Feature Animation Acting & Polish
Wow, it’s been almost a year since my last post! Oh right—I took the fall semester off from Animation Mentor to travel with my family to Japan. It was my first time visiting Japan, so I really wanted to enjoy the trip without having to worry about completing assignments for Animation Mentor. It was an amazing experience getting to see a country that is so rich in history and culture. I tried to savor every minute of it (literally!), especially since it was my son’s first international trip.
When I got back, I finally took Class 6: Feature Animation & Polish with Sean Sexton, the Head of Character Animation at DreamWorks. It was an incredible experience getting to learn from one of the best animators and mentors out there.
Sean’s process is a little different from what I’m used to. It relies heavily on shooting video reference and basing the blocking on that, whereas I usually like to sketch out storyboards first. We were also encouraged to use a workflow that was unfamiliar to me, where we blocked out the animation on 4s and 8s. This meant placing a keyframe on every fourth or eighth frame based on the video reference, regardless of the pose. Traditionally, I’ve always thought of blocking in terms of key or storytelling poses—the poses that best communicate the action and emotion of a scene.
This workflow took some time to get used to and felt slow at first, but it became much faster as I learned the rig controls and figured out what to focus on. It dawned on me that if I approached the blocking pass purely as a data-entry exercise, I could block out the animation much more efficiently. That meant not worrying about all the details and instead using only the major controls in the rig to establish the poses. Sean mentioned that he typically uses only about 11 controls during his blocking pass.
My first blocking pass using this workflow definitely wasn’t pretty. I had to put a lot of work into it to get it anywhere close to the level of feature-quality animation and polish that Sean expected. But thanks to his excellent teaching and his fresh perspective on the process, I’m really proud of how the shot turned out.
And that’s it—I passed the course and officially graduated from the Animation Mentor 3D Character Animation Certificate Program!
Two years ago, when I first started the program after spending so many years away from character animation, I wasn’t sure how I would do. Looking back now, I can see that my work steadily improved with each class, and my workflow became faster with every piece of knowledge I picked up from my mentors.
Anyway, on to the next animation!
