Following an Animation recipe

I find a lot of parallels in my life and work, in this instance it was how I approach cooking.  My wife will read recipes more as a source of inspiration, a suggestion of what’s ahead, whereas I approach it with a mindset closer to the scientific method.  I only cook with recipes, I don’t deviate from them and read them linearly, especially the first time through.  After the meal is served, I’ll note what worked and what didn’t for the next time.  The process has caused many eye rolls from my family.  This mirrors my relationship with animation and rigging.

A recipe is an apt metaphor of how I learned how to script ages ago.  I wanted to animate my own characters, but didn’t know how to rig.  So when I was shown how to rig, or explored my own ideas, I’d write down the steps to take.  These steps were explicit and linear, so that the next time I needed to say, rig an arm, I’d follow these steps exactly.  Once I learned how to transfer these steps to MEL with variables and context, I built smaller scripts I could run to create these rigs faster, allowing more time for animation and consistency in the rigs themselves.  From there I was off, seeing how the rig worked once I started animating.

Learning to Rig an Arm in MEL

Once I find something that could be improved, I’d go back into the listed steps and swap out the single item.  Again, the scientific method crops up, changing a single variable, running the test again and noting the results.  This slow, incremental change or approach is grinding for some, but soothing for me.  Progress is able to be tracked while errors stay in a narrow range.  It's a mindset I’ve tried to maintain on the projects, large or small that I’ve worked on.  Most projects provide an intrinsic value, such as shots for your reel, experience and money, but these are not always guaranteed.  I’ve done so many projects that were solely for money, living the saying ‘one for the reel, one for the meal’.  So while the money helps, it’s creatively unfulfilling and really hollows out a project, as such I took the opportunity to slightly improve my toolset.  This could be a large upgrade, a new approach, or something as small as changing the color of a control on the rig.  Something was changed, a small improvement made, another brick added to the wall.

Continuing with the cooking parallel, I view ingredients like pieces of a puzzle to be solved, instead of a world of possibility.  The goal is to use what’s available to solve the problem, 'what’s for dinner?'  I’ve often compared this to the scene in Apollo 13, for using what’s on hand to fit a square peg in a round hole.  On many shows and projects I’ve been a part of, working within the confines of the existing team and assets has been a rewarding aspect.  Figuring out an approach and infusing the creativity in the time available is very satisfying.  A favourite example of mine was collecting coins in Ready Player One. 

Ready Player One - Coin Collect 

The problem presented was ‘we need Parzival to pick up coins off the ground to fuel his car’.  The difficulty was how were animators supposed to pick up hundreds of coins? Manually is always an option, but not practical; FX could do it, but art directing FX presents its own challenges.  In the end, I wrote a tool to pick up coins, create a motion path and animation controls as the car drove over them.  So the animators could do a single coin or hundreds, all while being pipeline and animation friendly.  I showed the results to my Supervisor (I was a Senior at the time), he liked it and I rolled it out.  In terms of infusing creativity, I had the idea of the coins going through the 25 cent arcade slot (from my childhood spent in arcades), then being sorted.  You can actually see my model in the movie, which I'm very proud of as an Animator :) 

On a more personal level, I don’t really enjoy the end results of cooking or really eating for that matter.  I have a heavily deviated septum, so my sense of smell is diminished which affects my sense of taste.  So the idea of exploring food does little for me, I’ve never seen a better representation of this than in Ratatouille when Remi explains flavours to his brother Emile,

Emile tries new food

However, the idea of exploring animation does excite me, but only once I have the ingredients.  I find inspiration from characters already designed, existing IPs and worlds where new stories can be told and personalities explored. You can see this in my own personal projects.

Personal Projects

The ingredients are provided, but I can figure out how they’re assembled.  Exploring the world of Tribal by Darren Bartley, is infinitely more exciting to me than trying to develop my own characters from scratch. 

Tribal by Darren Bartley

At work, I get to be part of an amazing team and find the best way to tell a story within the confines of the show and the unique aspects of the characters. This is the part I enjoy, the process of creating this middle ground.  Knowing I have what’s needed at the start and goal at the end, and exploring animation to make up the bridge between the two.