Do you have any tips for a scatterbrained animator? A lot of the time I'll get burned out on a wip or start a new one and lose interest and I really would like To Not Do That
Unfinished projects! Every animator I know seems to have a couple of these. But that I feel is a pretty new occurrence, because animation, for most of its history, has been too expensive. Animation is overwhelmingly produced in commercial settings, and has been done so since very shortly after someone figured out how to do it at all. This generally means, a person with money was pitched a largely complete idea, decided it was potentially profitable, and paid someone money to hire labour to get the idea made. And what we think of as “independent animation”, has for the longest time not been that different. The process still usually required a lot of materials and equipment as well as labour, and so the old indie animators would put together pitch documents, shop around for investors, and then when they tour the festivals they would still have 50 names in the credits. They’re still at the festivals doing this now, and still aren’t quite aware of just how much the landscape is shifting.
But it is shifting! Commercial animators often now work from home with their equipment around at all times, or everything they need fits into a backpack and goes home with them. Kids who want to be animators don’t learn the ropes in an internship, they get a cheap tablet and some free software on the family computer and start by figuring it out. We have cameras in our phones!!!! Now when someone has something they want to make, they don’t need to write a proposal, they just need to open a new file.
But! While painters have unfinished paintings, authors have unfinished books, and composers have unfinished symphonies for all the same reasons that plague every artist, animators have an additional hurdle:Animation sucks and nobody wants to do it!And I don’t mean its hard- all art is hard. I mean the way we’ve been trained to break down the task of animation, the globally accepted “how to animate”, was not written for artists to explore their own creativity. It’s written for a commercial pipeline. And the pipeline seems pretty functional and useful at first! Animation is a multifaceted task, and dividing it into smaller tasks makes the whole thing easier to grapple. But the particular divisions at play are a hierarchy, with creativity at the top and labour at the bottom.
For instance, say you start by coming up with an idea. Wow that was fun! Very creatively gratifying, not so much work though. Then you might make designs, which involves drawing- a bit more work, but you get to come up with a lot of the fun details. Then storyboards- a fair few drawings, and while the bulk of the “idea” has been determined, you get to decide the specifics in how it plays out. Then on to key animation! Quite a lot of work, and pretty much all of the decision making has already been done, but you get to put in the little flourishes of the acting, focus on the minutia. And then in-betweens! Unrewarding, never-ending, gruelling work.In most commercial contexts yes, these steps I listed might be the chronological order of production, but it’s also the ascending order of department size and workload, and descending order of creative input, and pay.
Which begs the question: Why would anyone do this for no money, as their personal project? Why would anyone regularly put aside several hours at a time to perform a task about as stimulating as washing dishes, in order to make a fun idea they had 6 months ago they don’t even know if they like anymore? Of course nobody finishes their personal projects, we’ve made it as awful as possible! But we keep doing it, because it’s the way we know how.
But if there’s no investor who needs to approve each step of production, and if there’s no director who has a grand vision that needs to be upheld at the expense of the people making the work, then this way of approaching animation is completely arbitrary. Everything about it! Pre-planning everything is for the sake of reassuring the money, detailed rough passes are so teams don’t get confused. The whole notion of pose-to-pose animation and “strong key poses” has NOTHING to do with how movement actually works- it’s to condense the decision making to fewer drawings, so that whoever does the drawings in-between is replaceable, and can therefore be paid (and treated) like rubbish. You shouldn’t have to do that and say it’s for yourself.So, however you personally work best, I can’t really say. Unless you’re an entire production company wearing a massive trenchcoat, probably not the usual way. Personally, I often like to come up with an isolated scene, and then try and think up the next scene while I’m making the first one. I get to keep adding new ideas, and I find the whole undertaking a lot less scary when I have no idea how big it is until it’s done.But obviously you’re not me either, so who knows. But, you are part of a new generation of animators, who can just sit in a room by themselves with a bunch of art supplies and just figure themselves out, like neurotic starving artists have been doing for centuries. Have fun with it!
