[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/11953979[/vimeo]
Throughout many years of experience I built a strong workflow. The idea is to be open to everything, trying to create the most entertaining sequences but staying true to the character. The choices you make are the most important thing in your animation. The stronger they are the better will be your animation. The rest is just some technical achievements. So I based my own workflow on finding the best choices of acting. I would start by going in dailies for a kick off. I need to understand and know the sequence before going there to be able to ask as many questions as I can and to already propose ideas and test where and how much I can push things. I need to know exactly what are the intentions and the important points I need to hit at the end of the kick off. After that I would go into the 3D scene and play with it. The goal is to understand the volume, the space, and get inspired by what’s in there. From there sometimes if the shot is somehow cartoony I would draw thumbnails and idea on our 2D animation software. After that, the most important part of my workflow would be getting video references. Even if I’m working on a cartoon character and I won’t be able to use any of my posing, acting my shot in front of the camera is key for a good shot. It’s gonna help me to define the best choice. It’s like an investigation, I would try many possibilities, I can shoot more than 60 different times the same shot, trying to narrow, combine slowly the best ideas. I don’t want to test all that in 3D, it would take me ages, where here I can stay a whole afternoon shooting my ideas how they come. After having all these videos, I would edit them with the actual audio from the shot.
Generally you get at least 10 video choices that are very interesting. I would narrow down to 3 versions where I really have the feeling the voice come from my mouth, my body language is genuinely communicated the right idea, the right emotion. At this point I start to edit/combine the best parts of the 3 videos. I have then the best choices I could have made for the shot. After this step starts the blocking part. I would create a key pose every 4 frames trying to follow the intentions I had in my video. At this point the clever thing to do when you animate character like birds, mammoth or whatever is not to try to rotoscope the silhouette of the video, it would be impossible. But you want to print your animation with the emotion that has your video reference, bring the same intentions but with a different character design. You need to understand very well the body language and translate it from your human video into a quadruped or a snake. The main idea is bringing the same intention even if your character doesn’t or can’t follow the pose you made as a reference. I make sure I create strong appealing poses at this stage; the blocking is the spine of the animation. After some back and forth with the director, the supervisors, to adjust the blocking, I would start splinning my shot, working not only every 4 frames but every frames, building frame by frame until the result is smooth but snappy and has a lot of contrast. Usually that’s the easiest more technical part. I try to not fall into too much habits in this splinning part and I leave always room to good surprises by allowing myself to change on the fly my blocking main poses, exploring new ideas while finishing the shot All that to keep a freshness to it and to bring the best quality I could as I learned while doing it and my ideas are better and clearer at the end of the shot…
IA : From Ice Age 4 to Epic, what’s ( are) your favorite character(s) ? why ?
PG : On Ice age, I loved working on GUTT the ourang-outan. The animation supervisors knew I was working on John Carter a year ago, and I animated mainly Tars and Tal the bad guy. These characters were massive barbarians, their strength and heaviness was easy to compare to a big ape like GUTT. They started to cast me for shots with this huge character and I had a blast to work on him. The rig was fantastic, allowing a lot of flexibility with his facial expressions that would bring kind of the old caricatured Disney style from the apes in “The Jungle Book”. The design itself with its long arms wide chest toes like fingers helped to define a unique and entertaining character. The rig that we get in Blue Sky are just amazing, they can almost do everything and bring 3D level to this appeal we love in 2D. The enhancement of Blue Sky technology also improved characters’ speed; I was almost able to work in real time…
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/53958523[/vimeo]
On EPIC, MK, RONIN, NOD were great characters to work on. The slugs and NIM were also very entertaining and you could bring lot of creativity to a shot thanks to their cartoony style. But my preferred character was BOMBA, MK’s father. This character had such a range of emotion, acting, and even animation style. He could be realistic in some ways when he is sad or concerned, but he could become completely cartoony going back and forth on strong cut poses when he is excited. And all these changes could even occur in the same shot. I shot many references for this character for my animations and for other animators in the crew. It was such a fun moment. Tom Roberts was lead on this character and brought a lot of his personality too. He would bring glasses to video reference session, and we would both become BOMBA just by wearing it!! That’s funny, it’s like Superman and Clark Ken. As soon as I would wear his glasses, I would move like BOMBA in a very fast chaotic rhythm, almost impossible to do with human muscles. I remember having such pain in my neck muscles after these sessions as I would turn/hold my head in such a fast pace that it hurt eventually. One of the most challenging scenes I did was, at the end of the movie when BOMBA says to MK how much he misses his wife while he can barely hold his tears. I watched many references from Tom Hanks, almost crying which really helped me to convey such strong emotions…
IA : How do you communicate with the directors and can you share your experiences with people like Andrew Stanton and Chris Wedge?
Working with these people was a fantastic experience and a chance that I would never have dreamed of. What was great was these two directors are very expressive. In dailies, they tend to stand up and mime or act what they want; mimicking the voice of the character they are playing. That was such a great experience. I compare myself to a sponge in dailies. Andrew Stanton would often go for the clearest intentions trying to convey the strongest clearest idea. As animators, we always tend to push on complex ideas. I learned how to filter that and how a simple but efficient idea if well translated into the character can be much stronger than any complex choreography. By being animator, our job is also to be very good about body language. I decided I would use this ability in dailies. Whatever Andrew would do or not do, whatever body language he would use while explaining his ideas would help me to understand the subtext, what he really wanted deeply. That’s an amazing experience, and it’s even made easier by these kinds of directors as they are moving a lot, giving you as many possibilities to understand what they have in mind even if it’s difficult to put words on it. Chris Wedge would be also very expressive, connected to his character directly from his heart. I would compare him to BOMBA, the crazy scientist with a huge heart. Each time I was listening to Chris’ Kick-offs for a shot, I would learn a bit more about his characters. I remembered, every time I would already prepare myself for an obvious intention in the shot, he would come with another idea, completely different, very creative, always making his characters unique bringing something that only him knew, something that I was so eager to discover every day in dailies.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzixp8s4pyg[/youtube]
I discovered that these big directors are not here just because of their huge experience but also because of whom they are and how they approach people, sentiments, relationships and ultimately a story. I learned the most I could from them.
IA : You’ve also worked on Rio and we know it’s too soon to speak about this movie, but could you just tease us about this sequel and what to except?
PG : Hehe, we’ve been asked to not talk about anything related to RIO2. I could just say that all of your favorite characters from RIO are back, in an adventure that’s even wider, more colorful and more fun than the original. They’re returning home to the Amazon jungle. We have some great piece of music and dance sequences, featuring returning artist Sergio Mendes who’s joined Bruno Mars, Janelle Moae and Kristen Chenoweth. I’m sure this time again this movie is going to be an amazing animated experience for everyone!!
