Postmortems are the best way to highlight issues on a production and learn from past mistakes but on the last stretches of a show, as the team members are already allocated to other projects or looking for the next gig with still plenty of work to do, it can be difficult to find the time to sit down and look back in time to remember issues that ought to be resolved for the next show in order to improve processes.
What about if there was an easier way to go about it by making it more collaborative interactively throughout the production?
In the past I used to write down my postmortem notes on the last page of my notepads which was great but I couldn’t add gifs or videos and my colleagues couldn’t participate or often, I would point at issues that my colleagues had missed out entirely or forgotten in their own postmortem, making me the annoying guy with more notes than anyone else 🙂
Recently what I started doing instead, was to use our team chat (Slack, Teams, Discord) to share my postmortem notes as I came across issues.
Chats are dreadful when it comes to sharing information (this will be a future topic) but if you use a very specific keyword like [postmortem] at the start of your message, sorting out notes becomes a breeze when using search filters.
In addition this allows you to add demo videos and gifs to trigger a conversation and sometimes find solutions that other team members, or even yourself, weren’t aware of.
Not long ago, we discovered that a team member had trouble picking a tiny blue on blue control in their viewport in wireframe mode. Obviously the control wasn’t in the picker either so instead, we told them they should try the Xray mode! Alt + x is my favourite hotkey for it.
Is this quick tip useful to you or how do you go about postmortems in your company? Any tools you would recommend?
A trailer for our upcoming “Unstoppable” independent Norwegian feature just came out so I can single out this shot since it was part of it.
The shot is part of a fun sequence I animated and where the characters land on a nerve track inside the body of Eric and are propelled forward.
At this moment Kaja, our main character, regains consciousness and looks down at the nerve track she is stuck on, while Abel, the secondary character, is still impacted by the high speed crash.
At a quota of 3 seconds a day, those shots had to be expedited immediately to save time for more complicated acting and body mechanics ones at the start of the sequence but I had a very clear idea how I would tackle them from the get go with one of them simply be the reverse of that one, unless it was the opposite 🙂
I also knew I would need to layer a base of vibration on threes and fourth for big parts of the body just so the eyes could rest on something and a layer on ones for fingers or eyelids to create more jitter and craziness.
I also tried to find some areas like the lips and arms to create a more interesting wavy motion and I played with the size of the pupils for the gear change which unfortunately is not visible on the fantastic render by my workmate Antje.
The biggest challenge though, was to push the tamed facial rig to its limits in order to sell the craziness of the action and create a meaningful contrast with the previous acting shots to make the sequence more entertaining and memorable.
The brows were too limited to go further but luckily we had some clusters on the mouth I manipulated as far as I could, until the geometry collapsed and started to overlap too much with the cheeks geo.
I hope you like it and I can’t wait for the movie to come out to show you the entire sequence!!
Even if Epic came out in 2013 and most of those screenshots might be outdated, I still feel they would be of interest for people interested in facial topology and a good resource for a future overall facial topology article and facial rig calisthenics.
Blue Sky topologies are very rare online so I used ChopRig system lead developer Daniel Lima’s showreel for reference. You will see meshes and wireframes from 2019 “Spies in Disguise” and 2013 “Epic”.
Bastien Dubois‘ latest shortfilm finally aired on French/German TV channel “Arte”.
With its unique animated visuals inspired by Argentinian illustrator Jorge Gonzalez and uneasy theme, I feel really privileged to have been part of this outstanding short film beautifully mixing 2d and 3d techniques.
The short film successfully relates Bastien’s unsuccessful multiple attempts at tackling the atrocities committed by French army during Algerian War of Independence. Not an easy theme to be treated in animation that’s for sure!
French and German viewers can hit the following link to access the short film in full.
For other territories, the short film is currently running in animation festivals so here is a trailer below in the meantime. The trailer’s music is not reflective of the final soundtrack 😉
Come back to this post in the next weeks as I will add some behind the scenes if I get the all clear from the production.
Great CTN Pixar roundtable during showing diversity at Pixar. Hosted by none other that Luis Gonzalez, the talks centers around how Pixar artists Paul Abadilla, MontaQue Ruffin and Mike Yates got into animation, and they kindly share their journey up to joining Pixar.
“If you don’t have time to listen to podcasts, maybe you have time to read them!”
Let me introduce to you, a little project I setup few week ago, a blog where I am sharing transcripts of my favorite animation podcasts.
Why transcripts?
Podcasts have grown massively in the past 10 years and if you are not part of a high-end or animated feature online school, podcasts would be the next best thing to learn what goes on at top Feature Animation studios and hear about the workflow and techniques used in those studios.
Sadly, if you are new to the animation industry, there is no way you will be able to catch up with all the podcasts and fabulous interviews that have been recorded until now. The iAnimate podcast alone, has featured more than 75 guests accounting to more than 100 hours of episodes!!!
On top of this, most of the information shared got lost over the time as it is not possible to share specific parts of an interview, neither can you search or cross examine podcasts.
Transcripts on an other hand can be easily be indexed, searched, quoted. Wouldn’t you be interested to quickly Google search the thoughts of all the animators featured on podcasts and who worked on Hotel Transylvania or Toy Story 4 or How to train your dragon?
If you are into Speed reading, having transcripts of podcasts would allow you to quickly swallow up the whole internet!
Most importantly, if English is not your first language or you are just not fluent enough to understand podcasts, services like Google Translate would allow you to finally access that incredible wealth of information.
The Animation Transcripts Community is a free non-profit educational website aiming at making great animation material more accessible.
At the start of this endeavor, I was willing to pay for the services of outsource Transcript companies to write transcripts of only my most favorites interviews but then, I came across Otter.ai, an incredible app/website that automatically generates transcripts using Artificial Intelligence.
No, the results are not perfect, especially when dealing with animation specific terms. It is however a really great start for indexing podcasts and with the help of a community, we could eventually verify and correct and huge amount of A.I. transcripts. This is why I created, the Animation Transcripts Community or ATC, a community website where I would feature my favorite podcasts as transcripts and sometimes with show notes if I feel I need to highlight specific parts of the transcripts.
As explained, direct A.I. transcripts are great if you are in a hurry to share a specific part of an interview but not so great if you want to completely understand an interview so this is why I separated the transcripts in 3 levels of accuracy.
A one mic level of accuracy is a direct A.I. transcript.
A two mics level of accuracy is a first human review of the direct A.I. transcript. Some possible errors might have slipped and some confusing areas will be marked with several stars (***) but the transcript is already very good.
A three mics level of accuracy is the holy Grail. Several reviewers would have gone through and thumbed up the transcript. you don’t have to wait for a three mics transcript though, a two mics is already 95 percent accurate.
Head over to ATC to enjoy some great interviews and maybe become part of the team!
While watching that fun video, I thought about the “Breaking the fourth wall” concept.
As noted on the AnimC Pro Tips few month ago, you always want to avoid the character looking straight at the camera.
To me the most believable characters in that video are the ones that just, “live their life”.
The “hot grip” was okay as it was just the introduction to the skit but as soon as the “Crafty” looked at the camera, this took me away from my “voyeuristic” experience and I immediately became aware I was watching an actor performing for the camera rather than actual characters evolving in their natural habitat.
Yes animators can switch 3d software after a bit of training but there is no way an animator can be proficient in Maya, 3dsmax, AND Blender, when I would highly recommend to gain software specific knowledge, especially if you work in a small production or at a studio with no animation production experience.
Back in 2014, I joined Doodle Productions for the production of “Messy the Monster” season 01.
The company came from Architecture 3d visualisation so we had to use 3dsmax when most animators were Maya users. It didn’t take too long for the animators to get acquainted with 3dsmax as we used regular Euler based rigs and not 3dsmax’s proprietary “Character studio” (“biped”).
One issue we faced though, was the fact that we only had one rigger so it was close to impossible to get additional features and after all, there is no way a character TD can anticipate all the needs of the animators. Most of the time, I wouldn’t even bother and added the missing features myself.
In the following shot, the prop had absolutely no rig. I went ahead and added a bend deformer to make the motion of the trumpet look a bit more smooth, and a “lattice” deformer to visually convey the sound of the trumpet.
On that show, “Messy”, the main character, had two fluffy ears and a massive tail with no dynamics. At a quota of 6 to 8 seconds a day in 3dsmax, most animators gave up on animating those appendages which looked very jarring. Instead, the most technically inclined animators started using a script to simulate dynamics as we felt it was a good compromise to soften the stiff pose to pose look.
The script helped massively but like most simulations, the result needed some additional work to art direct the result and get the tail to resolve in Messy’s question mark trademark posing.
6 years later, I am still mesmerized by the tail animation and if you are curious enough and browse other animators showreels, you will quickly see the difference with shots where no simulation was used.
Don’t forget to read this article about David Gibson’s fantastic use of deformers on the first opus of Sony’s “Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs”.
