Practitioner: Ben Blair

Ben Blair, An aspiring character animator came into class recently to talk of how he got into the field of professional animation and how he's working his way up the ranks in the industry. Currently, Ben is working under the guidance of mentors at DreamWorks with some of the world's most skilled animators.

Ben Blair

He talked about how he became interested in animation after completing a media course (similar to ours) whilst at sixth form. He went on to experiment and teach himself how to use animation software and packages such as Adobe's creative suite and blender, ultimately applying for the 'Maya Fast Track' course at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. Maya is considered to be the industry standard 3D animation software; it is difficult to learn but extremely rewarding to master. Ben explained to us that if we are looking to become experts in animation we should learn as early as possible how to use the tools and software the industry has come to adopt.

 He emphasized learning whilst in and beyond college will give us an advantage over others looking to get jobs in the same profession as employers will choose candidates they won't have to train as much to use their software. On that note, Ben told us an interesting fact that many studios will buy software (such as Maya) and have their own programmers edit and change it in ways that will be suitable for them. For example, some studios may have customized software that allows them to create water simulations for easily than the base software. Despite this, knowing how to use the base software will make it easy to adapt to the customization and again, making you a better choice for employers.

Ben introduced us to various websites that offered online courses and tutorials for us to use if we were interested in learning the various packages that the industry used.

iAnimate.net

This site offers numerous online workshops and tutorials to help aspiring animators get their character animations up to studio-level quality. Participants use top-tier grade software and engage with professionals currently working in the industry to review their work and improve their skills; they engage in 1-to-1 online video chats in which the mentor can see and comment on their work in real time. Ben recommended this choice as it was a great way to get experience from those working in top animation studios and learn how to polish their animation to levels that would meet employment standards in the animation industry.

The Gnomon Workshop

This is another site that users can kind tutorials and online workshops by those already in the industry. Ben personally used this site for their 'Maya fast track' to quickly learn how to get to gripes with the program. They offer many specialized workshops and tutorial courses in different areas of animation and model design. The site uses a subscription based model that varies depending on what courses and tutorials the user is interested in learning.

Animation Mentor

Instead of individual workshops and tutorials, animation mentor focuses around a more 'traditional' model of having courses students can apply to for certain amounts of time and for terms for example, a course could take over 10 months whilst another could take 3. The courses vary from the 'complete' package that teachers students everything they need to know to work as a professional animator from beginner or more specialized courses such as animal animation.

Ben also showed us a variety of other websites such as more common video tutorial websites such as Video Co-pilot which is focused around visual effects and other sites that offer tutorials for all major design programs.



Ben also gave us advice on creating demo reels for use when applying for university or for a job in the industry. He told us we should treat it like a story, progressing in a way that shows off your 'creative flair' and has maximum impact for the viewer, only showing off your best work. To maintain the rhythm for the demo reel, Ben recommended we put some serious thought into what kind of music we overlay the presentation with; music sets the tone for anything its associated with therefore what we chose should reflect what we're trying to portray. Using music that is too 'mainstream' will reflect badly, unless it is somehow directly related to the content of the demo reel, using beats are lesser-heard music will go further in helping to sell your demo reel.

Beyond animation and software, Ben also told us a bit what it's like following his dream and being outside college; working for real clients and making money has changed him and his behaviors and no longer finds himself procrastinating from his work. The message he wanted us to understand was start working your way into creative professions - such as an animator - as soon as you can, whether that's building a web of useful contacts or learning the tools of the trade. Overall, I found Ben's talk very insightful and helpful for deciding on how to get into the studios that power the creative industry.

Final BLU style animation

I have completed my BLU style animation using Adobe After Effects. I attempted to try and re-create some of the elements from the BLU graffiti video. Below is the animation combined with a simple audio track:



I started off by taking my distorted ghost animation (see previous post) and implementing it over a photograph. I went out with a digital camera and took many photos of a particular spot in the college; my original plan was to have the ghost flying around the side of a wall and off into the distance. The animation was disorientating as the ghost moved past various photos (like a scrolling game) that looked alike . I tried to fix the animation by stiching the photos together like a panorama which had poor results - I stuck to using only one photograph.

Example of a panorama photograph

Photograph I used for the final animation

Using the same principles as animating parts of the character in Adobe After Effects (see this post), I animated the position of the ghost animation to move about the screen. I grouped the animation into its own composition so it could be animated as a single object rather than a collection of body parts (also explained in aforementioned post) so I could animate the position property (move it around over time). I created the movement animation for the ghost and applied motion blur and eased the motion to make it smoother. For some parts of the video the ghost also moves through 3D space; I did this by enabling the ghost animation to be a 3D object giving it the ability to move and rotate along the Z axis as well as the X and Y axis's. The usual animation principles still apply even in 3D space.

There are paint splatters on the wall where the ghost appears. I achieved this effect by taking paint splatters from my licensed stock footage pack (Riot Gear - shown below) and placing them over the wall and resizing them. I set them all to be 0% opaque and animated them in a sequence to appear once the ghost moved over them; I wanted to try and re-create the paint effect that BLU used in his video when a character moved along a wall.



The video shakes as a whole which implies it was filmed as a video without a tri-pod or support. I did this by creating a null object (an object with no information) and applied a random movement expression (called a wiggle) to it. I parented all of the other elements of the video (the photograph, ghost and paint) which allowed them to move along with null object - this creates the illusion the video is shaking as a whole as if it was being filmed when in reality it is a still image. To make the pseudo-video effect I added a subtle brightness colour correction that randomised to make it appear as if there was a camera that was receiving different levels of light as it moved around.

Overall I am pretty satisfied with the animation. I think if I had more time there would be more I could do to it to make it more convincing. I think with the camera shake I could have made it very jerky in the same fashion as the ghost animation to make it seem as if it was a series of photographs rather than a video that was being taken. If I wanted to get very serious with this I could animate the paint so it appeared around the outlines of the ghost at a given time; this would be a convincing effect but would take up a lot of time.