WAnimate Talks: Stephen Grant

Kate’s take on…..Stephen Grant…..Learning to animate through the studio system.

The Projection Lounge, 2005

Stephen Grant is from Perth and trained in Graphic Design. At the end of the 80′s he went to London and because there was three large animated films being made at the time he got to work as a ‘clean up artist’ for Amblin on American Tale 2. After that he worked for Disney in Sydney where he was four years as an Animator and four years as a Layout Artist. In Perth he does bits and pieces such as Quads for Animation Works. Stephen shared his experience of working for animation studio and talked about the different roles and the path to being an animator in a studio. Quads is a Flash animated programme but mostly Stephen has done tradtional animation. Stephen is known to many through his role as a teacher at the FTI.
Stephen talked about how animations are made in studios, the different roles etc and it was even a bit of a history lesson. As I knew nothing of all this I made lots of notes….

Stephen says of working for a studio…. It can feel like a factory, you are there to produce content, there are schedules and you have to make quotas. You are drawing drawing drawing ( the sound of a studio is of an electric pencil sharpener.) But it is inspiring to work with very talented people and it is good to be part of something large like a film or TV programme.

If you rocked up at Disney with no studio experience you would be made an ‘In Betweener’ this person does most of the drawing, they have the two key frames and they do the drawings in between.

Next you might get to be a ‘Clean Up Artist’ who takes the Animators key frames which are sketchy and makes a neat frame. This is an important role, at Disney there were 30-40 Animators drawing the same character and the Clean Up Artists need to bring it back to design. There are 1.5 times as many Clean up Artists as Animators and lots more In Betweeners. The structure is not heirarchical because the studio does not like to lose good Clean Up Artists and a good one can find it hard to loosen up to animate.

Animators draw the key frames which can be every thirteen frames or every other depending on the action. Everybody is on quota and has to get them out. The quota is based on a footage system (1 foot = 16 frames in 90mm) A scene = footage and frames. A quota in TV is 22 feet/week.

Animators work from a storyboard and a sound track, a model sheet and a dope sheet (how long the scene is.) Animation is edited before it is made, it is tightly planned. Animators talk to the Director and Composer. The Director looks at the line test. Directors are usually experienced animators. At Disney all the models, storyboards and soundtracks came from Disney in LA. You are making stuff for the US market. At the time Stephen worked for Disney they had studios in Japan, Sydney and China.

You could work on a character team eg Simba (from the Lion King) team, this is to reduce the differences in how something is drawn. The characters evolve during production.

Animating has some creative input but not really as Inbetweener or Clean Up Artist. There was a high turn over of Inbetweeners. Disney had a training scheme – anyone showing any promise got trained as an Animator.

At the beginning of the 90′s the drawings were xeroxed onto acetate sheets. In the late 90′s it changed to digital. After inbetweening the pictures are scanned in. Then the background is painted. The advent of digital saw most of the colouring department disappear. When Stephen left in 2000 there was still some hand drawn 2D but there was a bit of 3D for smoke, fire, insect swarms etc and things like vehicles (which are boring to draw.)

The Lay Out Artist takes the storyboards and does some mood sketches for animators and backgrounds. They set the stage; toner sketches, colour, camera angles and editing.

Animation and backgrounds are put together by the Compositor. In the olden days it was all sandwiched together under camera but now it’s done in the computer.

If you have a very individual style then a studio may not be right.

Animation Works is an example of a small studio. The Perth studio was one of three groups in Australia and one in Canada working on Quads. In the Perth studio there was five animators, 4 scene planners, two background artists and 1 designer. Working with Flash the Scene Planner creates the Animation File with the final assets and passes it to the animator who animates. The animator needs to complete one minute per week.

A small team is better because you can bounce ideas off people and you are closer to the source. There are lessons for a smaller studio from a bigger one such as work flow, how to break down production and be better planned. But smaller productions are more flexible and people can help out on things. A bigger studio provides the opportunity to do it, do it and do it. You may not feel like you are learning anything but you get better the more you do it.