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Tomorrow is going to be miserable, but today I wanted to put something nice into the world and thank the animators who just finished #RayaAndTheLastDragon.
Most animators were done a week or so ago. Other departments are still working, but animation is complete. (1/12)
Most animators were done a week or so ago. Other departments are still working, but animation is complete. (1/12)
I say with each film that making these movies is hard. I think people imagine that the computer somehow makes it easy, but allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Making an animated film is primarily about a bunch of humans making 1000's of choices over a period of years. (2/12)
I'm going to skip past a bunch of folks to get to animation, but know that those people are hugely important. Years are spent designing, modeling, rigging, texturing, making sim rigs, boarding, placing cameras, etc. before we start yanking things around and breaking them. (3/12)
We spend tons of time thinking about how our characters work -- who they are, how they behave. There are 30+ page docs and hours of talks for most main characters about how much they should move, how they walk, how to pose their brows, which of the 100s of controls to use. (4/12)
There are a lot of characters in this movie. Your first time animating a character may be the only time you animate that character. Nonetheless, animators needed to know all the rules and translate them into performances where you don't see all those graphs and controls. (5/12)
There was a bunch of uniquely hard stuff in this film. A lot of complex fight choreography. Big, cartoony stuff. Super restrained, naturalistic stuff. A dragon. Snakes are hard to animate in CG. Quadrupeds are hard to animate in general. Dragons are both and they are hard. (6/12)
Animators need to act on top of all of these rules and technical complications. The characters all need to move, think, breathe, and talk in a way that matches the performance of an actor that the animator may never meet, but with whom they are sharing a performance. (7/12)
They get notes on all of it. Directors trying to communicate their vision. Supervisors trying to keep their characters consistent (I did hundreds of drawovers on this movie). Other departments making sure they can consume your work. All while the movie changes underfoot. (8/12)
We're used to all of that. If it was just that stuff, it would've been plenty hard, but they did all of that while suddenly working from home during a pandemic amidst a period of massive social unrest. They did it all at a high quality with impossibly positive attitudes. (9/12)
We had to reimagine a lot of our processes. How we animate, how we show, how we give notes. This was a huge effort for which we owe a lot to the people working in production and technology who pivoted quickly and adapted constantly as we found new problems and solutions. (10/12)
Despite all of it, I think this was one of the smoothest shows in recent memory, in no small part due to the kindness and generosity of all of the people involved. Everyone brought their best to make this movie the best they could, independent of the circumstances. (11/12)
So, congratulations. Thank you for your hard work, your good ideas, your patience, and for being cool, especially when the world conspired to make all of those things harder than ever. I am grateful as ever for your trust and to be able to work with you all. (12/12)
