Open Mike Nite – A Reflection of Teamwork

It’s the end of my first year at CSM’s Character Animation course, and whilst this post technically isn’t mandatory, I thought it would be appropriate to write down my thoughts on what I think has gone well this project, what hasn’t worked as well, what I’ve learned as well as my goals for the future.

As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been working with Neale and Sofi on “Open Mike Nite” for the London International Animation Festival. We just had our assessment recently, and it went well! The expected happened in that we couldn’t finish it 100% for assessment, but we got pretty close. Only a few shots weren’t cleaned up and coloured, but we still have to nail down compositing, lighting, masks and the like. I’m sure we’ll have it all wrapped up in the next few weeks ready for November’s debut.

I’d like to share my thoughts here as I did in my assessment reflection about how I performed and the experiences I’ve gained being here. Throughout this project, I’ve been thrown out of my comfort zone. I had to slow down, learn to match my pace with Neale, learn to take criticism and feedback from a supervisor and learn to work differently in how I submit animation to someone else for correction. There were a few times where I had made assumptions on how characters might move, especially at the start when Neale was finding his feet with the project. I’d fully animated some sequences, sort of expecting we were on the same wavelength, when in fact, he had very different ideas on the shapes of the characters. From experiences like this, I realised what it meant to be an animator under a supervisor: you must follow their direction and vision, and they have the final say. At first, it felt a little like I was being limited in my own creativity in this project, but truthfully, that’s more my ego talking than anything. And it’s not like I was being silenced from making suggestions either, sometimes Neale would take onboard ideas I’d thrown into the film.

I think my ego especially took a bruising when I was submitting cuts to get feedback in the first or second week. At this current point in time, I still have trouble figuring out keys without working out inbetweens, so the “keys” get lost in the mix as they change and swap with inbetweens. I also still have the habit of trying to tie down and get on model as quickly as possible, which meant I was giving Neale very off-model stuff with awkward and stiff movement. I remember being told to loosen up and slow down, and at the time it almost felt like my way of working was being questioned, largely because this has been the way I’ve been animating since I first took animation seriously – I had become proud of the way I worked. But I also started to look at it from Neale’s perspective: I don’t imagine it’d be very helpful to be given near complete work and be unsure what was keys and what were inbetweens and make corrections from that. I knew I had a major animation ego at that point, and over the weeks afterwards, settled down and did my best to adapt to what would work for Neale.

All year round I’d been using Clip Studio Paint. It was the only software I really knew how to use, partly because it was on an iPad. At the time, I didn’t have access to a Cintiq at home, so I hadn’t had time to get used to either it or TVPaint. But there came a point in the project where me and Neale hesitated on what software to use moving forwards. Neale had developed a brush in Clip to animate with, and of course that was my personal software preference. But Neale had become accustomed to TVPaint, whereas I had avoided it because I felt like I couldn’t produce my best work unless I was using Clip on an iPad. Eventually, we had a chat with Abbie, director of “Abyss”, where she gave her two cents on the matter which was that I should follow Neale and learn TVPaint. Either way, one of us had to learn a program we weren’t as familiar with, and we only had a few weeks left by this point. I’m glad I followed both of them on that choice, because I feel a little more confident in my ability to adapt and learn on the job, and now I have another program under my belt.

The same can be said for my efforts on compositing this project too. I’d briefly picked up compositing in Premiere from the 2nd term, but I’ve now started to mix After Effects in. Looking up tutorials, playing with masks, it’s only basic stuff currently but I’ve started building a foundation to compositing, and hopefully I’ll move forward and pick up more skills beyond this project. Since submission, me and Neale have gone back and forth on what kind of weird backgrounds we want where the 3D backgrounds aren’t required – we settled on Earthbound-inspired backgrounds, with textures and checkered boards that make you feel slightly uncomfortable. At first, I found tutorials teaching me on a game engine such as Godot, but eventually I worked out what tools I wanted to use rather than specifically a game-dedicated software, and found the equivalents in After Effects and looked up tutorials for that.

I picked Open Mike Nite as the project I wanted to help out with for two reasons: 1. I felt me and Neale were pretty in sync before the project started, and 2. I felt the rounder, more cartoony art style would be something pretty easy to adapt to. Before the project started, I was confident I’d adapt very quickly to the project. Boy oh boy how wrong I was. I’d overestimated my skill level both as an animator, and a team player. I’ll likely remember this project as a humbling experience, as I learned what it’s like to animate in a team, where workloads are split equally and where everyone wants to leave their mark.

I think moving forwards, I want to continue developing my skills so I can adapt quicker than I have done here. I’m continuing to help out with work on “The Ritual” (as seen below both in clean-up and compositing, as well as other second year clean-up so I have more experience in working under other people’s styles. Furthermore, I intend to pick up Toon-Boom Harmony, since there’s an overwhelming demand for work and animation using that software, and slowly improve my understanding of anatomy and posing so I can create more dynamic animation for future directors. To have both cut-out and frame-by-frame under my belt would be a huge boost to the opportunities available to me, so I want these to be my starting points.