[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/45045241[/vimeo]
IA : Can you describe a typical animator day at Blue sky Studios ?
PG : I guess like anywhere else, my day would start at 9:00AM. We usually have two SweatBox sessions per day one at 9:00AM, one at 3:30PM. We call SweatBox the dailies sessions where we show in front of a big screen our animations to the director. We are gathered in a room with part of the team, the supervisors, the main editor, and people from camera, production managers, the Director etc to show our ideas and talk about it. It can be a pretty stressful moment. People in Disney were showing their work to Walt being under pressure and in hot rooms; they called the space the SweatBox. We reused this term in BlueSky for our dailies. So you would go directly in SweatBox if you’re supposed to show in the morning at 9:00, or if you’re lucky, you just take a coffee before going to your desk. Usually you open your scene, try to manipulate the space, the characters until some good mojo happens. Just before lunch usually, I go for a video reference session. I manipulated my scene enough to know exactly what I want to do. At this point I can try to act something to give a tangible feeling to my ideas. Later on I go for a short lunch, and then I come back to my desk to block out my ideas from picking acting choices from the references I made. The afternoon is usually very intense creating lot of poses, deleting creating other poses, searching… We have also leads and supervisors who make rounds to give a fresh eye on our animations. So I would just show all this turmoil of ideas to the supervisors to eliminate as fast as possible ideas that wouldn’t feet in the continuity of the movie. From whatever I end up with, I could go also for another video reference session inspired by the animation I did. I would then act the animated movement I created, but I try to bring some acting subtleties on the fly. This creates some good texture to animation and sometimes a subtext that is gold to a good animation.
At the end of the day if the creation seems good enough, I would sign up for next morning SweatBox…
[dailymotion]https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x15gq1k_rio-2-official-trailer-2_shortfilms[/dailymotion]
IA : You’ve worked on Epic and Ice Age 4. Can you speak of your role in these movies ?
PG : I arrived in Blue Sky while they were finishing Ice Age 4. It was so cool to be able to work with all these characters everyone knows so well. Of course when you start in a studio, you have to prove yourself. I started to animate on small easy shots, but was hungry for much more complex stuffs. The supervisors might have felt it. They started to give me more and more challenging shots, especially with GUTT, the orang-outan. I loved to work on this evil character; I had lot of fun shooting video references for his actings. At this point I was able to show I could work fast with a strong workflow. Ice Age wasn’t even finished that FOX was creating a first trailer for EPIC. They proposed me to be part of the small team who were to create the trailer. I was thrilled with the idea about working on EPIC. It was an unusual movie for Blue Sky, more mature and I loved the characters relationships. I was happy to become character lead on NIM the dancing Oracle being a caterpillar in the movie. This character was a fun peace, but I spent finally more time working on BOMBA one of the main character in EPIC and his daughter MK. I also gave a hand on Queen Tara, Beyonce’s voiced character. To keep a higher quality to her character, we changed her model last minute, and it was a real challenge to bring all the appeal that this character deserves. I was happy I could help to define better her style. In fact I really embraced this entire movie’s style. The shots I was working on were more and more challenging. I helped more and more by shooting video references for other animators, which remembered me the time where I was more of a manager in animation. I ended up with a pretty strong reel at the end of the movie. This brought me another fantastic surprise. My managers, under FOX agreement proposed me to be part of the animation reels they were to propose for the 41st year Annie Awards! I was so excited. Let’s see what will happen from there!
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/65624887[/vimeo]
PG : In what ways, if any, do you think your job has changed with technology?
I think technology changed completely how animation is made now. Even stop motion get inspired by 3D camera movements. I read that in Coraline artists were working their lypsynch with a 3D character to work all the facial expressions approved in CG. They were then printed out or mold out to be used by stop motion animators on their puppets. I love this kind of marriage where 3D, 2D, stop motion can collaborate to give even better experiences. Here in Blue Sky, we first create a rough pass of 2D animation to throw out ideas. We do it on an in-house developed software that is pretty fast and ergonomic to use. It makes it super easy to switch from one medium to the other. The same with 3D, the rigs are faster and faster allowing more and more freedom, we can now almost create a 2D animation and stick to it with a 3D rig to keep the creativity of the 2D lines combined with light rendering and complex camera movements. It brings the best of all worlds.
But for me what improved the most the quality of our work is the information carried by internet. When I started, I had to print Maya’s Help documents to learn it. It was difficult to get it. No one would be able to help you really there was so few experienced people. You could never find a good animated reel to see how it’s supposed to look like. Sometimes I would get to see some VHS reels from Disney’s animators… No evolution reel back then, the only inspirations were the few movies already done. The work flow was kind of an unknown magic… Today you can find everything on internet, every making off; a lot of animators are posting their reels, showing how they work. Blog’s are detailing different workflows, everything went exponential. Everything is easy to get, the info is there! you just have to find it and practice it. That changes everything. The animation culture is not a mystery anymore. So globally and for everything in life I guess the technology helped to forget the technical issues in favor of our own personal freedom and creativity… HaHa some people will hate me for writing that!
[vimeo]https://www.vimeo.com/64739001[/vimeo]
IA : Can you describe your workflow? You degree of freedom and how you can make your own choices when developing a character?
PG : I always compare animation as being an architect. You can be the best architect in the world, if you don’t follow what the client wants, he’ll never want your house. However your client doesn’t know how to build a house and is not sure how to do it, he just has a general idea of what he wants. It’s the same in animation; you can be very creative, make bold choices as far as you understand what your shot’s intention is. Ultimately you need to have in mind what the director has in mind on the big picture of the movie. That’s why we have dailies to submit our ideas to slowly find what’s best for the movie. However, the animator is the main actor of the character animation development. He creates all the material necessary to define the character range of emotion by producing and getting feedback to narrow the intention explored until everyone agree that’s exactly what was needed for the shot.
