This is an article I wrote for Animation Mentor. Please feel free to leave any comments. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

As someone who has been back and forth between games and film for many years, I thought it might be interesting to offer my perspective on what I think are vastly different animation pipelines.

In my opinion, when it comes to animation, games and film begin their production process needing (not wanting) vastly different things, and this ultimately sets the tone for how animation is critiqued, processed and approved over the course of almost the entire project.

In general, prior to crewing up for a major animation feature, there needs to be in place some form of animatic that fairly accurately represents the needs of the client. From this animatic we can begin laying the groundwork for shot management, resource needs, asset needs, etc. The process is fairly linear in the sense that each respective department follows on the heels of the previous department, until eventually the shot is finalled and goes to film. For games this process is fundamentally different. By virtue of the fact that playability is required first and foremost, the only way to test the viability of the game play systems is by already having a large amount of assets on hand. This means that a lot of animations need to be blocked, put into the game engine, linked together by programmers and tested by game designers. This circular process of creating, testing, scrapping, and then creating some more, can go on for years. If during this process animation becomes overly concerned with aesthetic quality, they risk losing valuable time assessing the primary objective of any game, namely, “is it fun?”

In film, ensuring a strong narrative is to a large extent already done. Practically speaking this is not always the case, as many of us in the field are well aware of how often a project gets edited on the fly, shots get cut, sequences change, etc. But often those issues are merely a consequence of polishing the narrative and addressing budget constraints. Unlike games where animators serve a pivotal role in developing the game play systems, animators in film are not tasked with creating the overall narrative from scratch. Most of the groundwork has already been done. We have storyboards, an edit, a puppet, a layout scene, a camera, etc. Almost all of our time is dedicated to making amazing animation that communicates a narrative already (for the most part) locked down by the director.

So the division in methodology between games animation and film animation is quite clear to me. In games animations are finessed and tweaked once the game play systems are fun and functional. Getting game play to this level takes so much time and requires so much creating and re-working of animations, that making them beautiful needs to come much later in the process and is often left to the way side purely because time and money have run out. In film, we move from blocking to second pass much sooner in the process, and very rarely do we have to completely scrap our work as a result of core narrative changes affecting our shots.

Ultimately, I think of the film pipeline as linear, each department more or less sequentially following the next department down the pipe. On the other hand, I think of games as an intricate web. Each department is inextricably linked to multiple other departments, going around and around until a cohesive playable system is created. After these bare bones are built, then time can be allotted to perfecting the animation within the constraints of the system.

Animating for games can be a fulfilling process. What I enjoyed so much about it was the incredible sense of teamwork I felt on a regular basis. There is a big difference in the way film and game animators appreciate their work. Once you’ve completed a game, you wont sit back while playing it and say, “Get ready, here comes my walk cycle……there it is…see…I did that!” The reason is because often the work a gaming animator has done is fused into so many aspects of the game that it becomes very difficult to pinpoint an element and say it is exclusively yours. For that one walk cycle, a programmer has blended it with dozens of other animations made by other animators, a game designer may have tweaked it in the code, and other animators may have worked on it. In film, I can watch the movie, and when my shot comes up, I know the animation in that shot is exclusively mine. I can cut it out of the edit and point at it over and over again and say, “I did that.” But in film, the process of creating animation work is often isolating and impersonal. The sense of team (and I should specify this is not always the case on every project), is dramatically less intense. In games, you are constantly communicating and brainstorming with so many people from so many departments. That is rarely ever the case in film. But I personally will always love making films more than games simply because I love being part of movie history and knowing that my work may be seen by millions for years to come.

This is an article I wrote for Animation Mentor. Please feel free to leave any comments. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

As a creature animator who has worked primarily on hyper real content, exaggeration is a constant issue in my work. For example, just a few days ago, my animation supervisor told me my shot was an “eleven”, and he wanted me to take it down to an “eight”. What he meant by this was that the creatures in my shot were too energized. I was breaking the boundaries of believability within the context of this particular project and the edit. While my characters moved mechanically correct, and even the actions in their performances were good, everything was too bouncy, too fast, too BIG! Maybe this would have been fine if I was making a cartoon. Knowing where to draw the line between over exaggerated and contextually believable is part and parcel of a creature animator’s job. The only real difference between a cartoony animator and a creature animator is in how far the principles can be pushed.

Anticipation vs. Action

In cartoons, the relationship between the speed and size of a anticipation versus the subsequent action can be played with and manipulated to create a wide variety of different emotional responses. You might have a slow and big anticipation showing heaviness and a building of power, followed by an unusually fast action, thus creating a strong contrast in physics and timing. Or the opposite might be the case. A character takes a quick leap off a ledge and then hits a long moving hold as he hovers in mid-air over the precipice. Obviously with hyper real animation these kinds of timing relationships must still exist between antic and action, but the contrast must be toned down to the point that real world physics exists unquestionably in the mind of the viewer. And this is no easy task! This is very often why viewers can watch realistic CG animation and come away feeling something looked odd or unnatural about the performance. They may have no clue why they feel this way, and more often than not it is because as animators we have somehow failed to create motion that can deceive what the human mind is already an expert at, namely the scrutiny and perception of the physical universe. (As a side note, these issues segue into the Uncanny Valley, and are the source of why so many movies to date have failed to convince the viewer that humans can exist seamlessly and believably as CG characters.)

Striking a Pose

In cartoony animation there is a great deal of emphasis placed on hitting a pose to elicit an emotional “signal” to the viewer. A character expressing fatigue might inhale deeply, hitting a long upward and expansive anticipation, followed by a quick compression of the body and lungs, his shoulders and head slumping downward and striking a strong exhaustion pose. Since the origins of classical animation, we have become experts at breaking down the structure of poses to understand how they can elicit various emotional responses from the viewer. In hyper real animation we concentrate much less on striking poses. Of course the methodology and work flow that goes into creating animation will have very minor differences between a cartoony project and a realistic one. We still block our shots in very much the same ways (a cartoony animator may block in stepped while a realistic animator may block in spline), making sure the blocked performance has all the necessary key poses to convey the narrative. But our main goal is to create a fluid and organic performance based in reality, and is less about punching an emotion on a given frame; so more time and energy at even the earliest outset is placed on the breakdowns and inbetweens. What do I mean by this? Most creature animators I have worked with choose to block in spline. From the very beginning of our shot we need to place a great deal of importance in understanding how the weight, mass and energy of a character unravel through the performance. It is less about striking emotive poses and more about offsetting and layering the motion so that it never feels like parts of the character are landing at the same time. The parts of the character have to be perfectly grounded in physical reality, so that there is a constant justification for how muscles, bones, tendons, and organs react through the movement.

I could go on and on scrutinizing how different animation principles are handled differently between animation styles that favor strong exaggerated movement and those that do not. The point is that exaggeration is a constant give and take in the type of animations I have done throughout my career. Under some circumstances we may need to push a pose much harder than is physically realistic, but more often than not this is for technical reasons. A pan on a camera may be softening the look of a pose from that particular angle, or a character may be unflatteringly foreshortened and need to be “cheated” to make sense. As a general rule, exaggeration is a good thing if it brings life and energy to the performance, but it quickly becomes a bad thing when that part of the human brain rejects it as “weird” or unnatural. That’s when we know we’ve gone too far or have simply interpreted the physical world incorrectly.