StrongmAnimator

“I hate when people go on TV and tell you how hard it is to do animation … No, UPS is hard work. I’ve done some animation … It’s the easiest job in the world. I go in a booth and I go, ‘what’s the line?’ And the guy goes, ‘it’s time to go to the store.’ And I go, ‘it’s time to go to the store!’ … And then they give me a million dollars.” - Chris Rock

Now, to be fair, Chris Rock was talking about voice acting for animation (although he could have clarified that a bit better). Yes, his delivery was funny. Hell, I laughed at first. Then I realized that his words were to full-time voice-over artists what Andy Serkis' words were to VFX professionals. Tara Strong even took note of this message well before I did.

I'm not going to jump on a soapbox. I'm not a VO Artist. However, I see enough of a parallel that I need to say SOMETHING. So I'll say this:

The award that Mr. Rock was introducing and announcing went to a movie (Rango) that used a technique that has been coined "emotion capture." It is a process where not just the voice acting was used, but the physical acting was also referenced by the animators, as shown in this featurette:


This looks and sounds to me like these actors didn't just go in a booth, say some lines, and collect a million dollars, now doesn't it?

During my hiatus from writing, I started drawing- every day, actually. I know, it sounds odd- an animator that doesn't draw every day? Really? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT GUY. Unfortunately it was a habit that I fell out of, but I have now jumped back into it with fervor! I'm even participating in a Daily Draw for February over at SatelliteSoda, my thread involving drawing monkeys from my wife's stuffed monkey collection (and one of our dog's!) You can find my thread here.

If you want to see a quick shot of the most recent work from all the artists participating, hit this link too!

Drawing regularly again been quite fun! It's even got me looking at Cintiqs or Asus Slates so I can start 2D animation again. My creativity seems to have been sparked, and I am excited about the possibilities, with both personal and professional work.

Speaking of professional work, I've also had my head down leading the amazing animation team at 5TH Cell, working on our XBLA title Hybrid. The team has been working really hard on this game, and we can't wait till the public gets their hands on it- team-wide playtests are a blast, and I know the fun will carry over to the real world. Just don't ask me when, because I ain't tellin'.

I'm even training more seriously for strongman competitions this year. I may be flipping a tire or tossing a keg in a town near you!

Anyhow, I'm not sure how consistent I'll be writing, but I may get back in the saddle soon. At the very least, I'll have a GDC 2012 Trip Report! Stay tuned...

To Whom It May Concern,

"It is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it." - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy


This blog was cross-posted here .


OK, animators. I know the deal. You guys want to be the next Brad Bird, the next John Lasseter, the next Jennifer Yuh Nelson, or the next Glen Keane.


Well, don’t we all. But here’s the problem. Instead of concentrating on the craft that you so passionately want to blaze a trail in, some of you are concentrating on figuring out how to become the next amazing director. While some of you are going about this endeavor in a respectful and proper manner, some of you are doing it wrong .


In fact, by my completely unscientific count, there are 99% of you doing it right, and 1% of you doing it wrong. It's not just animators, either. It's just about every discipline in this and other industries. So to the rest of you, when you read "animator," fill it in with your specialization!

Technical Creativity?

This topic comes up in conversation frequently- in my case, when I was recently invited to be a guest on the Reanimators Podcast . During the podcast, we discussed where next-gen console development (the real next-gen, like PS4 and XBox 720 or whatever) was headed in regards to tech animation and animation overall.

Motion Designers?

While many studios and animators have already been using network editors, I’ve noticed a split on who uses them. Some places have a tech animator setting up the networks full time, while some have the animators do the simpler blendtrees/state machines and pass them off to programming for the more complicated behaviors. And in some cases, even the designers set up the networks. In any case, there is still a back and forth between the owner of the animation networks and design.

This blog was cross-posted here.


Ah, culture change. It happens at many studios- as they grow, as they bring in new management teams, or as they shift in genre focus. In the age of tech art, there are times that culture change can occur in art content creation and management pipelines. From world editors, to audio management tools, to animation systems, new tools will often create new problems before solving the ones they set out to fix. Managing these changes can prove to be quite difficult.


Ch-ch-ch-changes


Let’s say you’re the character team lead. Your team has just shipped a great game, but during the course of creating the game you and your team compiled a list of shortcomings in your character creation system, software, and pipelines. The phrases “we need to find a way to do this better,“ and “we need to stop being so dependent on Bob the programmer so we can create characters more efficiently” were uttered often, especially during the final push.


Even with those "broken" pipelines, the project was successful. Your team moves on to the sequel, which needs to be created much faster with many of the same tools and pipelines. Sure, you make a fix or a change here and there, but you’ve barely made a dent in that huge wishlist you compiled during the last project. You go on to make a better game than the first, but the problems from the first development cycle still exist.


Thankfully, as the sequel ships, studio management finally agrees that a new Character Creation System (CCS) is needed to keep moving forward with the franchise in a way that can compete with the big boys. The studio selects you as the person to guide the CCS development team, and gives you the resources to create the ideal CCS.


6 months later, it’s done and works perfectly! Pipelines are exactly what everyone wants! The CCS works like a dream! The tech and project teams are delivering each other’s babies! All is right in the world and you are all now rich. The end.


Hahahahahaaaa. Right. If only :)


Reality Sets In


A few months after the CCS team begins development, reality sets in. The studio needs to re-allocate resources, so your team shrinks, and with it, your Alpha milestone feature list. You begin to realize that even in the design phase, the character artists are beginning to question decisions that are being made in regards to the new CCS. Features they had clamored for just months ago were suddenly not so important. The old CCS suited them just fine, they claimed, except for these three things. No, make that five things! In the coming weeks, it’s ten completely different things, all of which were never on the initial wishlist. And forget about the animators, they say, even though they need this tool as well. Just implement the character art features and let the animators deal with it!






After all of this, it becomes apparent that the character artists each had their own idea of what the proposed changes would be, and how they would affect their daily workflow. While this individuality is what will eventually make the CCS great, it currently makes it extremely difficult to develop in a way that will make everyone happy.


Not only is the new CCS affecting the workflow of the character artists, but it’s affecting you! As the CCS team lead, you want to deliver the best possible toolset, based not only on your experience but on the experience and input of the rest of the character artists. There is a lot of pressure on you, not only from the character artists to deliver what they expect, but from management.


So you rely on the character artists to give input and guidance for WHAT to deliver while balancing the features that the CCS team CAN deliver. Quite often, you come out as the bad guy with the character artists, even though you are one of them- you were even involved in the initial wishlist that resulted in the CCS team being created! The level input you receive from the character artists devolves from enthusiastic to almost nothing, even when you request it. You begin to deliver incomplete or incorrectly developed features only to learn that the character artists never read the design documents for those features in the first place, even though THEY prioritized them.


Eventually, you feel like the character art team is working against everything you are working for, even though you were all supposed to be working towards the same thing. And the character art team feels like YOU are working against THEM. There is a lot of tension between the sides, and eventually management has to intervene, sometimes more than once, with limited effectiveness.


It’s not quite how you envisioned it happening, is it?


Tim’s Amazing Way To Do it Right!


The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Both sides of a culture change don’t have to be in conflict- hell, they don’t have to be on opposite sides! There is a better way to handle a situation like this, but it takes EVERYONE involved- in our example, the character artists, the character art lead, the CCS team, and most importantly, management.


Here’s how:


Management Support




Once you've garnered the proper support from all levels of management, you then need to set some ground rules. The character team and its lead need to know that their managers support your development of the CCS. Studio management and your managers need to support you by helping deal with any conflicts that may occur between the CCS team and the character team. You should also now hammer out how features and assets will be delivered, and implement a change request system for features that are broken or require changes as well as for new features.


Once the rules are set, you are hopefully making the development of the CCS more about the behaviors of the people involved and less about how it is being developed.


Seek Peer Counseling


The number one thing that YOU will need while guiding the development of a change like the CCS is friends. People to talk to. Peers, not just in character art, but in life. Developing the CCS is going to be hard, it's going to be stressful, and it's going to flat out suck sometimes. You'll find times where you don't want to get email from the character art team for fear of what they don't like that day. You'll find yourself second guessing every feature design spec you write.


So you'll want, no, you'll need people who you can go to. People you trust, who can sanity check your ideas and also tell you when you are being an idiot.


If you have people like this to unload on, then being confident in what you are trying to deliver will come easier. It will also allow you to get stress off your shoulders so that you don’t take it out on the team you are delivering to (in this case, the character artists).


Stay the Course


Remember that the CCS was a group idea, supported by management. If it ever feels like everything you are doing is pointless, worthless or unappreciated, just remember that the goal is to deliver a toolset and pipeline that will make everyone's lives easier when it is done.


In that same vein, be confident enough to change direction if needed. It could be that the initial ideas sound great on paper to everyone, including the character art team, but once put into practice it becomes obvious that things need to change. Work with naysayers of the vision to determine if their concerns are valid and course correct if they are. If they aren't valid, clearly lay out why they aren't valid to those people.


Most importantly, don’t feel threatened by people who seem to be working against the end goal of the CCS. Give them all of the information they need and ask THEM propose better solutions. Quite often their antagonism is caused by simple miscommunication (I'll outline what should happen if it is truly brought on by ill will or poor intentions later).


Communication


Communication and Transparency, the catch-all words that are supposed to make everything better, right?


Wrong.


Just saying you "need to communicate better" or "have decision making be more transparent to the team" isn't enough. You'll need to outline HOW communication needs to happen and how each side will respond to it. You need to have a process for making decisions and making sure those affected know how the decision was made without holding 5 meetings and having different go-betweens.








If you have features that the character team needs to read over, set the ground rules for how they'll read over them- are they just bullet items? Do you have design docs written for each feature? Set a consistent expectation and then police it. For example, let's say you've got a feature list that contains design documents for each feature. At 12:00, you ask the character art team to read it over and prioritize it. At 12:10pm, they have it prioritized. Does that sound right? No. They probably didn't read the design documents of each feature. Kindly ask them if they did, and if they didn't, ask them to do so in order to ensure that the CCS team delivers the features properly. This will hopefully eliminate the possibility that, upon delivery, the feature is not what they expected, which could (unfortunately) lead to your team being thrown under a bus due to miscommunication.


If there is resistance to proper communication from the character art team or the CCS team, you still need to keep trying. Get management involved if need be, but hope that you won't need to. It would also would be a mistake to step back and stop pushing for input and feedback, and to stop GIVING input and feedback to the project and project needs. You need to remain steadfast against the wishes of those who are either complaining about or worse, threatened by your presence- instead, talk to those people and find out exactly what is causing the tension,and work to correct it.


And if at all possible, keep the CCS team and the character art team in the same room! Feedback can come more freeform, both sides can see how each other's decisions are made, and it can potentially eliminate an air of open hostility (if it ever devolves to that). At the least, it can help you identify when it starts so you can work to resolve it quickly.


Respect & Ownership
No matter what you think as the CCS team leader, you don't own the CCS. It's being developed for the character art team. Make sure they know that, and make sure they feel empowered to use the processes outlined in the points above in order to get the tool that you and they had initially envisioned. This is very hard to do, especially when things aren't going the way that everyone had planned or hoped.


The best thing for the CCS team leader to do is to treat character art team with respect, and leave it up to them to return the favor. During troublesome interactions with the character art team, think of how you would resolve a situation with one of your closest friends- would you complain about them behind their backs, try to garner support against them, and then blindside them? Or would you lay it all out to them, face to face, with the hopes to resolve what is likely a minor conflict?


Make Personnel Corrections


Even with the best communication, the most thought out processes, and all the respect in the world from your team, there are people who just aren't going to get on board. Whether they don't trust that the CCS will be what they want, or don't like the people working on it, there is the possibility that you'll have to deal with bad situations involving them. Like in the above example, if the character lead or team is shown progress of said feature, but raises no red flags until the feature is delivered, that's just bad. If those people are also involved other subversion (like circumventing the use of the CCS), that's even worse! First, you'll want to find out if there is a valid reason for this behavior. If there truly isn't, those people need to be properly disciplined- performance warnings, firings (last resort), whatever, but it needs to get nipped in the bud.


If management is already supportive of the goal of the CCS, they should get involved in these situations quickly and correct the situation as swiftly as possible. If they don't, as the CCS team leader, don't take it out on them. There can be any number of factors in determining if someone needs to be disciplined. You need to trust management to do their job just like they are trusting you to do yours.


That's All Folks!


Overall, making a culture change like the CCS is not easy. It can be a long, arduous journey, but if everyone realizes that they are all aiming towards the same goals, it can be successful. Getting management's support early, setting up expectations properly (and following through with them), treating everyone with respect and making sure the right people are in the right positions are the keys to that success. I'd love to hear from others regarding their experiences with similar situations, and if they have their own ways to do this better!

This post is a revisiting of a previous post from this blog, and is also posted here.

Every so often, the hot topic of crunch/overtime/extra hours comes (read: anytime a jackass like me writes a post about it or the mainstream media decides to interpret what a jackass like me writes as a scathing commentary on the state of the industry). Sometimes, though, high profile people say something about overtime, and it incites a reaction, no matter what the intent.

It’s no surprise to anyone, in any industry, that overtime can creep into all facets of our lives. In the case of me being both a powerlifter and a video game developer, overtime has come in the form of overtraining and crunching, respectively.


For powerlifters, overtraining generally involves training your body so hard that it effectively cannot recover- your basal body temperature drops, your central nervous system begins to shut down. For game developers, crunching is typically a point in a project that requires developers to work 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week to hit a deadline, pushing our mental capacity to a limit. In both cases, you become lethargic and your sleep suffers, furthering the lack of recovery. The belief for both overtraining and crunch is that that the extra time put in will result in higher quantity and quality of results.

Our ability to cope with such overtime hinges heavily on the amount of time we have to recover from engaging in it.This recovery, whether or active (by, say, deep tissue massage or engaging in an unrelated interest) or passive (by relaxing on the couch or playing video games), can only work if those needing it are given the proper amount of time and resources to ALLOW it to work.

All The King's Horses

Recently, I spent a large amount of time training for a national powerlifting competition. I trained for 5 months, competed in a local meet as a warm up, and then trained for another 2 months before the national meet. During the initial 5 months I worked very hard in the gym and took regular breaks from training so my body could recover, and I saw great gains in strength. At the local meet I set a personal best in the deadlift, and walked away happy.

After the local meet, I took only a few days off, and then decided that I had recovered from the first meet and the stress it had put on my body. Since I had limited time before the national competition, I spent the next 2 months working even harder than I had before. Not only did I not take enough time off after the local meet, I eliminated any down time from my training, effectively giving my body no time to recover. After several weeks of this new training plan, I actually felt weaker. I started skipping workouts and making excuses to myself to not push it too hard. It got to the point where I didn't even want to compete in the national meet anymore. I was burnt out, stressed out, and flat out tired. Even still, I set a goal to break my personal record for total weight. In fact, I planned on pushing myself to move more weight than I had ever done, even during training.


So what happened? I failed. I didn’t allow my body to recover from the incredible stress I was putting on it, and as a result when it mattered most I couldn’t compete at my full potential. I didn’t reach my goals, and the national meet was one of my worst in recent memory.

All The King's Men

Game devs are probably wondering what this meathead, lunkhead, Planet Fitness-reject's story has to do with them. Well, to paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in “A Time To Kill,” just imagine if what I described above was the progression from a press demo to a final build (or, maybe the progression from shipping a game to working on the next one).

Imagine that the whole team gets behind polishing the absolute hell out of the first hour of gameplay. We spend a good 6 months of time getting the first 3 missions right. The scripting, the code hooks, the character performances, everything. We show it to the press during the months leading up to launch, and all of our attention is focused on that one hour of gameplay shining like a star.
After all of that, the realization sets in that we have 3 months to finish the game. We have to get ALL of that hype into the rest of the missions, the gameplay, the general feel of the game. Maybe this mission here doesn’t have enough of what dude from Kotaku loved, and maybe those animations there don’t live up to the expectations of our publisher. So we start spending extra time revamping, changing, cramming in content. Features creep in. Hours start piling up. Some of us are thinking "I'm working extra hours because I believe in the project," so when we hit a wall at 10pm, we push through it.



Suddenly it's Thursday, 2 weeks before submission, and we've already put 50 hours in this week. We start to check in bad data. We break the build. We snap at co-workers. We're no longer being smart or creative about making the game- instead we're going through zombie-like motions to just get it done. We just want to ship this thing and move on to the next project.

And that passion we had? Starting to dwindle, if not gone already.

Sound familiar?

Putting It Back Together

The thing is, though, that it doesn't have to be like this. There can be good overtime. For example, I've overtrained my deadlift and seen incredible gains by pushing myself on heavy days and taking a month away from the next heavy session. I've worked 50-60 hour weeks, with 5 (and rarely 6) days a week for no longer than 2 or 3 weeks to get a deliverable out the door, and have produced work that was higher quality and more rewarding, with no negative effect on my health or marriage.


What made the good overtime better than the bad?

After the bad overtime, I was done. I thought I had recovered enough, so when I tried to (physically and mentally) get back into both activities, I couldn’t. I was done, and wanted out. I considered quitting both powerlifting and game development after the last bad overtime experience with each.


In the case of the good overtime experiences, I was able to take the proper amount of time off that both my body and mind needed to recover not just AFTER the overtime, but DURING it. The work I put during these smaller pushes was of higher quality, more rewarding in the end, and most importantly, kept me engaged in I was doing and looking forward to getting back to it at full tilt as soon as I could.

It can be argued that if we want to be successful, we have to push ourselves harder than the average in our fields. It doesn’t, however, have to have a negative affect on the things we are passionate about. We’ve all read the reports, seen the opinion pieces, heard about EA Spouses and Kaos’ “thousand yard stare.” I’ve read articles on how overtraining has blown out knees, biceps, backs, and worse. Everyone universally agrees that too much overtime is bad- Bad for your health, bad for relationships, bad for studio morale, bad bad bad.

Smell The Roses

Overtime exists and it’s not going away. I’m not suggesting that it does. I’m not going to rant about crunch time ruining lives. I’m not going to claim that my life has been horribly affected by working overtime or training too hard.

I am, however, going to say this- we all need to manage it better.

I don’t mean that we need to plan better (we know), or avoid feature/exercise creep (we try), or never put in overtime (we will). I mean that we as individuals need to manage how we represent ourselves while working overtime. We need to be conscious of the fact that people who are interested in what we do (powerlifting, game development, insert-your-interest-here) are going to look at us as an example. They’ll see us doing stupid things in the gym or working 100 hours a week, and see us wearing both of those things like honor badges. They’ll see us tweeting about how we’re “crunching to make the game better for you, the consumer!”, or read our Facebook post about how we just totally killed a training session and can’t walk right now- but hey, "no pain no gain!"

Those people will enter our fields and expect that to be the norm, the right way to do things, and they will never question those methods until they too are burnt out. And that’s a damn shame, because we can prevent it. We can teach these newcomers a different lesson- to not make the mistakes that we did. We need to encourage them to come into our industries and change them for the better.

When all is said and done, people will only remember the 4-million-on-day-one sellers, and not the people who worked hard and sacrificed to get the game to that point. We’ll only remember the monster numbers that a powerlifter put up at Worlds, but we’ll never see the training that was put in to achieve that. So let’s take back that part. Let’s do it smarter. Let’s follow the Law of Diminishing Returns.