Learning Animation

Again?

I came of age at an odd moment in 2D animation.

Circa 1998 I had enrolled at University on a multimedia degree, or Time Based Media as it was known back then. For one of the projects we had to make an interactive, authorial CD-ROM, kind of like a website.

For reasons unknown, I had chosen to animate various cats who lived on my street, and I made very rough, hand drawn walk cycles, frame by frame, with no idea what I was doing, just feeling it out. I sequenced them in a program called Macromedia Director, a kind of stablemate or precursor to what became Flash.

During our project critiques, other students suggested supportively that perhaps I should be drawing cartoons or animating instead of segueing these natural skills into our mixed bag multimedia course where we flitted between radio broadcasting, camera work, and the like. Maybe a seed had been planted.

After a time I’d dropped out for one reason or another, traveled around India, mainly getting stoned and drawing lots of cartoons and comic strips in my sketchbooks. I’d always liked cartoons, flip books in the corners, animated adverts, the Weetabix gang, Milky Way ads, that kinda thing.

Once back from my escapades, I dawdled around for a bit, working menial factory jobs, even sending off for some of those spurious postal homelearning courses you used to find in the backs of newspapers, promising “you can be a cartoonist.”

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These days when I mentor or talk at colleges and universities, one of the things thats so hard to convey to this generation, is how difficult it was to access good information back then. In that moment, before the internet was part of our daily lives, even trying to find out information about simple things like which colleges were good, where there was a good animation course, what was worth doing, which towns were cool to live in, so often just felt like happenstance, talking to the right person at the right time, or not.

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Bristol had quite a scene back then; we’d go to clubs and parties there, a few pals were living there, my sister too. She was living with a crew of graffiti writers, the first proper graffiti crew I'd met, one of whom she's now married to. They inspire to this day, some of the most true to their voice, persistently creative fine artists I've met.

So I found myself in Bristol, home to Aardman, the Bolex brothers, various support studios involved in the processes of stop frame, puppeteering, and model making. I am a drawing guy, not cut out for latex prep or metalwork, so I enrolled on a newish short course, apparently started to train crew for Aardman, called the Bristol Animation Course. I think it was the tail end of the year 2000, to study hand drawn animation for just three months.

As I said at the top, it was a funny moment where 2D animation is concerned. Computers were involved but barely, and slow, a place to help colour or sequence our hand drawn, hand scanned frames. Our tools of the day were lightboxes, pegbars and electric pencil sharpeners.

One of the first things that I bumped up against, is that animation is hard, man.

I found it really hard. Hard to keep my character on model, hard to draw someone else’s character as opposed to my own design, hard to maintain the persistence of volume, weight and line, thats essential to convey the optical illusion of 2d animation. Not to mention counting frames, dope sheets, the sheer mathematics of it was really overwhelming to me, and not something I’ve ever had an easy grasp of.

So I would rush through the animating as quickly as I could, get things scanned, jump to the coloring, wanting to see everything in motion without ever falling in love with the process itself. It's funny how I fell into being a compositor later on, perhaps inevitable in hindsight.

I was learning my trade at a time where 70 years of hardcore analogue craft skills were fast becoming digital. Macromedia Flash was very much the thing. There was a website, as I recall perhaps even called shockwave.com, which had a lot of short films on it that were all made in Flash. The Internet was laden with SWFs as banners, ads and games. It was a creative, exciting time for vector animation.

Analagous to how Blender or perhaps Unreal, are whispered about as some sort of solution to animations innate problems of labour and scale: the silver bullet, the answer.

So it was also a time where it felt like shortcuts were the thing. And people, much more experienced people, producers, artists, animators, would say things like “we don't have to animate anymore, or it will do the in-betweens for you.”

I was caught up in this moment where the reality of what animation entailed felt tricky and really challenging, a near unassailable mountain. Yet the dominant program at the time promised hacks, shortcuts, ways around actually having to animate anything by hand. So I guess I was already trying to skip to the end.

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With no hands on experience, I couldn’t find any work in Bristol, the heartlands of stop frame animation, eventually moving to London.

Gorillaz, the animated band had really revitalized 2D animation in music and advertising, but the animators doing it were largely old hands, some of whom had been out of work for years.

I started working as a gopher for the company responsible, where they had a lot of real animators, people that had been animating with a pencil for the last 10 or 15 years. And all of them were saying, you've got to learn some software. Those old models of apprenticeship, learning on the job, starting as an in betweener or a clean up artist, working your way up through the gears of being a 2D animator and maybe someday even becoming an animation director, they were long gone.

Everyone I spoke to was trying to learn these new programmes themselves. So their advice to me was learn Flash, learn After Effects. So the sad thing is that I never really learned to animate. That's the truth of it. I never really learned to animate. I learned how to dodge it, I learned how to get around the side of it. I learned how to use masks and shape layers and interpolations and anything that I could do that would stop me having to actually animate. And when I did have to animate something, whether it was a bird or some flames or something, I used to prevaricate, procrastinate, put it off as long as I could. I'd make timeline markers, folders, notes, guides, references, annotations, all correctly filed and labelled.

I think this is one of the reasons that I really fell into being a compositor or a motion graphics guy or an After Effects artist, is that I was always neat and tidy where all my filing was concerned. One of the main reasons is I was just trying to put off actually having to do any animation, because it used to frighten me.

So over the years, obviously, I've done some things, I've animated here and there, yet it still terrifies me.

After me, came a generation of digitally native computer savvy animators that just took things forward into the future, using classic frame by frame animation techniques of the 30s or the 50s and onwards, but they put them straight into Photoshop or Flash or TVPaint or Procreate, cintiqs, wacoms, iPads, whatever they felt like.

Both savvy with those old animation rules - which I'd skirted around and tried to avoid and evade - but happy to blow it all up and animate their own way. Some of the most exciting animators I have encountered these past few years seem to be making it up as they go.

I’ve loved to see the pushback from Generation Z against Richard Williams's totemic animation survival kit. I think I'm still triggered by it.

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So anyway, long story short, I've been working in animation for 20 - 25 years, and I am still scared of it. The truth is, I still have that little bit of a bead of sweat, and my heart skips a beat when I need to animate something, or it's put to me I may need to animate something.

So I thought it would be really nice and useful and good for me to try and learn it again, or maybe for the first time, two decades later. I'm doing it with Alex Grigg’s course, because he's an animator and a director that I respect enormously.

He's a great teacher. He knows his onions, and he's got a really fun, accessible style.

So here it is. I'll keep you posted.