Saturday, April 01, 2006
'The Wild' is coming
For those who haven't seen or heard anything about 'The Wild' yet, here is a link to a scene of what you can expect from this new Disney movie due out April 14th: link
I had the opportunity to work on the first 2 minutes of 'The Wild' here at Reel FX as a layout supervisor and an animator. We were asked to to do something that looks completely different than the rest of the film. Ken Duncan was the Animation Director, and many of us were asked to go out to Pasadena (Reel FX West Studio) to work with him for 2-3 weeks at a time. We all learned a completely new way of animating. Ken and those guys out there obviously come from a traditional 2D background. So the way they work in 3D is VERY similar...xsheets, timing charts, and all. While most animators who use Maya are graph editor junkies (me included)...none of us so much as cracked open the graph editor while there. Everything we did was a result of REALLY focusing on what was on screen and not getting caught up in the spaghetti of splines. I will say that I've since gone back to using the graph editor, but not anywhere near in the way I used it before. Before I was sometimes concerned with my curves "looking pretty" and hoping the computer would give me something I wanted in the motion of the arm, leg, head, etc. But now I use it more as a diagnostic tool, to clean up hitches or smoothen out a section that looks gittery. I can't tell you how much more fun it is to animate when you don't depend on the computer or graph editor to help you have "happy accidents", as my friend John Berry calls them.
Anyway, I'm pretty proud with what we accomplished on that first 2 minutes. My hope is that folks will be pleasantly surprised with what we contributed to 'The Wild'.
For those who haven't seen or heard anything about 'The Wild' yet, here is a link to a scene of what you can expect from this new Disney movie due out April 14th: link
I had the opportunity to work on the first 2 minutes of 'The Wild' here at Reel FX as a layout supervisor and an animator. We were asked to to do something that looks completely different than the rest of the film. Ken Duncan was the Animation Director, and many of us were asked to go out to Pasadena (Reel FX West Studio) to work with him for 2-3 weeks at a time. We all learned a completely new way of animating. Ken and those guys out there obviously come from a traditional 2D background. So the way they work in 3D is VERY similar...xsheets, timing charts, and all. While most animators who use Maya are graph editor junkies (me included)...none of us so much as cracked open the graph editor while there. Everything we did was a result of REALLY focusing on what was on screen and not getting caught up in the spaghetti of splines. I will say that I've since gone back to using the graph editor, but not anywhere near in the way I used it before. Before I was sometimes concerned with my curves "looking pretty" and hoping the computer would give me something I wanted in the motion of the arm, leg, head, etc. But now I use it more as a diagnostic tool, to clean up hitches or smoothen out a section that looks gittery. I can't tell you how much more fun it is to animate when you don't depend on the computer or graph editor to help you have "happy accidents", as my friend John Berry calls them.
Anyway, I'm pretty proud with what we accomplished on that first 2 minutes. My hope is that folks will be pleasantly surprised with what we contributed to 'The Wild'.
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