Gavin Moran Q&A Session

This was an eye-opener.

But first, an introduction: Gavin has been a character animator for 10 years. He was born in the Republic of Ireland where he attended college til he didn't. He came to the United States in 1994 to pursue his dream of animating or at least finding some other way of not working for a living. He has worked in various different studios including Disney, Wildbrain, Sony Imageworks, and Dreamworks on projects such as Dinosaur, Hubert's Brain, Stuart Little 2, Spiderman 2, and Shark Tale. Currently he is working on Dreamworks and Aardman's latest movie 'Flushed Away'. He talks about himself in the third person and only owns 2 pairs of shoes. (Bio and picture taken from the AnimationMentor.com public site.)

The biggest thing I took away from Gavin was this: Watch your animation in realtime as much as possible. A common beginner's mistake is slow timing and overanimating forces. Why does this happen? Overanalyzation. They go over it slow in their heads and it shows up in their animation. Richard Williams (Animator's Survival Kit) says the same thing happens to older animators. They start moving and thinking slower and their animation reflects that. It doesn't make sense to live in a frame-by-frame mindset all the time, cause the audience never sees it that way in a theater - they are watching it in realtime. Who cares if it looks right frame by frame if it doesn't read at 24 frames per second?

I immediately changed my approach after hearing this bit o' wisdom. It reminded me of another piece of advice I got years ago in figure drawing class: Look at the model as much as possible, not your drawing. The majority of your time should be spent in observation. Otherwise, you get so focused on all the little marks that the overall picture suffers from lack of vision. The drawing begins to serve itself instead of the marks supporting your overall idea.

Another analogy that Gavin drew was between animation and sculpture. You start with the big, broad strokes from the rough stone (your key poses), and then whittle the thing down (the timing, the spacing, arcs, anticipation, overlap) til you get a polished, intelligent, nuanced piece (the clean up from stepped blocking to smooth animation curves).

Like Gavin said, it really is a process of breaking things down. But you have to do in a somewhat organized way or you'll get completely lost. That's why AnimationMentor is so incredible in its teaching approach. The basics first. Milk before meat.