this one! it’s my favourite because the original shot in the boards was WAY different; miles just jumped into frame and ran out while taking his clothes off. it took some exploration to get to the panning down the fire escape idea. it still needed a button at the end of it though so i pitched a few ideas and brainstormed this joke with my partner. i had another take that i liked where instead of re-zipping, miles thwips away and leaves his pants spinning in mid-air lol but they liked this one the best

they were added intentionally! the 2099 world look is based on the art of syd mead, and the art team combined the sleek look of his paintings with the precise construction lines of his sketches

miguel had several passes of linework done on him. the first were the lines that we add on every character in anim, the expression inklines. the second were the lines that fx adds to every character since they change depending on the angle that the character is facing camera (this would be difficult for anim to do on every shot), those are usually the lines around the nose, nostrils, chin, ears, and neck. finally, the look of picture sketch lines were added, to make him look like he had construction lines that hadn’t been erased yet

the shot in the screenshot above was animated by the amazing eleonora burtolucci!

i’ve gotten a lot of similar asks so i’m going to use this one to address this general query about how to get get started in animation and make it to your dream studio. it’s totally okay to dream big and have a goal to work towards, but it’s also okay to start small. i understand the feeling like you need to get good quickly in order to not miss out on cool projects, but cool stuff will always keep happening. getting good takes a lot of practice, so even if you don’t land your first job at your dream studio (or even your second, third or fourth choice), it’s still good practice wherever you end up. i’ve been in the industry for 13 years now and i’m still learning, it never stops. come at learning animation with a positive attitude of wanting to create and have fun, not fear of failing before you even start. you’ll face a lot of challenges and stuff that makes you feel like you’re not doing it right but getting through that is how you get better. and from my personal experience, you’ll never feel alone in this industry! the best part of every job i’ve had (even if the job itself was crummy) has always been the people that i’ve worked with; anim folks are super friendly, welcoming, and helpful

for further reading, i’ve answered another question about what sony looks for in a demo reel here, and i have several pages of animation advice in my animation question tag

1. i’m not sure! he might be around a head, head and a half taller than miles maybe? definitely shorter than miguel. we had a height chart for every character model but i don’t have access to that right now. in some shots we cheated the sizes a bit to emphasize certain feelings though, like scaling him up to make him feel more powerful in mumbattan
2. we made his face hole smaller when we thought it’d be funny! and we made it more bubbly to make him feel more powerful and unstable whenever he talked about his past, as a way of sort of foreshadowing his final form
3. interesting connection but i don’t think this ever came up, actually! just goes to show how differently you can animate characters with similar limitations. we always take what we learn from past movies and implement them in the next thing though, for sure. our head of character animation on atsv, alan hawkins, was also hoca on tmvtm, so even if there was nothing specific carried over, there was a ton of knowledge on general acting and storytelling that be brought from mitchells to spiderverse

this is a lovely question, i had to really think about this one! there have been a lot of shows and movies that i loved being a part of and people i loved working with, but the thing i loved animating the most is a hard one to pinpoint. i keep coming back to the ending of the final episode of tmnt that i worked on, the penultimate episode of season 4. i had worked on tmnt from the start of season 1 and it played a huge role in my career. it’s also where i met my partner, who i’ve been with and worked alongside for 8 years now. we don’t get to animate a lot of shots that play together in sequence though, but we got to kill splinter together in this ep :) he animated everything up to the throw, and i animated everything after

i had always wanted to try animating a real emotional cry and, given the limitations with the turtle masks and lack of budget to add tears, i’m still pretty happy with how those shots turned out too

kind of a dark answer haha but i think this is what i loved animating the most because it was the perfect send off to my time on tmnt and i got to work on it with my best friend

good question, and thank you! i haven’t seen much talk about spot but a lot of development went into his look

for posing, we took a lot of inspiration from the artist egon schiele, an idea from humberto rosa. we wanted spot to look awkward by making him feel like a loose yet controlled sketch, exaggerating his weird long and lanky proportions into very squared off and angular shapes

for the portals, they had to be created in anim first and then fx did a pass on them to add all the little extra swirly bits, and then comp did another pass on them to integrate them into the scene. every element that you see in a shot had to be created in 3D in order to move properly down the pipeline so that the other departments knew what to do with the scene, because they don’t always look at the animation playblasts, what matters is what’s published in the scene file. we can draw over our shots to try things out quickly but eventually had to put in the work of making them real 3D assets. every portal that you see on spot’s body and floating off of him was placed by an animator

near the beginning of production, a lot of tests were done to make spot’s face portal more expressive, mimicking mouth and eye shapes as a part of his acting. it was decided that simpler was better in this case, so it was mostly just kept as an oval instead

in order to make a shot like this work in 3D, we used two spot rigs here and a portal tool that let us flatten the geo of the second spot down to 1 pixel so that only his hand can be seen while animating in and out of the portal. nothing is painted over here, this is pretty much 1:1 to what’s in the maya scene

in order to progress spot’s power throughout the movie, we needed to add more body spots in the india sequence, similar to the second to last pose here (art by aymeric kevin):

our anim tech lead emmanuel gatera worked with rigging to update spot with the ability to turn sections of his body black with the use of a boolean, since it was impossible to add enough spots to totally cover his hands and midsection. he did still need a lot of spots along with the booleans though, i think it was somewhere around 80 (we had library poses for them, didn’t need to bring them all in and manually place them in every shot haha)

and finally forget what i said about having to create everything in 3D because the final stage of spot’s power was the exception to that rule since he was only in a small handful of shots. nideep varghese animated this shot with the regular spot rig and drew over it entirely in 2D, which the fx department recreated with about a bazillion layers of hand-drawn fx by arthur muller, srdjan milosevic and filippo maccari. lighting/comp by craig feifarek

Originally posted by omegawott

we have a bunch of different tools that we use to adjust geo to create our own blendshapes! we call them tweaks. we have different ones to model geo, create keyable clusters, bendy/noodle limbs, silhouette shaping, smooth wrinkles, and a few others that i don’t really use lol

they were mostly developed for the hotel transylvania movies to achieve those crazy shapes that you can’t achieve with the rig alone, but we use them on every other movie too because they’re just so helpful for making poses look more designed. when i started at sony i didn’t know a thing about modelling. 5 years in i still know nothing about modelling but i am slightly better at it now haha. i drew this as an example to explain how we used tweaks to shape the characters on twitter, which was a mistake because i got yelled at for taking the butts away lol

IT WASN’T MY CALL OK but also the butts they modelled onto these characters are insane and every animator spent a lot of time tweakin spidey butts

miguel was SUPER FUN i loved animating him!! i feel like a lot of 3D animation defaults to super skinny characters that are basically just tubes, so it’s fun to work with a character that lets you design the shapes into something more graphic

we had to think a lot about how someone that big moved, but also how they carry themselves when just standing and talking. we referenced idris elba:

when a person has very well defined and built up chest muscles, their shoulders tend to be pulled forward. i did some posture tests early on to help out with finding a good slumped but still powerful, natural standing pose

a lot of tweaking had to be done too whenever he was doing any kind of dynamic action because of how defined his muscles are, extreme poses tended to get off model pretty quickly. here’s an example with one of the shots that i animated, i tried to recreate what his model looked like without any shaping adjustments:

i wanna give a special shout out to eric de carolis, who animated a lot of fantastic miguel swagger, he really helped set the bar for how we should handle miguel’s massive everything when walking. he animated this shot:

so, yes! there was a lot that went into finding his character through movement and it’s always a challenge to animate subtleties on someone this big while still making them feel heavy

it was x_x as much as you try to set boundaries, you can’t help but still think about work non-stop outside of work hours. i had a lot of work stress dreams towards the end haha. the biggest things that kept me sane was my weight lifting routine before work and going for a walk after work every day. my partner was also a lead on spiderverse, so that helped a lot having someone to talk to about it that understood the specific stresses without me having to explain them first haha

i’m making up for the lack of balance while working on the movie by not working at all right now lol i’m taking a nice long vacation

sure!

as an animator at sony imageworks, your day is fairly simple. most days are just work days, and you can listen in to rounds even if you don’t have anything to show yet. it’s helpful to listen to the kinds of notes that other people are given because it helps you to learn the show style and how to handle different characters for future shots. if you’re starting fresh on a new shot, assigned to you by your lead (you can sometimes request shots, depending on what’s available and who your lead is), the first thing i do is look at it in the context of the sequence. from there i’ll gather or shoot any reference as needed, or maybe sketch thumbnails. depending on the shot, i’ll just show the reference to get feedback on that, or rough in some basic poses as a “layout plus” pass to get a more specific kickoff on what my lead/supervisor/director thinks the shot needs to be

there are a few levels of feedback that your shot goes through:

1. your lead: the anim crew gets separated into teams, each one led by a lead animator. this is your go-to person for most things. they’ll be the one to help you with questions, making sure your shot is presentable, small polish, show style, and a whole bunch of other stuff
2. the head of character animation/supervisor: when your lead gives you the ok to show your shot in rounds, this is where you show the hoca. they’re the one in charge of the overall look and feel of the animation and has to keep the whole movie and director notes in mind when critiquing your shot
3. the director: the hoca will then look at all the shots submitted for director review/shots shown in rounds/shots due for the week and decide whether or not to show them to the director, who will then give more notes. his job is to make sure the shot is doing the best it can to tell the story that it needs to tell, often changing the acting, camera angles, timing, action, or anything else lol
4. executives: this level is more removed from the day to day of the animator and we usually don’t need to worry about this one. but sometimes we get executive notes (usually these come after the shot is approved so it needs to be kicked back to anim)

once your shot gets approved by the director, then it needs hoca approval (for any last big picture notes, or in case the director approved with notes), and then finally lead approval (for small finishing polish work) before you can publish. on spiderverse, we also had a second animation supervisor that had to approve shots too as a design pass. this might seem like a lot, but once you go through the process a couple of times, you get used to it!

the life of a lead is a lot more hectic haha. there are a lot more meetings, you always have to be available when an animator on your team asks for your eyes on their shot or if they have a question, you have to listen in to your team’s turn in rounds/director review, scheduling shot due dates with your coordinator, bidding sequences, and… lots of other management and technical stuff. it’s hard, but being a lead was some of the most rewarding work that i’ve done, i’m super proud of the animators that i’ve been lucky enough to work with

our official work day is 9-6 (one hour off for lunch, we get a food delivery voucher if any meeting goes into lunchtime lol), and we get paid OT after working for 8 hours. for most of the time working on a movie, you need to get special approval to work longer than 8 hours a day, but as a movie starts getting into crunch mode, OT becomes “pre-approved” and animators are free to work as much or as little OT as they want