Animation : Ask Me Anything (AMA) 10/18 to 10/19 by Brian Smith

Hope you had a great weekend, Brian Smith. Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions.

Stop-motion Animation takes a lot of time to film because the crew has to move the characters (like action figures). I'm thinking that'd make the budget high. Question: Do you think it's cheaper to make stop-motion Animation or 3D Animation? I want to know because I'd like to write a stop-motion Animation script and a heads up about budget will help.

Hi, Brian, what a wonderful resume of stellar work!! I cannot wait to check out the blog you wrote about the Hero's Journey and Disney Animation.

Hi Brian Smith thank you for taking the time out of your day to answer questions today. What are the tasks and roles that comes with being in animation production? Are you involve in more manager-like roles?

Maurice Vaughan that's a great question, and as much as I hate to say this, the answer is... it depends. Stop motion has the potential to have a lot of upfront costs because you have to build the sets and the characters, and the props. And yes, it requires a team to move everything around on set. It's also critical to have a stop-motion film meticulously storyboarded. In CG animation, if there is a redo, the animator can simply fix the section of the shot that needs to be fixed. In stop motion, the entire shot needs to be reshot. However, in CG animation, you have a lot of the same issues, just on the digital side. Sets and characters need to be built, as do the props and any other assets you're going to need, plus you'll need a tech support team for the inevitable hardware and software issues you're going to come across. So my advice to you is, if you think your film will look better as stop-motion, that's the avenue you should go.

Tony, that's correct. My role has generally been to manage teams of artists. It involves assisting the department lead in assigning work, making sure the artists are getting the work done in a timely manner, taking notes during director approval sessions, and overall making sure the team is staying on schedule.

Hello Bryan, my name is Cee and I'm the creator of a new animated film called "Ryder & The Deer Guardians" in collaboration with Kumar Sambhav of VawWorld Studios.

Brian Smith thank you for your quick response. How do you keep your team of artists on schedule and what do you do if you start getting a sense that your team is starting to fall behind?

Cee Whirx I just accepted your invite to connect!

Brian, thank you!

Tony, primarily in feature animation, you have a weekly quota for the department and a weekly quota for each artist. Those quotas are generally measured in feet and frames. So a department might need to get around 100-150 feet out per week and each artist might need to get 3-6 feet out per week. So it will be easy to see if anyone is falling behind based on those metrics. If an artist is falling behind, you might try to give him or her some easier shots to get caught up. If a whole team falls behind, you might have to have people work OT to get caught back up, but it's the job of the dept manager to make sure that doesn't happen. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but you try to avoid it when you can.

Hi Brian, thank you so much for doing this AMA for the community! I'd love to know why you chose animation/mo-cap as a path (if that was a conscious choice.) I'd also love to hear about how you've developed your artist/project management and organization over time. Do you have tools you use or your own personal style and system?

Hi Brian Smith. My name is Josiah and I’m trying to make it as a screenwriter and I really hope to network with you and everyone here so that I can prosper and grow and gain more experience and knowledge. Thank you for this and I hope we can network.

Niki H those are great questions. I have always been a fan of animation, and that fandom didn't abate even as I became a teenager. I took my first animation class in college, and even though I was never a very good artist, I fell in love with it right away. What I love about it is that it's the only visual cinematic medium where you start out with nothing but a blank page. The entire project comes out of your imagination. You don't have anything to rely on other than what you can dream up. There is something so pure about that, and it's unique to the world of animation. That's why I chose to pursue it and never really left.

To your other question, it's a combination of things. Generally, when you're on a production, they'll have a database like Shotgrid that can be used for tracking progress. However, I'm an old-school guy, and I find there's nothing handier than an old-fashioned spreadsheet at your side if you need to have exact information at your fingertips. That and a ton of post-its.

Hi Brian - I actually read your blog while I was writing my first animation feature. Lots of great tips in there. Looking forward to reading your feedback to others in this chat.

Brian Smith When you say the department has a quota in feet and frames, do you mean the actual unit feet? How is that measured in animation deadlines?

Hi Brian Smith! Great discussion! Hi to all Advertising is important, trailer and otherwise. That said my film is about creativity generally. In film it's about the story it tells. A short part of my film will pay tribute to "character and speech bubbles" (comics in film format) as an appeal to the hearing impaired because of importance of the message and title "The World of Thought, Perception & Creativity", There is also animations and will include "stop motion" (keeping with the good story theme) and as mentioned advertising including trailers. I will appreciate general comments. Thanks!

Hello Brian Smith, my name is Komal, I didn't acheive anything in this field or in simple words i say that i'm scared to make decisions by my own self. In my family they barely know that being an animator can be a carrer choice, so i'm the only soul in my home who choose this passion and wants to get succeded on it. But i don't understand how i'm going to do it, i mean i know what kind of story or charcter i want for making my first animation feature but i don't know what would i do next? should i have to take animation classes? I don't know what my first step would gonna be in this field? So, i want to ask, when you were new in this field what was your first step? Do you were get confused to make right decisions like me or it's just my problem? What do you think, what kind of step should i have to take for starting my carrer in the animation field?

Thanks for the VERY detailed answer, Brian Smith! All of your answers are great! I'll keep your advice in mind, especially "So my advice to you is, if you think your film will look better as stop-motion, that's the avenue you should go."

Tony, it's actually feet of film. So one foot of 35 mm film is 16 frames. Since we make animated movies one frame at a time, we measure our progress by how much footage is getting out on a daily or weekly basis. So if a quote for a department is 100 feet, they literally need to produce 1600 frames of animation that week,.

Komal, thank you very much for your sincere and personal question. It can be quite challenging to break into the animation industry from the outside. What worked for me was when I was attending school at USC, I had a summer internship at Disney Feature Animation the summer before I graduated. I kept in touch over the school year with the people I worked with, and I was able to parlay that internship into my first full-time job when I got hired as a PA on Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The best advice I can give you is to take classes and get trained as an animator so that you can put together a solid demo reel of your work. Once you have 2-3 minutes of very good character animation or efx animation or whatever kind of animation you want to do, start sending it to studios you would like to work at. They all have websites that explain how to apply for positions and what the requirements are to apply. The best thing in the world you can do if you want to get into animation is show that you belong here by demonstrating excellent work.

Hey Brian! Thanks for doing an AMA for everyone! I would love to know, with all the changes happening right now in the animation business and a lot of people feeling uncertainty, what would you recommend recent graduates and up-and-coming artists do to prepare themselves for the job market? Or where do you think they should put their focus in terms of creating opportunities for themselves?

Brian Smith, since you're good at production management, are you good at finding film funds for film projects?

That's a great question, Emily. As I mentioned to Komal, first and foremost, make sure you have a good demo reel. Put your best 2-3 minutes' worth of animation on there and send it to as many studios as you can. And don't just limit yourself to the big guys like Disney, DreamWorks, and Pixar. There are plenty of smaller shops like Skydance that are working on features but just aren't as prestigious. They're still doing amazing work, and they could be great places to get your foot in the door. Go to animation conferences. The Lightbox Expo was just this past weekend in Pasadena, and CTN in Burbank is coming up in November, and there are always recruiters there. Plus, there are also always recruiters at SIGGRAPH and ComiCon. Hit up all those places. Start to become a familiar face, so people will recognize you go in for interviews. And remember that finding a job is a process, Don't get discouraged if you don't land your dream job right out of the gate. I've been in this business for 23 years, and I'm still trying to land my dream job.

As far as looking for a job with a studio or working on your own project, there are benefits and challenges to both. Making an animated film is a long slog. I've always said that you need to be crazy to make a movie one frame at a time, and that's exactly what the animation business is. It's crazy, and no one will take you seriously unless they think you're a little nuts. Making your own film can be rewarding, and there have been some wonderful independent animated films to come out, especially over the last decade and a half. But it's haaaaaarrd to find distribution for them. They're a good chance you're going to end up beating your head against the wall. BUT, you will have the reward of making your own film with your own creative vision. If you work for a studio, you will have the security (such as it is) of working for a big company with benefits and a regular salary and working on a movie that people will actually see. However, you will likely always be helping someone else achieve their creative vision while you put your own creative vision aside.

I know I rambled a bit. I hope that answers your question.

Brian Smith, thank you for this AMA! I have an animated feature script (among many others) that I'm using to gain representation. Is there a different process out for there for animated scripts, as opposed to live action? I'm assuming no, but wanted to get your professional opinion on the matter.

Hey Brian! Thanks so much for doing this AMA. Curious to hear how your experience working on the Avatar films has differed from the other animated features you've worked on!

Hi Brian Smith - thank you for doing this AMA!

I love everything Avatar and am so excited for Way of the Water!

My Q: Given the current disarray happening with studios right now, what is the one most important piece of advice you can offer to all of us trying so hard to make it happen? (for writers and animators)

James Welday I don't think there is much of a difference in the process between writing a screenplay for live-action and one for animation. The biggest issue you're going to have is that it's difficult to go to a studio from the outside and successfully pitch an idea to a studio like Disney or Dreamworks. Those studios have teams of creative executives looking for the next idea, and they can have a half dozen projects at various stages of development at any given time. Plus, the directors are on staff, so they're ready to pitch their next idea once they finish their current project. Then there are all the animators and story artists that have ideas and will pitch them in house. That's the competition you're up against when you try and pitch an idea to a studio. I don't want to be a downer and I'm not saying it can't happen, but you need to have realistic expectations. At the very least, you'll need to have an agent so they can potentially get your script to a creative executive in the development team.

@Brian Is it likely that large studios such as those you have worked with would accept an idea with both 2D and 3D as a proof of concept short/screenplay? Or is it more likely to be one or the other and they would say re write this for solely one animation type?

I want 2D cos characters somehow look like ordinary everyday folk they are meant to be, the visual "simplicity" highlights emotion and their core elements rather than distracts. BUT when their world turns upside down and they go space travelling the 3D would be perfect for swirling through magical galaxies. Thanks for doing this Q & A

Hey Sam, I don't have enough room here to talk about how much different working on Avatar has been from working on animated features. Avatar is technically a live-action movie with a sh!tload of VFX, and we're essentially working as a post house. The pipeline is entirely different, the schedule is entirely different and the process is entirely different. We always joke that we're living on Pandora, but we might as well be on a different planet when you compare what we're doing to making an animtated feature.

Hey Jacqueline! I just wrote a blog on that very subject about a month ago. Here's a link to it:

https://www.stage32.com/blog/the-truth-about-the-animation-industrys-rec...

The jist of the blog is to stay positive. As volatile as it seems right now, the industry is still very healthy, and there are a lot of opportunities for those who think outside the box. I mentioned in an earlier answer to attend animation conferences, and you can add festivals to that as well. Be a familiar face to recruiters. Get to know them without being annoying, and they will go to bat for you. Be willing to work in TV or in VFX. Don't be too selective about what job you want. All experience is good experience.

Hey Debbie, I don't think any of the large studios would be opposed to that at this point, at least philosophically. this is especially true when you think of the recent success of movies like Into the Spiderverse and Bad Guys, that had different styles of animation within them. As long as the idea makes sense and carries a good story, you can defend your reasoning for wanting to do it that way. It sounds like you have good reasoning for wanting to do different styles like that, so if that's the way you want to tell your story, that's the way you should pitch it.

Brian Smith appreciate the advice, thank you!

Derek, you're absolutely right. The bigger studios all primarily get their ideas in-house. And they never accept unsolicited ideas. Your best bet would be to find an agent. Any studio will only take submissions from agents and animation studios are no different. Something to consider would be to make your idea yourself as a short and see if it can get noticed by any of the studios.

Certainly thankful to be part of this AMA , Brian! Particularly on "In-house ideas". Will certainly like to hear general opinions, on my concepts beginning with my recent lounge post. Otherwise thanks again! Best!

Hello Brian! One of our more edgy offerings jumps back and forth between the animated world of computer gaming and real world settings (about 50-50). Should we pitch it/compete it as afeature length drama screenplay, or as an animation, or both, or, I suppose, neither?

Thank you.

Ah, John, you've stumbled upon to one of my pet peeves. Animation is NOT a genre. It is a style of filmmaking through which any genre can be told. I know you didn't use the word genre, but it was implied when you asked if you should pitch it as a drama screenplay or as an animation. My question would be, why aren't you pitching it as a dramatic animated film? If you have a dramatic script that you want to tell through animation, you should pitch it that way. Not knowing the material, I can't really advise you on whether it would play better as a game or as a feature, but I wish you the best of luck with it.

Eon, by in-house ideas, I mean those ideas that are pitched by people who already work at the studio. The idea that you mentioned above in the thread sounds interesting, but I would need to know more about the story. Using thought bubbles like they do in comics could have a cool look, but without a compelling story behind it, it would be nothing more than a novelty. Now, if you're targeting people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and that's who your audience is, then it would be more than just a novelty but it still needs a great story and compelling characters.

Thanks Brian, I take your point and agree with it, although competition rubrics seem sometimes to point otherwise.