CTN Animation Expo: Thoughts & Experiences

this weekend i attended the CTN Animation Expo, and i feel compeled to blog about my trip and share with you my experience thier. Some back info, for those who are unaware, the Creative Talent Network put together thier first 3-day animation expo this weekend in Burbank CA, at the Marriot Hotel.

http://www.ctnanimationexpo.com/

After registering, the first thing we (we = me, Jay Mitchel & Alex Lashomb) did was strole through the exibit floor. as we walked, we passed a booth with amazing caricatures and illustrations of pop culture icons and who was standing behind the booth, none other than Mr. David O'Keefe! while we stood thier admiring his work, we began chattin' about small stuff, like where we were from and what we were all into ya know. i remember him sayin something along the lines of, "it's amazing that they were able to get all of this talent under one roof!" he was sayin that he visits the blog of the guy in the booth next to his (Diasuke Tsutsumi) all the time and that he was a fan of his. i think David was awed almost as much as we were at the magnitude of talent in attendance, which was humbling to see. check out the work by Mr. David O'Keefe! this dude is bad ass! http://www.davidokeefe.com/

i managed to snap some flix of his sculptures. check em out, i'm sure you'll recognize them!

After walking around the exibit floor, we went to our first pannel of the weekend, "VFX in Animation @R+H." The animation directors from Rhythm & Hues Studio discussed the a little bit of thier history and some of their experiences working in Animation. They also shared valuable info on sumiting demo reels and becoming apart of the process. On the pannel for the dicussion, there was Keith Roberts, Kristin Solid, and Matt Shumway. Keith Roberts is an Animation Director, Kristin Solid and Matt Shunway are Supervisor Animators @ R&H. After the pannel discussion, I was able to pull aside Mrs. Kristin Solid to ask her a few questions, and in all honesty, i was quite nervous! i remember standing their wide eyed saying to myself in my head, "keep it cool Jay, she's just a pro that's worked on several films i've seen befor, that's all!," but in seriousness i was wiggin out! i was so shook, i wrote down my questions that i wanted to ask her so i wouldnt forget them! My first question was, "How much animation do you think you do in a week?" i was always interested in the workload of a professional animator, with animating being so tedious at times. Her answer was not what i expected at all! 7 seconds! A WEEK! i imagined an animator would at least be doing 1 or 2 min of animation in a 5 day work week! at first i was kinda shocked, but then as i thought about it, it began to come together. The animation quality of R&H is at a realistic level of entertainment, so 7 seconds a week for a solid realistic animation sounds about right. I'm sure there are several variables that im not taking into consideration, but im sure all the animation is scuritinized with an eagle eye so there would be several alterations. As i digress, my next question was "How was animating the characters in Transformers movie?" I assumed that the characters in Transformers had some gnarly rigs to them, but i guess i was wrong. She said that they were relatively simple, they'de give her a low res rig, more simple animation, and a high res rig more detailed animation. This led to my next question. "Do the animators and the riggers work together to creative the rigs?" She said that would be the most ideal situation, but the pipeline isint set up like that.my last question was one that i'd like to ask all professional animators, "What do think of mo cap?" Her reply was "I hate it!" and that answer told me she was a real key framer vs a mo capper who uses mocap info to animate. i suppose there's no way around using mo cap tho, sometimes pose to pose animation doesnt give you the "real" performance of the character the director might want, so mocaping the animation would help that process. i dont know what it is, but i always felt that mocap was the shortcut in animation and that it takes away the performance the animator was trying to convey. it just seems like mocapping takes away the job of the animator, considering the animator still has to clean up poses and make adjustments, they really lose the intuativeness of animating and fall into a system of entering mocap info. after our short chat, i was still nervous and i couldnt come up with anymore questions, so i ended there, even thought i wanted to pick her brain for another hour. here is Kristin Solid's site! check it out! http://kristinsolid.com/

blog still in progress....