie smaller eyes are like wider and much more pet like later I mean the first movie really dealt with that rights you you have to tell the the idea of two festivals it's a Night Fury dragon that hunts at night nobody's ever seen the most fierce the most dangerous dragon theories and our little ill-equipped gangly runt of the litter hiccup befriends the the worst enemy essentially and we as the audience have to understand that this character goes from has this face but they also that face and that he truly believes through compassion with this injured animal that they're not bad there there's just our idea so that that's part of it and that that process the sequence that I just described is what brought us to that other side of toothless and even though we didn't quite know when we designed to first at he was going to have that kind of range is what then proved to us the toothless can also be really cuddly cute fuzzy you know mammalian kind of creature and so I think it's that and in the novice II once once the audience knows that that characters in there to face you know became it became a little bit more that character but a lot of it had to do with the fact that we through making one movie understood what makes toothless appealing and how to physics being is appealing even when he's fierce and dangerous and in the first movie there's a lot seen that work scenes that were done where we didn't know exactly what his you know Showtime angle was you know like toothless is a really tricky character if you go 3/4 back he looks like it looks like a weird sort of deformed thing if you have certain up shots or side like we know toothless doesn't always look right that's the downside of of a complex design like if you take Mickey Mouse even though Mickey Mouse is a complexes and it's essentially a ball you know any angle you look at it it's a ball but when you have a shape that so complex is toothless head you know sometimes are certain angles that it just doesn't look like what you were what you expect that's always a trick with I mean that's a trick with certain kinds of designs and for all the other dragons for all the movies like what was the process like of picking and choosing like behaviors traits personalities like how you're finding reference like what was all of that like for all these years I mean we we very quickly developed a couple of rules for ourselves which was the initial goal was to not only create a dragon universe it's just basically based on the dragon eye dragon ideas that we have from growing up from seeing sleeping beauty and visual effects movies and there's a certain style of dragons that that you'd expect that maybe 15 years ago if you had asked the kid draw dragon that's what it would have looked like I think that's changed because of dragons because of our movies but it's basically what we did is we wanted to create a universe of species that that we all know this could be a dragon that could be we want to have a chubby one and we have the one that we want to have one that's long snake-like we want to have the classic dragon we want to have a dragon that the world has never seen and so very quickly we realized okay we basically create an animal kingdom a new animal kingdom of animals with wings that you could qualify as dragons and the way we went about this is because toothless from the beginning and also of course a lot of Nico Marley's early designs kind of resembled certain animals like the gronckle meatlug is basically a crocodile mixed with a bulldog then you go like okay well that that makes sense now did you say it you know bulldog shaped crocodile with wings you know like it that makes a lot of sense and then you go what's toothless and then the toothless that Chris and Dean wrote that we you know had to design from scratch once Chris and Dean came on to the movie because the first two years there were other directors working on the film they say they they said it should be actually this should back up the story there is that they went around from story artists to story artists as they were born in some early sequences and one of the story artists I'm sorry I can't remember his name but had a screensaver of a black panther on his on his computer and and the directors went it's it's like that I mean it's a creature that I want to touch but I also know it's gonna bite my hand off plus it's black you only see its eyes it would not be visible in the night it should be something like this and they'd there'd been a lot of design drawings around toothless and that's when I I started doing a lot of drawings myself as well and of what I think 2/5 could look like along with Niko and Gabe Hoarders who was the supervising animator of the first movie we counted together came up with what tooth is eventually looked like and then through animating this character we modified them you know into into a more appealing cute character but what I'm saying is basically every dragon is a mix-and-match of existing animals at least as inspirations and I called it to the salad mixing bowl of dragons where you throw in a number of ingredients and we would go to the point where we shoot like we would collect references and just play great play lists of toothless being the mixture of a black panther a small bird of prey a bat and salamander and you create a playlist and you enter sort of you know combine these different videos and you look at any girl like you can see that if you create and some kind of a mixture of these ingredients there's a creature there that I can recognize and that set us off on every dragon is basically inspired by a small number of animals or things like we also started throwing me in well you know skull crusher is a battle-axe mixed with a truffle pig mixed with rhinoceros and a scarab beetle and you go like that makes perfect sense you like and you see you look at that character now it's pretty clear that's where the inspirations are from so that's that's kind of how we went about yeah yeah because he's worried like his front looks like an accident yeah did that factor in there like any decisions like well a battle-axe would chop like this so he needs to yeah yeah and definitely I mean it was sort of a gerenuk Oran rhinoceros who would ran things right so but with with the front of the bat and that made it really entertaining for us and I think it's ultimately also what makes these characters appealing and entertaining because there's an idea behind every character a very clear caricature which i think is something really important in animation it's how do you how do you create something that is not just randomly invented but that is recognizable and entertaining I was compared to there's something magical when a stand-up comedian goes up on stage looks nothing like you know Trump or George W Bush or somebody who's easily to be easily caricatured and they do a few things that make us immediately recognize that that character that's being charactered that's that's magic I think that's something that is very powerful and kind of touches us in our you know guts you know it makes us laugh so so that's something I always look out for whether it's a human performance or an animal performance it's like find find the caricature even if it's dramatic or realistic you have to find something that is relatable and and that you can connect with even if it's an object you know and everything has character everything you look around everything is correct you can take two types of bobbles and they have different characters so that's I think that's really the essentially an animators talent you know there's there's understanding naturalism mechanic's mechanics locomotion and the principles of animation all that is really important but you have to get to a point where that second nature and you're doing it as you're animating and what you're really focused on is what makes this scene something that somebody would want to watch over and over not just once and say oh yeah that was really believable oh that I believed in the reality of this thing it's like what makes it fun and an entertaining and and dramatic what's the character of it that's I think what sets animation apart from you know visual effects for example or or you know just making a straight documentary of something you know this is really this is really what it's all about it's actually let's one question I wanted to back up to is you like progress career-wise and stuff and then you had opposed the hooker kind of character animation what does that mean like what are the roles what's the job yeah what's the job yeah I get asked that a lot because it sounds a little bit like I hate to Title II it sounds a little bit like you're an executive and you're in charge of character animation and it really isn't I mean there is there's of course there's studio level discussions about hiring and you know what what's our software you might want to use but I look at it as more like it's really a creative job and it's a job that depending on who does it varies a little bit because I'm a 2d animator and at the core I know I storyboard on movies i I do some design work I do a lot of translating from 2d to 3d and help the process along but essentially the way my job has two parts the first part is building digital puppet or being more precisely being the client of all those who build these digital puppets for us the drivers if you look at it like that so if making a character is making a car then I'm the driver who has to tell everybody who's working in this process I'd love to have six gears and I need to have an automatic roof and need super boosters like whatever line and I ask for a lot of things that they can go OK like we can't do that it's gonna cost too much your Ferrari needs to be a Toyota so there's that company there's a lot of conversations around what's feasible what what do you want it to look like and of course it has a lot to do with appeal and design like if if Nick Ramallah has designed fishlegs a certain way you want to make sure that the digital puppet even though it's a 3d [Music] you know thing now you have to make sure that it represents the idea that was at the core of the design and that you can do all those expressions so during you know I tell you like 15 to 18 months I work with designers the modelers the riggers and even a little bit with the surfacing team on what these characters will eventually look like and that can go down to the thickness of the lathe because when the lathe gets late a certain way I have a shadow in the eye and the eyeball and now my pupil looks smaller when I when it gets late and it doesn't have the same appeal like we've had so many conversations about stuff like that but essentially it's building building the rigs with the people I mean I'm not I don't know how to build a rig but I worked with Kevin Oakes in this case who's the head of rigging in what I'd like to have as an animator and I say that I of course then very quickly you have supervising animator then take charge of of a character and then they work closely with a rigger or character TD who works on that specific character so that's the first half and then as soon as we have these digital puppets up and running of course part of that work is what I talked about earlier which is how do you make these characters entertaining how do they behave what has the acting of tough not different than the acting of hiccup how do we make sure that hiccup is recognizable as a character from as a little boy to a five year old to 15 year old like how is that the same character so we come up with a lot of acting principles and rules per character and define these characters very very early on as we build these digital puppets we build libraries like expression libraries toothless for example had you know a good 50 different kinds of expressions that we had that we could go to go to expressions that we knew worked because once you're in production once the machine is running once you're in sharp reduction you have to be efficient and the first thing that suffers when you're on the pressure is the quality of the look of the characters the peel and and that's why you have to do all this work upfront so halfway through production now it's time to do shot shot work and my job then becomes like animation teams are structured I'm the head of animation we have seven supervising animator who each are in charge of a character and then they have teams that work with them on those characters and the animated sort of cracks switch around a little bit because not every shaft has just one character in most shots have multiple characters and my job in that process is I work with basically the right hand - Dean who who comes into animation dailies tells us what the shots are about tells us what he wants to see and then reviews the shot but his primary goal is to tell the story so he will say this works I gets the idea across and and it's it's the characters that we recognize and it moves the story forward so his job essentially is tell the story right my job becomes how do we make this the most entertaining the most fleshed out the most the highest quality so I'm essentially the one who always is on the lookout for how to make the scene entertaining and and the best quality can be so I work with animator do rounds I obviously also animate myself because I think it's really important that if you're a creative leader that you don't just talk about it that you actually know what it means to you know pick up a stylus and animate the character and show that that there's certain way of doing it and also I get it you know otherwise you just become a talking head and that can be really tricky mm-hmm for finding the entertainment and forgetting about the technical rules and set off how do you blend that when you're working with such complex things like flight making like there's so much to like the level of animation that you're working with yeah how do you not think about that stuff yeah that's the challenge I can that's where experience comes in of course but I think the most important thing is you have to do the research upfront so you don't have to spend a lot of time learning to understand how certain things work so for dragons we did this two-week flight school depending on whether there are new enemies or animators that worked on the previous movies and then flight school that was basically structured into like a few days of theory where you learn about aerodynamics you know like Bernoulli's principle which is you know the air that moves over a wing is is has it's less static than the air that moves under wing because it has a longer path to travel and fluid our moving air has less pressure than static air so basically a wing pulls the character of like stuff like that like you need to understand how that works because the the quintessential problem in animating flying characters is that contrary to a walking character who contacts the ground and you understand how the ground works and you understand there's a force that pulls a character to the ground here you can't see the force that it's that the characters interacting with which is air and air has so many different qualities air can be turbulent it can be it can have an updraft it can be you know it can come on it can be sort of there could be winds there there's small patterns Bakke patterns there's general movements you have to understand that and in order to make it credibly have to sell the the presence of air and then the additional problem which is how do you sell weight in air and how do you transition that weight from flight to ground so we have to do we have to we have to really study this and I think generally that's really important if you want to caricature something you have to understand how it works in nature in order to not create a cliche because cliches are basically repeating something that somebody else is already you know say it right and by the virtue of repeating it becomes a cliche it's not real true anymore so character is important that it's grounded in reality and so all these animators basically did simple and the part that I didn't didn't even talk about yet is the flapping of a wing the wing beat itself is such a complex FK chain that you have to understand because the core so that the default would be to do this right just kind of a wave mouth motion but it's it's a really complex rotational movement so understanding that it was really important so animators did a flapped first and there was like a three day exercise just a wing doing the flap then the second exercise was flying statically like along a helicopter basically imagine if a helicopter point the camera out of this out of the helicopter and just film a dragon flying and that that was the exercise about sell air like show me air even though I can't see it and then the third exercise was a takeoff of our landing where the character had to land or take off from there certain beats and you know sequences of locomotion that happened at every take of an every landing and in order to do that right you have to study it and then do it once and once those animators were ready you can also allow us also to do one thing which is you could kind of see who naturally is skilled at such complex mechanics and animators were not necessarily interested or excited about this and that we also then steered casting on the movie a little bit that way so we put a lot of dragon experts you know like Bill Diaz or a leader on top bass who did amazing dragon stuff towards those shots and others we kept them more on the human performances that like training process and learning all that but then it's trying to be entertaining once that's understood how often would you break rules or like allow like yeah we're gonna forget about like did you ever have to oh all the time yeah yeah I mean generally I think animations generally like this ik there's no hard and fast rule how to do something if it works oh my god by God I can you know have the character fly backwards if it works you know if it's entertaining so these principles and all these things that you learn you use them when it doesn't work like it so they're fallback rules so I think an anime should follow its instance if you have something that you visualize in your in your head and you believe that it's this is something that's gonna really work you have to do it you have to get it out of the system so you know ultimately my job is sitting in front of a piece of animation whether it's blocked or finished and I follow my gut instinct and maybe my experience as an animator and I tell myself that's working or that's not working or it's working but I think it could be better and bye and that's where you have to be as a supervising animator in the head of animation I think the most important thing is you have to know pretty quickly what are the two or three most important things that would make this better I think the worst thing is supervising animator can do is let me just start throwing all the things at you that I come through my mind starting with exaggerated that pinky here has a spacing problem like that that's the wrong way to go about it because you have to always think of you have to take it in the pyramid approach right you have to start with the foundation gave the big notes first don't worry about all this other stuff you will have a chance to say those things later and if you don't have a chance most likely didn't matter and every time I have this experience every time I watch a movie finished on screen finally late with the effects and everything and I look at it and I go like there's a lot of things in here that I worried about that in the context of the movie do not matter that and that's not to say you shouldn't try and aim for the best version possible but in order to be a good creative leader you also have to keep in mind in the back of your head if you're aiming for action you're probably going to clip this animators wings you're gonna make him feel like he's not really owning the shot and you have to know that as long as I can get it into the ballpark it's going to be great I just have to make sure that those big things that we'll get it into the ballpark are being said not the little things that will probably matter only to experts that's nothing I think you should forget about how your peers will look at your animation you should think about how will my ten-year-old son or my mother see this and will they be entertained by it we something which wastes so much time on things that are essentially technicalities I think those things are really important to keep in mind and I think also to just come back to how do you make a shot that entertaining yeah I think there's a there's a way to go about this which is listen to the line of dialogue or watch your scene lay out and turn the sound off and just think about what's the most obvious choice here like what comes to mind write it down do it a couple of drawings act it out if you will fold it up put it aside and then say okay now I'm gonna give me ten other versions ten other options for this shot what could it what else could it be could he walk could he like could you do a somersault could he like you and you have to kind of force yourself you have to crack that and you have to force yourself to say what's the craziest version of this shot what's the version that will never be approved and you have to go to those places and then slowly come back because only then do you realize that your original idea is either absolutely right there's no other version or oh my god I didn't think about how retained and and simplistic that original idea was it's too obvious I think we artists have to challenge ourselves to give to give the viewer something that they didn't expect Robert McKee I said in the storybook which i think is something really great to give the audience what they want but not how they expected I think that's a really important thing so that's how you find you know what what is essential about the scene and not be locked down with technicalities yeah that's awesome I like the 10 ideas make it happen they forcing creativity yeah unless you have found those 10 ideas don't even don't even go into blocking you know leave it like force yourself and even if you get into writer's block you know you can't find those ideas find somebody to give you an idea ask other people how they would do the scene that's something that I think we we also get stuck on all the time so I think we're - we're too focused on our own egos you know like I want to come up with the idea that's gonna make this shot great so that at the premiere I can tell myself that was my idea even though that's a very satisfying feeling even if you did a shot that none of the ideas were from you and you found them all from your friends you are the one who you are the shepherd of that shot you're the person who made that happen I I think that's we are in a team sport and we have to make sure that we use all the resources that are there don't don't limit yourself I mean there's so many things that I have done you know some of the best work that I've done there are ultimately not a combination of other people's ideas I think that you have to you have to just embrace that unless you're a genius and for people who like I mean out of the studio and you don't have yeah regular core group of people that you trust and whatever you know what are some things that come to like when you were a student if you had to follow the same kind of ideas like what would you have done now I guess with different tools but like how would you can I get that feedback and use that for growth I mean you know there's there's inspiration all around us all the time I mean you know there's so many ways to go about finding the right idea if that's what you're asking I mean obviously your school mates you know like just because somebody's not necessary great animator doesn't they don't have great ideas so you have to find people that you trust and you have to kind of get out of your shell and share share those ideas share your ideas even if they're not good you gotta get them out of the system so I I mean I'm I I really realized that pretty quickly for example when I was the Goblin I had two or three co2 friends that I said what do you think of this how do you feel about that and but I remember I was also oftentimes I was just held back by the fact even though that I I think that's a feeling to find us like I always wanted to impress with my scenes I want to okay I'm gonna blow these people away with what I'm gonna do now that's a really good feeling to have that's like that if that's your if that's what drives your engine what makes you work an hour longer or you know wake up in the middle of the night to do something that's an excitement that's a positive feeling right it's like oh my god I have this idea and I'm not gonna tell anybody about it you can do that I mean maybe that's another idea just fold up but to ask other people about ideas or find more ideas than that and even if you know deep inside that's the thing if you have that feeling if you feel that feeling that nugget I mean I generally feel that every scene should you should get that feeling at some point you go like oh that that half blink or that's like cocking of the head is what's going to make this so special you have to do it you know at least you have to try it out I think if you're going into short uninspired you don't quite know how it's going to be it's probably not going to be a great team and probably everybody's gonna be able to see it so you have to force yourself to get to that point where that feeling is coming up where you go like oh this is gonna be it's gonna be so sweet you know and and I you know the last resort which would also be the first resort is pop in the jungle book or watch any see any animated movie where that you know you know melt call or you know any of the nine old men have animated on you you're gonna get some ideas you know how to make this just pop off the screen like there's not a lot of information out like how to animate drag into flight and like you've talked a little bit about some of the mechanics that go into like learning it do you have any stuff you want to share the people who were animating flying creatures yeah you have such a wealth of knowledge oh yeah yeah sure I mean I think the FIR it is basically a way to go about it right the first problem you have to solve you could basically take a ball maybe stick to two flat shapes in the side and you don't even have to worry about your character yet and just find your path and make it feel like it's not on a rail it's not like air doesn't function like a ground or or water that may be maybe more like water but it's but it's even less reactive than that so if you move your character through space don't think of it as something that's sliding through space it's drifting and skidding and and turning there is a moment of a delay between for example if Dragan banks before that takes effect and map your frame might be different that but everything's a little sluggish everything is a little bit delayed so that's problem number one how does a how does this volume this with weight that's pulled by gravity in pulled up by by lift how is that volume moving through this liquid essentially it's gas right so you can treat it like a liquid and how dense is that liquid so that's problem number one that's this first thing you have to solve and the second thing you have to solve is a dragon or a flying creature is actively doing something to rub move down fly faster or fly slower so you have to think about how that cause and effect works so if a dragon flaps its wings down probably a little past the halfway mark maybe down here in the wings were down here the body will lift up but pretty quickly we'll have the counter reaction which is the the upbeat will push the body back down right but generally when a beat is strong there is two-thirds up and then it comes one-third 100% up and then maybe 50% back down so it's generally rising right unless it's a slow frappe then it's just kind of an up-and-down so you have to deal with that's just the flapping but then it's also each wing has an angle of attack which means if this wing gets tilted up that wing gets lifted right if the wing gets filtered down that wing gets pulled pulled down so this banking is it's something that you have that is actively controlled by a wing so okay now all right now that the dragon or the bird or whatever it is is actively pushing himself through this liquid that we talked about earlier and then the next thing is to make it entertaining like it's just that like there's flourished as rhythm there's like a can go flap flap flap flap you know there could be a timing to it that makes it interesting if it's just flap flap dive time it's just boring so just did the general you know things that you do with every animated scene which is give it rhythm give it a flourish find something that's that's that's fun you know do something surprising what if the what if your bird all sudden does a 360 you know a barrel roll or so if then you find those ideas on top of that and something really important to know also is it's not just the wings that drives how a bird flies or a dragon it's the tail it's the the angle of the head it's the body position a bird flaps differently when he's sort of flying statically at a 45-degree body angle the flaps then all of a sudden are more forward so the direction of the flap changes so it's a lot yeah but I think you have to do it you have to go about it solves one problem at a time start with something simple a little bit little you know approach it approach more difficult subject most importantly I think don't animated a flaw don't animate a flying creature unless you've at least freeze-frame through some great Eagle footage or cranes or whatever creatures out there yeah I think you have to do some study in in real life just to just get just free strain through it you understand so much visually so much faster I think that's really important and specifically live-action reference not necessarily animated flight I mean I always start with live-action real-life nature or humans or I observe again because I think otherwise you do a character of the character and you very likely going to copy things that are essentially off or weird I think I think that's important one last thing I forgot to ask you how is your 2d experience helped you through everything do you still use drawing and so on because people always say do I need to do I need to know drawing what if I can't draw to be an animator now so on so on but you've done both so I feel like you have a lot of I mean I certainly don't think you need it I think you can be a great computer animator and never having drawn a line I think you have to have an eye you have to develop an eye for but you know like their sculptures a sculptors that have never drawn and they're amazing sculptors the stop-motion animators are not great draftsman they're amazing stuff stop-motion or this I certainly think it helps like it helped me but where it helps mostly is in learning to be what's an appealing drawing like what makes what makes a character's eyes appealing what's an appealing shape do how do how does a mouth shape be simplified in more stylized and then you know screen compositions I mean by drawing you you forced to learn those things I don't think it's absolutely a necessity but it helped me a great deal because obviously as a supervising animator or as a there's a whole car you do a lot of draw overs I do a lot of draw or you paint overs where actually paint over so that I use the color of the of the of what's on the image and not just a red line that sometimes you can't quite tell is it really better but when you paint over you really can tell this before this after it's exactly the same colors this clearly looks better so that's it helped me a great deal so I would highly recommend if you have some interest in drawing in some drawing skills to do to do at least do spend some time doing you know live drawings I think that's really helped the helps for live drawing helps you understand proportion and gesture and you know breaking angles three dimensionality it understand it helps you understand a lot of things but I don't think it's a necessity it's another tool yeah I think I think so it's I definitely see that 2d animators have a slightly different way of looking at an image at a pose and you know but I I mean we have some great animators at DreamWorks that are not necessarily great draftsman that let's see what's appealing and what's not appealing I don't think it's a requirement but it's certainly a great tool yeah well we have questions here from a bunch of people okay yeah I'm curious and if you want to submit questions for future interviews go to the links in the description I'll have details there but yeah that's a thing now very first time we've done sourced questions how do you keep creativity really active when you're working in the same environment same studio for years the same project how you keep having new ideas motivating yourself and your team and how's it feel on a regular basis I've never had a problem with being motivated to be creative because I I lose myself in my work very quickly and I've had many experiences where I worked on not so great movie but the scene itself is still interesting like there's I think you can make almost any kind of scene interesting for yourself you know I know this is Suns maybe a lot of people go if you if you worked on the shot that I'm working on right now your brain would be it would be imploding I get that I've had that too and but there's always something that I think you can challenge yourself with and sometimes it is about getting it done that like create yourself a little schedule of how to go about this shot and get through it and I mean there's moments where you may not be inspired because you're just doing something that's kind of grinding but in general I always feel like there's something to be found that's interesting and even if and if you really find yourself incapable of getting motivated then I think it's time to get out it's time to go find something else like I really believe that and that's that nobody will ever tell you that like no supervising animator or Hoka or director will ever tell you no it's really time for you to go find something else because I don't think you're inspired nobody will ever tell you that everybody will always that's corporate America and I think it's good that everybody generally will try and encourage you to find a way to be helpful to the project and tell you that they believe in you that you're gonna get there because there is most likely always away and it's not a supervisor's job to tell you you know what there's really no way for you to get motivated it's really something you have to find in yourself and then I think when you're out there you're gonna realize very quickly there's a lot of other places to go that may not be may not have the same kind of status or the same kind of salary but there's things that are really in and I think it's really important for you to be creatively inspired like animation is too hard and too time-consuming to do something that's just a job like it just cannot be just a job it just can't I believe that very very strongly that unless you're inspired unless you're having not even having fun but you're enjoying getting to the result and then when you see it you go like okay I feel chief something here that's that I'm proud of if you cannot get that feeling over a certain amount of time I mean not every shot will give you that but generally that's the feeling you have to achieve so for me it's always I find something that I can caricature I find something I find find inspiration in real life and if I have something that's really grinding I generally do something on the side I try and you know fill a sketchbook or do a design of a character or plan ahead of what I could do next between after this movie what will I do next would it be great to do some storyboarding you know which I did I went from animation to and supervising to storyboarding and it some character design like trying to sort of bring your own skill level up that's also something that could be incredibly inspiring that can get you through some you know less inspiring times I think it's worth it I think it's really key that you challenge yourself and move yourself forward creatively and in terms of skills by by finding things you're interested in but you're not doing yet you know sometimes it's learning a program it's learning a certain software and you'll find some craters satisfaction in there and but it's important that you recognize yourself only you yourself will recognize whether you're stuck in some kind of a loop that you can't get out oh you talked a little bit earlier this actually works for this about being the client for the model isn't the mowers and riggers and things like that what are some really important things that you you need to have in the model or in the rig I sure that's a really that's that's a that's a tough question but I think if your original design at the base is appealing your job is to maintain that appeal actually improve it so you have to find a way to make it better from what you have even if the source at the beginning is amazing then it's about not losing it and as it goes into three dimension it will be incredible and so the first most important thing you have to have appeal yeah but the character has to be appealing and you know Simpson characters can be really appealing even though there are many beauties and but it's a better example like deliberately unappealing characters are appealing to our valence can be appealing appeal is maybe sometimes interpreted it's not just the Disney princess appeal it's appealing can be a word that like you have to love like it has to be just something you want to look at that's key number one and then in the model of course topology becomes really important because you want to be able to hit all those expressions and if the topology is not there to get you those shapes you got to go back and fix the topology it's not always possible but I generally spend quite a bit of time with with with the team and just discussing I guess it's the right topology and I don't know enough about topology but I asked questions about that can you achieve these kinds of shapes that are maiming for so then this you know you want some kind of fleshiness you want to be able to create those shapes and you want that create movement I think the model and the rake should allow you to if you move controls there should be chain reactions like you want to have things push other things and you don't want a lot of dead zones so things should like if this area here does never move in the rig when you smile and it just comes really stiff and that's really hard for an animated to break so rate should really rig and the mall should really give you a chance as an animator to push things around all the while maintaining volume and design so you shouldn't be able to just randomly push things around and then the design can be something completely different although there are characters worth where you want that if a character is kind of morphing or it's sort of the Grinch you know who hours and has this giant mouth with that's part of the fun then that repeat it there too but so you want to have a character that has that is fleshy that is it doesn't lose the design that doesn't have a lot of dead zones and and that's how I think that's how I approach it is generally make sure those things carry through and of course there's a lot of like rules that I gave myself you know for example if the fingers are too skinny and you can't do a faced and you always see gaps between the fingers you can never do a good fist so there's things like there there's hundreds of little things like that that I've personally accumulated over the years things that I saw on the animations I was like I wish I was able to do this fist and I can't do it I can't close these gaps it never looks like a real fist that's it's a very common example that happens often so you have to kind of look out for those things as you as you as you go through the process you have to kind of know what problems could arise at the end of the journey and for those who haven't gone through this process I think the way to go about this is watch animated movies and watch good animated movies watch your Disney Pixar DreamWorks only blue sky movies and but also watch some lesser movie student films and see what the difference is like how they taste solve it and how did the student film solve it and you can kind of see okay they did some things here to achieve this that this student film doesn't have like pink necks are really problematic for example like really skinny necks really long skinny necks that become like all something like the shoulders don't interact with the head and you can't do certain things you can like if you can't do this with a character that's incredibly limited for an animator like a limiting for an animator or for example the length of the lower leg to an upper leg if if you can't just translate your character down and a character sits on its heels a human character you're going to have a problem because a lot of a lot of the reference that you're going to shoot for your scene you know you're gonna have to kind of cheat your way around it to achieve it so make your life make animators lives easier as you build the characters I could talk about this for hours I saw so many things Dawn's about reading what advice would you give students coming right out of school that are trying to get a job and I think this one I think we could break up into like would you tell students whose reels maybe aren't there yet and then some who they're very close mm-hmm I mean I think the number one thing that studios are looking for and it depends a little bit on the studio obviously if you're doing an advertising company or so it's different than big giant features to you but I can only speak for this feature studios number one we're looking out for is what's this animators potential for being a great actor and performer and a person who can find really surprising ideas so then the second thing is does he or she understand the principles of animation is a technique technically on a level where we could put this animator in in on a scene or the Stu's animator need to go through some more training that depends a little bit on what what what the studio is looking for in terms of hiring but number one advice I have if don't just focus on being technically good focus on doing something that's entertaining even if it's just a really tiny little scenes start small a fun walk cycle that don't just do a generic walks I could find that walk psycho than his character like go out and look at different people and watch spend ten minutes of 30 minutes at the bus or the train station and watch people walk and find out okay that's the most entertaining walk I'm going to do that walk in my shot that's important so then the same goes for little performance you can do you can take a three-second Jim Carrey clip and do something really entertaining really funny with a mediocre rig and it's entertaining so you show that with people who are watching these layers that you're you have you want to be entertaining you don't want to just be hyper realistic of course if you want to go too into visual effects and you wanted to creat your animation then of course you should do that so that's I guess another advice is compare yourself to what those people do in the positions that you want to be in and try and slowly approaches up to that nobody's expecting you to do a 30-second scrap you know an entertaining piece of animation that would be insane because if you if you were able to do that you'd be hired already you don't need to do this go through your school so I think that's that's kind of the key thing and then people who are really close I guess just be persistent in but be persistent but not annoying like there's some people who kind of cross the line of how how often they send their was real how many times they write you an email about please look at my real you just have to kind of you have to be somebody that even the recruiters want to hire you know like somebody who's a a person that people want to work with you to collaborate with so if you're to persistence that's also not great so but but but be persistent like oh go through your hit them up send your real update yuria once your reals done and you submitted it keep going to your next test or your next short film keep working update the real regularly and resubmit it when it's updated you know and and I think one lesson that I learned I think is really important I am I was graduating right when Pixar was working on Toy Story 1 and for me there wasn't even in because I was training to be a 2d animator to do computer animation and that happened multiple times in my career where I was just sort of kind of blind to all the other opportunities they're out there because I have a certain idea set in my mind I really want to work at you know DreamWorks or Pixar don't do that like look at all the opportunities that that are there and you are gonna find things that you're going to like and maybe there is a couple of detours and eventually if you're good at what you do when you keep working at it you're going to end up in a place where you were really happy but if you're just set on I must be a wet digital animator and do work on these high end you know visual effects movies but you're not quite there yet you're gonna you're gonna lose a lot of time whereas you could have just done this amazing commercial and then go to this you know visual effects movie in France and from there go to the next thing like people open for all these opportunities that are out there don't just lock yourself into one path a lot of people ask about the major few studios and that's kind of a laser focus but that's not all there is and like there's there's a there's other things and then be like once you get there you're not done like there's still other things you might want to do so like right what do you what do you think about I think that's really important like statistically speaking you know the the greater you that are out there trying to become animators there's only a certain amount of people that are going to find these jobs they're going to get into those studios and I'm sure there's a lot out there that will will but not everybody will so you have to be honest with yourself thank you yes everybody says if you have if you have good friends they'll tell you truthfully what they think of your work but nobody's out there to crush somebody or say like you will never make it and of course nobody knows whether whether or not you will ever make it because you you have not evolved and you have not had the chance maybe to get the right training and maybe there's a talent inside of you that gets there and of course that's entirely possible and also maybe highly that you the talent is in you but I think if you set yourself if you set your goals to limit it and you kind of narrow your search only for those things you're you you could possibly be stuck in situations that you don't want to be in or you are closing you know your your view point to other opportunities and like when I from my perspective how I analyze the industry of course a there's a lot of people who want to do animation I mean a lot of Studios from the big studios to the smaller production houses you were all one I create their own IP and make their own movies and series and there's a lot of players out there that probably the world hasn't even heard of yet that possibly will become really successful probably not all of them but there will be some so you might be approached by Studios that are going to be incredibly successful and you dismiss it for I've never heard of this studio you know and then also one thing that's incredibly encouraging for animators per se animation is exploding into other territories from VR to AR to gaming to you know animated series and by Syria I mean like you know assistants there's going to be so much there's so much animation that's going to be needed out there that there's not possibly enough qualified talent out there to fill all those positions but if everybody wants to be a Pixar animator and nothing else all these jobs will go to people probably not as talented and so I think you really have to look at the market with an open eyes because I I'm sure there are some big companies out there that are pursuing what the next type of entertainment is and there's going to be some really exciting things and we're all going to go oh my god why did I not get in on this early on when it was I mean just think about app development on the smart phones I remember the first app I saw was somebody who designed a beer-drinking app and all he could do is that all I could do is filled liquid it looked like beer and I think that person whoever developed this made a ton of money and now app development is one of the biggest businesses out there you know in terms of digital new businesses it's all actually it's already old and so there's going to be a lot of new things that animators are going to be needed so we have to be really open open to those possibilities yeah I truly believe that it's really important that animators and artists are stay stay upstate honest with yourself like ask yourself how does it compare to the best out there don't I think a big mistake that a lot of people making even within the companies when they want to get promoted or they're asking for a chance to be a supervisor or character lead or something they compare themselves with the lower level talent in those positions rather than comparing themselves to the top talent in those positions because I think in in order to be moving up in the industry you have to compare yourself to the best and you have to be honest with yourself am i there or am I not there if you feel like you're there but you don't get the opportunity then go somewhere else if you're not getting the opportunity that I think that's really important to be true to your be honest with yourself about that and but also don't let it crush you if you feel like you're not there because again you don't know like all sudden something clicks and some opportunity gets opened up and some aspect of this craft that you're really good at that others aren't good at and you get an opportunity and I believe strongly that positivity floats up like being an optimist and positive and believe in in your evolution and your and your your ability to get better along with having open eyes to what else is out there you were going to find a great path and you're going to be really satisfied with where that's going I like that how fast do animators need to work on productions that allow them to build enough time to still polish do the planning what's the timeline look like I think it varies a little bit from studious studio How to Train Your Dragon 3 the animators stayed about five and a half feet in average per week so so that considering some of the complex shots we had in a movie where you had 15 you know dragons in the shots or maybe an animator would do that at 2 or 3 feet a week to some of the senior animators who would go 10 15 feet a week so I think an average you should do about you know if a 5 second shot should take you about a week but of course if you have a 15 second shot that should take you 3 weeks I like the shorter the shot the harder it gets to hit it is to hit those numbers but as a student that I wouldn't concern myself too much with that I would I would just focus on quality and focus on being efficient and moving forward I think the best animators are the most effective animators are the ones that are to come up with an idea they think about it long and hard what is the version that I want to do then they sit down and they block through the shot without stopping they don't second-guess themselves they just do it then they take a moment they look at it to go have a coffee they look at it a few times and then go all right I'm gonna fix these five things they go and do it some people like I created lists for myself I looked at my shot it took an half an hour either you know 70 80 percent chart and I create lists of all things I want to fix and then I I go down the list and don't do not look at the shot because what this is a big difference between 2d animation and computer animation because you can play all the time you can watch it all the time and loop it over and over to the point where now you desensitize to what the shot actually looks like you don't even see it anymore and you start looking at all the things that could be wrong that nobody ever sees so you have to make sure that you our ties the most important things and that when you sit down and work you sit down work don't be distracted like procrastination is a really dangerous thing for an animator but yeah generally I'd say five feet a week you know five five seconds a week with a single single character or two characters is sort of the goal but I know that on certain movies that came out recently they did less footage because the because maybe the technique was a little bit different different and other studios go a little slower and I was going faster so it depends and for those who don't know a feet a foot to 16 frames so it's basically two thirds of a second gotcha animation is hard and mentally in cognitive intense what are some tips to maintain focus not procrastinate and just stay in the zone yeah that's it's a challenge I mean everybody is everybody's challenged with that some some less than others more but you have to have a rhythm you have to you have to force yourself into this and some do it by blocking time say okay these two hours I'm not going to walk away from my desk then I'm gonna take a break and then I'm going to work again I think one thing really important really great advice is do not check your emails or give yourself specific hours when you check your emails before 9:00 before lunch at 3:30 and at the end of the day do not look at your email do not go online put that stuff away then some people need music to be in a bubble I always want to be in the bubble so I put on music headphones and I play quite loud so that I stay in that zone and I'm enjoying myself I'm enjoying I don't feel like I need anything others put on a show or something that keeps their brain entertained Milt Kahl said people who are animating me with music I can't remember where to use but something pretty pretty bad like he needed silence I I think it depends on the person I think you know I definitely think it's a good music score a score of a good film that you know will get you in the zone but I think you have to really be you have to be you have to give yourself goals by this time I will have achieved this I will have blocked to frame 240 and you really hit that you try and really hit that even if it's I think the biggest enemy in getting stuff done is perfection like trying to make everything perfect and second-guess everything do that at the end fix it at the end and I think a new have you told me have some workflow videos stick with the workflow like you have to have a workflow I'm going to shoot graph think about I shall shoot reference do some drawings once I have that I block through my shots on eighths or something or I just do the body blocking or whatever whether you're layered or posted pose or or some people just do like I'm gonna do first some drawings directly on the computer and I'm gonna hit those poses and find define the moments when you say now I'm gonna edit what I did you have two separate editing and improving what you have and going through and doing something those are two separate processes and when you start mixing those things up you you meander and you start spending a lot of time and I think the other thing particularly if you're I mean obviously if you're Laird animator you have to go from the inside out and you have to layer from the beginning but don't don't spend too much time perfecting curves and then also don't spline your shot too soon because if you spline your shot too soon you're gonna get lost in the fact that something doesn't move properly so keep your keys on the same frames don't offset too soon let go but also not too long obviously you can also be in blocking mode for too long and you try and make your perfect perfect blocking and then you put spline and you go oh my god that's not at all what I wanted so what I do is I shoot reference and do drawings at the same time I first thing I do when I get a shot is I open the shot I put one posing just to understand the lens effect on the character and work compositionally is there from there I do my reference or my drawings generally both once I have that I block through my shot without looking at it in steps the least amount of poses I need to tell the story and I DENTSPLY and then turn turn it to spline just to see how it moves are there any errand keys or weird you know game balls or whatever it might be whatever it could be you want to know what it is that what it looks like but don't do anything about it then break it down break down more keys go on for some 8 8 whatever however you want to go about it if you have reference and you sort of match reference to do that but then once you're through the process again look at it again it's blind but don't do anything about it too soon so you kind of go back and forth cool and then polish up the show what was your most troublesome shot through the entire Dragon franchise and the one that you enjoyed the most the hardest shot I think I did was the shot in dragons to where hiccup and toothless face claw jumper and the mother for the first time and she flies around them and then opens up cloud romper opens up the double wings for the first time it's the reveal that it's actually not just a - said - winged dragon but a four winged dragon and there's a section in there where I basically had to match the top wing to the bottom wing and make it feel like one wing whereas there really - and then have it feel like feel I can read as the second wing separates I think that was probably the technically most challenging shots because of that and you know for complex flight complex camera actually not you sorry there's one more that was harder and that was in dragons one there's a shot where [Music] Astrid falls from beings just saved from being sucked back into the Red Death his mouth she falls down to this comes in swoops her up catches her he looks back she sees her smiling and then there's a shot which is the really tricky one where he flies at full speed and then drops her off she runs to a stop the camera pushes in the back of the head and he flies away back to attacking the Red Death and finally sort of luring him away luring him away from the island I was probably even harder because the that one of the hardest parts about flying shots is the camera is its own thing like it dictates the spacing of your character and the camera went from full speed to a slowdown speed on the ground so essentially the character gets separated from the cat from the camera all those shots on into on the entire franchise were probably the hardest shots to do because you really frame by frame spacing and and of course all the parenting like she flips or upside down holds on you know from the hand to the feet to the pudding and putting her on the ground and that changed I was really tricky but to be fair none of these shots now that the hardest shots that I've done or anywhere near as hard to some of the shots that the guy stayed in dragon Street like near on topaz did a shot at the end of dragons 3 that you'll hopefully see which is shouldn't give too much away but this basically toothless flying around the light fury and then passing back and forth forth characters yeah I don't know if you know which shot I'm talking about the I think I did I mean it's insanely complicated and likely Ron and Bill Diaz and few people Dane starting her and Thomas prompt those guys have done such complex shots like the B wildebeest fight the big battle the attacking the battle with the were flying behind the dragons that that was Iran's I mean I'm probably not doing justice because there's a lot of other people who really did difficult shots so my shots were nothing compared to those shots nothing there's some there's some real like some people did some magic to get the shots even done do we even get the shots in the can when we see some of those shots when we saw some of those shots in previous we went like this is ridiculous like no animator should have to go through this so so so so challenging like a little dragons therapy group it completely completely I think we're gonna have we're gonna have battle scars from this for years to come how about the one you're most like you enjoyed the most you're most proud of like the happiest one across the piece there's a lot I mean any time any time I was able to me toothless I really really had a great time I mean one of the shots that I really love that makes me laugh every time I see a there's a shot and maybe it's also because I I suggested this idea to Dean as we were driving to a lunch and it's the shot of in dragons - there's a shot where toothless as are those two as you take the first one is there's a short word toothless looks at cloud chump who just stole a fish from him and he looks at him lovingly and then cloud Chomper barfs up a fish and toothless eat it like excitedly I was shot that I really really enjoyed and that's the one ever I suggested this idea to Dean and he was like that sounds great let's do it and in dragons 3 the shot I think there's two shots that get a really big laugh that is actually in the trailer Dane did this amazing shot of the big mating dance shot where he sort of pops his head out he does is we and that's a really amazing shot and I think that's probably the most beloved shot in Dragons three that he gave and I had the chance to do the shot right before where he tells toothless how to do the chicken dance and toothless then does it and walks around the lights fury did that shot that that was so much fun to do it's just like it's it's the best feeling when you do a shot and then every time you hit play you have to chuckle well you know like this is really this is really cute and really entertaining it's sort of surreal yeah highlights I mean there's many more but if you have to if you force me to pick it to let's say goes okay this should be making everyone want to go back yeah or maybe by the time this video comes out I think you I can say will be out by the time I release this you haven't seen it go if you were looking and reviewing people's work and people were animating dragons and you were looking at it for hiring what would you be looking for that you want to make sure they get right and dragon flight yeah or in any other animation if you have anything in particular I mean I guess I'd uh you know the first thing out of God for is like is this animator just his animator have a sense of entertainment can he entertain can he make something believable and credible but also this is their spark in it is there something that's a little unexpected or I mean generally you go people you know you must we must hire this guy his people who go like how do you I didn't I honestly had how did he go about this like what was the what brought him to this idea and how they did he or she find this idea and that happens all the time you know like that's really that's really out of left field I love it this is this is really cool that's generally a great indicator that this person will do very well in a big studio so that may be the first thing again we hired some people for dragons specifically that we felt like could handle the complexity of some of those shots that are almost visual effects shots that really complex creature shots so we definitely did look at as well as you know is is this person capable of handling some really challenging technical shots and so but but there's always a variety of people that get hired and they're people get hired for different strengths but I would say number one is it's this person entertained me that gives me the entertaining cool and is there anything any common flight animation mistakes that you see that you would want people not to do or to learn more about so that they don't I mean it's like school there's an entire you know hour of where I talk about examples of things not to do number one is and that is generally not the animators fault is birds or dragons cannot take up a take off straight up they have to have thrust there has to be airflow over the wings before they can actually lift off that's why planes have to speed before they take off now of course a bird or a dragon can jump and then create some create some some airflow over the wings but that's problem number one second second problem is the characters not flying through air it's running through water or some other weird liquid so it's all like in paths and tracks and then the third biggest mistake is the way a flap works I mean I mean not to say you can't do something really silly and completely ridiculous and it makes you laugh which is great like I always love what they did in horton hears a who that there is a character camera members named the vulture character like fruits totally ridiculous and it completely works because it's entertaining so again entertaining is more important than believability it depends a little bit on the show of on the style of the show but yeah so I think those are the three big big mistakes well I remember you talking about because you guys didn't like draw overs and all the stuff that I wanted to point out was the having air in the wings they like having flat wing is it like they'll bend or twist and it looks just like a flat mm-hmm simulated paper thingy yeah so do you do like I don't know drawing passes like are there anything that you would if you would I mean that's probably the number one drawing draw over a drawing that I did which is the shape of the wing has to be slightly curved I mean from profile right so yeah this is called the airfoil which creates that lift but even a wing from a side it's not a flat thing in this it's it's it's there's it's under pressure total pressure from below it's on the pressure through the air fully it's naturally anatomically curved in order to create lift so that's like dish and and then of course the tip of the feathers there there's there's air pressure pushing them up so there's there's this s shape in a wing both from side view and from front view yeah so what that what is that wing shape looks like is something that I did a lot of drawings for but it's also part of flight school so most animators immediately understood the problem that you know that a flat wing shape poses and it's not done any Crichton shapes generally you know you have to look for if anything is on there a certain kind of pressure whether it's gravity or air pressure or water pressure shapes become dynamic just if they're hardly ever flat or straight or you know there's certain a certain curvature to it that is all the questions I have over there any final word you want to leave people with I mean I would say thank you for going to see how to train your dragon 3 the hidden world I take it that you will or I trust that you will you won't be disappointed and then for all you animators out there I'll just say it's a craft that always evolves and what makes this job great is that you never stop learning you go from animating rats in the sewers of London to animating horses and in the American you know wilderness to animating you know dragons or you know fluffy animals whatever you will be there's always something new and there's always something to learn and when you work in a studio whether it's a big studio or a small studio you're always exposed to people who come from different backgrounds and different skill sets so what's amazing about animations you're always exposed to something different you learn something that you didn't know before and that's something I embrace that's something I love and I I'm sure you love it too and so don't ever think you need to be at a point where oh now I learned it now I'm good enough to do this job that just never happens and that's what makes it great so I hope you enjoy learning and I hope I can learn something from you when your project comes out because I'm gonna be the first one freeze framing through your animation and go like an how on earth did he or she do that that's pretty impressive so I'm looking forward to seeing your work awesome thank you so much for watching thank you so much for being on the show thanks so much it's been a pleasure I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 37,723

Keywords: how to train your dragon animation, httyd animation, httyd3 animation, simon otto interview, how to animate dragons, how to animate birds, toothless animation, dragon animation, httyd hidden world animation, httyd hidden world toothless beach scene, toothless lightfury dance, simon otto animation, simon otto dreamworks, animation mentor, dreamworks animation httyd, animation advice, 3d animation workflow, 3d animation tips, animate dragons, how to train your dragon 3

Id: O1GgIjVM8Vw

Length: 96min 22sec (5782 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2019