The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

So here it is, my first animation-focused post. I think this will be a good place to start.

Let me tell you how I used to animate: I would load up my character, I’d listen to the dialogue for the scene, I’d make a few key poses in stepped mode (these would be “general” poses… like they were hinting at the idea I’d want to go with later, but not actually the poses I’d end up using), perhaps throw in a breakdown here or there, and then I’d hit “spline.” This would all take an hour or two. I’d end up with something that looked pretty sloppy, but as I understood it, animation usually looks pretty sloppy coming out of blocking anyway. Besides, now it was time to polish.

Polishing, from this point, was awful and painful and frustrating. I figured that it was simply because I was new at it, and it would get easier for me as the months and months of school wore on. But it never got any easier. I’d set my poses and breakdowns, spline them, and then go to work in the graph editor but it was the same painful mess each and every time.

The problem, you see, was that I was operating under an impression of how everyone else worked, and how quickly I needed to work as well.

And I think that a lot of students also operate under this impression: that the pros get the poses in their animation really fast, and then spend the rest of the time polishing. Then, following the “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” line of thinking, we students and beginners believe we should work that way, too.

But this was a completely false impression I had picked up from who-knows-where. This isn’t how the pros work, and I was fortunate enough to be at a school where I could hear the pros talk about their workflow over and over and over until it finally sunk in to my head that I wasn’t being very smart.

A perfect example of this is when I had Ethan Hurd as a mentor. During one of our weekly Q&A sessions, someone asked how long he would spend posing out a character. He said that it depended on what the shot called for, and what the schedule was like, but usually he would spend an hour or two on each pose–though there were times when he’d spend an entire day on one pose! (granted, these types of poses were usually ones that had a lot riding on them, and were often the ones that would sell an entire scene, but still–a whole day on one pose!)

Hearing this was like having a switch flipped in my head: I had only been spending a half an hour at most on each pose, and usually significantly less. And if this kick-ass animator would take four times as long to pose a character, then why in the world would I think that I could do it any faster?

I needed to get rid of my notion of how long I thought I should be spending on a pose, and (here’s the key bit) give myself permission to take as much time as I needed to make a pose exactly what I wanted it to be, from the hips, to the eyes, to the tips of each little finger; to check the line of action, and the force of anything the character was interacting with; to use all of those principles I’d learned about animation and put it all into that one frame. Once I gave myself that permission, I noticed my animation improving a ton.

Not that it looked that great–it just looked better than it had before. The thing is, I was still spending a lot of time “polishing” after setting my few poses and setting my tangents to spline. It was still a mighty painful process.

Then came Victor Navone and Brandon Beckstead. Victor was a guest at an online animation club I used to host, and Brandon was a classmate of mine during my last six months of school. Their workflows are very similar to each other: they stay in stepped mode until their scene has a key on almost every other frame, and on every single control on the character. I’d heard about working this way, but until I actually saw their blocking stages, I never really understood how powerful it could be.

Here’s an example of Brandon’s blocking:

This blew my mind: this is all in stepped mode, and you could almost call this whole shot animated! There’s keys throughout the scene, not just at the “important” frames. Or perhaps I should say, it highlights how each frame is important for selling every tiny detail of your scene. Suddenly, I didn’t want to animate the way I had been, with just a few keys here and there before leaving stepped mode. Suddenly, I had (here it comes again) given myself permission to break down my scene into such tiny parts that I could see my animation there on the screen before I even considered starting to polish. 

I think that it’s a hurdle that a lot of students have to overcome: starting to take their work seriously. It’s not easy, especially when you’re still grasping at ideas about workflow, and the principles, and having strong ideas, and being clear, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

If you find that you’re struggling with learning animation (or learning anything, really), stop and take a look at how you’re approaching things. Are you heading sort of blindly, or blurily, towards your end goal? Do you know that there’s a better way, but you avoid it because you figure you’re just not ready for it yet? Well, I say to listen to that little inner-voice you’ve got: give yourself permission to do things the right way*. You’re ready for it, I promise you.

I’m not saying that this will make animating easy, but there’s really no reason to make it harder than it already is.

* there are so many different ways of working, and approaches to workflow, that there really is no one “right way to animate.” maybe the ideas in this post don’t appeal to you, and if they don’t, that’s absolutely fine. find your own way to work that’s comfortable for you. the big point is not to be timid about it–take the time to really make your animation the best it can be. and it’s been my experience that the more time you spend up front, even if it’s 5 times as long as you think you should be spending, it will make the final part of your process so much smoother.