I make a conscious effort to not speak negatively on this blog, because I just do not want to give negative topics any energy. I want encourage animators to learn from those around them and seek out any knowledge they can find about animation. If this blog proves to be one of those sources - awesome. However, I give big kudos to Shawn Kelly for writing this article for Animation Mentor. I have experienced first-hand...and have heard the horror stories about the attitudes of young animators entering the field today.
Shawn calls it "snobbery," but in my book it's not snobbery...it's "self entitlement" and it has become so ingrained into every young animator's psyche - once they finish school or just worked on a couple movies...! it makes for bigger egos than some of those I encounter from veterans. Just because you were the "best animator" at your school, doesn't mean you should go to Sony and sit next to a 25 year veteran and run your mouth about the shots you are getting and how they are beneath your skill. Just because you have worked on 3 movies at a tiny little studio (or even a big one), doesn't mean you know everything there is to know about visual effects and animation. Do you REALLY want to be known in the industry as that arrogant, little punk that whines and runs at the mouth about what makes for good fx and animation, when he really doesn't know anything? Unhireable is what that is called.
My advice is to try and make your energy positive and not negative. If you get a shot and it's not the "glory shot you expected... understand you can turn any shot into something great. Jamie and I go into great detail on this topic and more in Chapter 7 of our book called - "When Push Comes to Stab" or "studio politics."
I have a little story for you before you read Shawn's article. When I started my first day on the Disney spots at DD they weren't really ready to hand official shots out, we just did walk and run cycles to test the rigs. After a couple goofy run and walk cycles, I looked over the storyboards and there was this one shot of stitch on the motorcycle. He would have been only about 4 pixels high because he was drawn way in the distance. This shot probably wouldn't have been one any animator would have chosen as a "money shot" to animate. But, I thought I can make this fun!
I turned around to the modeler behind me and said "is there a motorcycle in the database here?" He got me the bike and broke it into 4 pieces (2 wheels, handlebars and the body). I did a quick test of stitch riding, loosing his hat and popping a wheeling on the bike. Joe Pytka (the director) saw it and liked it so much - he went back out and shot new footage to put my little animation into the spot. The next set of commercials, DD hired me as Animation Supervisor because they saw that I got what Eric Goldberg and Pytka wanted out of a performance.My point of this story is you can create anything out of ANY shot. So, stop whining and prove to the folks in dailies that the shots you got are the best - why? because you MADE them that way. Read on to Shawn's article for more on all of this...it's a great read!
RISE ABOVE THE SNOBBERY
By Shawn Kelly
Those three categories pretty much cover every one of you, so I think it's safe to say that for the most part, we're all in love with this animation stuff, and we all have big dreams for the magic we hope to create with the tools of our trade.
We're keen on learning more and more about our tools, in order to create more beautiful and moving art with them, right? I think we're all on the same page there. We want to know more about the software, yes, but hopefully we're also more focused on diving ever-deeper into the actual principles of animation – like finding a new way to think about anticipation, or a new angle on how to use arcs – all that fun stuff.If you've spent any time at all hunting down this sort of animation information, you've realized that it's a nutty bunch of people who have thrown themselves into this life. Creative people, sure, but animators also seem to be an unusually energetic and enthusiastic group of people. Maybe it's because we have to have a childlike nature to be so willing to immerse ourselves in what has culturally been thought of as a "children's art form," at least here in the US. Maybe it's because we spent most of our high school days cracking jokes and doodling in the corner rather than wearing prom crowns or winning sports trophies, forcing us to develop
Personally, I think it's this: despite the childlike halo that surrounds the idea of "doing animation," it isn't easy. I've said it before and I'll say it again - this animation stuff is hard.
In fact, it's damn hard.
It takes a certain kind of person to not only have the patience to put in the hours and days and years of practice required to gain even a modicum of confidence in this art, but - and this is the important part
- it takes a truly unique person to power through all those hours and emerge at the other side filled with even more excitement and enthusiasm than when they began.
I had the honor of interviewing one of our true animation greats, Eric Goldberg, for Animation Mentor. One of the things he said to me, which really rings true, was that it is impossible to make it in this industry if you don't TRULY love animation as an art. "You have to love it," he said. And that's the absolute truth. If you don't have that passion for the art, you will never have the patience to power through all the years of learning. To some, these years were tedious and frustrating, but for those of us who truly love what we do, they were rewarding and incredibly fun.
Those of you who are in love with seeing your characters brought to life know that for us, it's worth the struggle of learning, and worth the "tedium" of the actual creation of the performance. Those of us who are in love with animation find joy in the details, thrills in the excitement of new discoveries, and resolve in the face of the continually new and ever-more-daunting challenges posed by new characters, new shots, and new projects.
Why am I saying all this? What does this have to do with my Tips & Tricks article?
Well, here it is -- we have a problem in this industry. It's been a problem for years, especially (for some reason) among students. It isn't going away, and frankly, I think it hurts countless animation students.
We're…snobs.
There, I said it. We're snobs. Animation snobbery has reached epidemic proportions, in fact. I can't count the number of students who have explained to me that their skills would be wasted on anything but close-up acting shots, or how many students I hear about who have scoffed at job-offers to work on high-profile projects that may not be destined for critical acclaim, but would at least have given the students their first feature film credit!
I honestly find it shocking. To turn down your very first animation job because you don't feel the movie or game is good enough for you, or because it isn't Pixar or ILM - I'm sorry, that's just asinine. It's just as ridiculous as turning down a job because you'll be going in as a "mere" junior animator, or because you won't be guaranteed the much-vaunted "acting" shots.
I don't think all snobbery is necessarily evil, of course, but snobbery should be directly proportional to your experience level. If you've been in the business a while, then sure, I think you have certainly earned the right to be choosy about what you work on, and have also won the right to request to focus on certain types of work, shots, or characters.
I'm mostly talking about the next generation of animators, here, the new folks coming up. At Animation Mentor, we're really lucky to have an incredibly open and energetic student body - students willing and excited to learn from their mistakes as well as the mistakes of their peers, and frankly we put a lot of thought and effort into making sure we help continue to foster that attitude. As a whole, they seem genuinely eager to create a well-rounded animation career, and they understand that for 99.99999% of them, that career will not begin as a lead animator at Sony.
However, for whatever reason, I would say that at least half of the young animators I meet who haven't been involved with Animation Mentor (and yes, even a few who have), seem to have surprisingly skewed expectations of what their first few years in this industry should be like. They're all smiles on the outside, but you can't help but squint in the blinding glare of egos going supernova.
Everything is owed to them. They all think they're the next Glen Keane. "Don't waste my talents on smaller shots even though I have zero professional experience, I'm clearly the greatest animator known to man and you should allow me to bless your studio by placing me on only the most important shots in the film." Ugh.
And you know what? They might be right. Maybe they're great. Maybe they *COULD* have been the next Glen Keane. But guess what? With an attitude like that, they will never get the chance to rise to that stature. No one is going to be able to stand them long enough for them to prove their worth. Do they think Glen Keane showed up at Disney one morning, demanding to start right in on the biggest hero shots in the film? Please. He put in an incredible amount of time learning and studying from the more experienced animators who surrounded him at Disney. I've never had the pleasure of meeting him personally, but I have no doubt that he'd tell us that he owes much of his animation knowledge to the time spent studying under the greats who came before him.
That should be the goal of every new animator, in my opinion. Get yourself into an animation studio - be it games, features, television, whatever - and learn as much as you possibly can from the more experienced animators around you.
p.s. the sketches in this post were created by Floyd Norman for the Thinking Animation text!
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