[update. Just so I don’t mislead animation students, I don’t use Jason Ryan’s “2d to 3d workflow” anymore. Instead I do my posing straight into Maya, with preparatory sketches once in a while. The main reason being my inability to draw subtle acting shots]

Jason Ryan

Yesterday I was talking to an animator friend that had recently converted from 2d animation to 3d. For few minutes, I had been explaining to him why I was making a 2d animation of my pantomime shot before shooting it in 3d but he couldn’t understand why or where I got this idea from. “This workflow is inspired by Jason Ryan” I told him, to which he replied: “but who the * is Jason Ryan?”

Jason Ryan grew up in Ireland, worked for disney for the past 12 years, where he was supervising animator on Chicken Little (Eamonn Butler was the animation supervisor). His last film at Disney was Meet the Robinsons and probably “Enchanted” before accepting a position at Dreamworks.

Before AM I didn’t know who he was either but once in….. Jason Ryan became a regular topic amongst students, especially around class 2 and 3, when we were trying to figure out how to animate a shot. He was only a mentor for 3 classes I think but he was a great source of inspiration to his students and the followings.

There used to be a section on the Animation Mentor forum where students would discuss topics raised during the week lecture or assignment on the “My Mentor” section dedicated to their class.

This section has diseapeared now but at the time Jason Ryan was a mentor, his section grew up to 40 pages!!! 40 pages!! That should tell you how infectious his passion for animation is.

His workflow is strongly influenced by his traditional 2d animation background and I would highly suggest you to check a video he recorded for Digicel

http://www.flipbookpro.com/movies/mayabowlingdemoSTRMED.mov

basically what he does is to first rought out his animation on a Cintiq equipped computer or a Tablet PC, using a digital 2d software like PAP, Digicel or TV Paint (my favourite). The final animation is then exported as an image sequence in Maya and will be the base for the posing of the character.

This workflow is very good especially when working in production as it only takes few hours to communicate with your supervisor what you are going for. It would take much more time if you were to reach a similar level of definition in Maya.

Being quicker at this allows for more changes and experimentation.

I also like that very much to fine tune my timing. Playblasting takes few minutes, 2d animating takes much less.

Few more links:

The place for his future animation training and a quick trailer:

An interview on radiofree.com
http://movies.radiofree.com/interviews/chickenl_jason_ryan.shtml

Two videos of him at work on Chicken Little (check around 2:07):
http://movies.aol.com/movie/chicken-little/18895/video/inside-the-dvd-chicken-little/1479195

http://movies.aol.com/movie/chicken-little/18895/video/video-qanda/1423201

Ahhh this makes me want to watch Chicken Little again!

Today I finally got to meet the whole crew and my mentor Elliot Bour. He seems to be a very nice guy and very down to earth for someone with so much experience in animation and directing, also he didn’t mind expressing his opinion about companies and movies he worked on so that was refreshing but this will stay private as in this business you still need to keep stuff for you, don’t worry he didn’t have much grudge against the whole business and didn’t make comments John K. would do.
Fate made Richie Prado and Matt Morris be in my class this term so I get to be in the same class than 2 UK guys, Matt being in London already and Richie coming back once in a while from Birmingam. This allows us to meet regularly and help each others. Gosh I just realised I might have forgotten some of my classmates when i did my photoshop collage… damn

Yep after few ups and downs I finally reached the second year of animation mentor and will spend the 6 next month on developing then producing my own short. Producing a short is not something you can take too lightly and the idea of spending the next 6 month on a story I will choose in the next few weeks is really scary! Luckily things are done very well at Animation mentor and our mentors for class5 are animators or artists who have had some experience in the story department or in direction.

My mentor for this term will be Elliot M. Bour . He “began his career working as an animator for Walt Disney from “Beauty and the Beast” to “Mulan”, then directed on Disney’s “Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo” and “Kronk’s New Groove”. Elliot just got a job at Sony in development and hopefully we will be able to pick his brain to come up with the best short possible!

Elliot is on the right of the picture next to the Disney legends

Ok, this is meant to be my final but I am struggling some much to clean this up. Anyway, this is where I am so far. I will try to find the time to improve it.

Here is my latest assignment. Still a lot of work to do but I think it is getting somewhere. The obvious errors (floating CD, buried eyes, orange guy frozen at the end) are not the main problem, I will attend to them at polish time.

Here is where I am with 2 characters shot. I still have a some keys to put here and there especially where Bishop goes monologuing then create my eases and time out the whole thing but I am hoping to start splining tomorrow and be on time to deliver a polished version by the end of the week or as a late assignment next week.

The shot is meant to be delivered on sunday this week.