[University] Ged Haney lessons

While working on our narrative projects, we had the pleasure of working with character animator Ged Haney. As an aspiring character animator, this was a great opportunity to improve and ask some questions.
Before I rush into this, let me show some examples of Ged's work. In the first session we had a brief overview of Ged's career, his interest in animation sparked after being asked to help write the music for an animated short. After this, he moved on to create his first animation, "The Kings of Siam" (1992).

You can clearly see a lot of characterization in this video from the get go, emotions are portrayed clearly and tailored actions, such as the three legged walk cycle really make characters feel like individuals and truly gives them a sense of personality. A weakness of mine I'm working around is that I tend to make things very "samey". For example a walk cycle, I'd go ahead and make a standard walk with nothing more to it. No thinking about how the character is feeling, how fast they're walking, or any physical properties. To force my way out of this, I've varied the four team members in my narrative project. I have Viking, with a top heavy body and lots of weight to work with, Viare, who has long legs in her stylized anatomy, Veetoo, a small girl, who will move in a light, spring heeled way, and Vextor, a cat who will shift between bipedal and quadrapedal movement, depending on the situation.

We were showed a variety of other animations Ged worked on, including TOM, a children's show created digitally.

It always interests me to see the difference in digital and traditional work from our guests. Traditionalists often have mixed feelings about digital animation, and in Ged's work, a shift in artistic style is evident. The animation is now a lot more bouncy, and it's shifted from frame by frame hand drawn to a more symbol based style, which makes the most of the sharp feel Flash and other digital programs can offer. This work is also beneficial to look at as I'm taking a change of drawing style with my project, looking at the basic shapes that build up characters and playing around with them. An example of these basic shapes can be seen better in his animation "Milk Milk, Lemonade" which is an incredibly "marmite" video, showing a man using the loo for 15 minutes.

This talk of art style and digital animation leads me nicely to a chat I had with Ged about web animation. There's always this interesting divide between students in my class and the experienced people we have in.This divide is the internet. A lot of influences in mine and my friend's work comes from web animation, and I was happy to show Ged some examples of work similar to his own style. First up was the works of Jonti Picking, (Weebl). Jonti is a British animator who makes short, catchy songs and animates looping music videos to them. In fact, these videos are the reason I got into web animation, but that's another story for another time. 

Moving on from the animation side of things, another reason Ged was in was to look over our scripts. Allow me to put this next part as simply and bluntly as possible:

I suck at writing.

Bold, italics and unerline aside, this has always been a huge weakness of mine. I can think up ideas, and expand the hell out of them in my head, but when it comes to putting them on paper, things fall apart. It's a given that the first draft of my script wasn't going to be perfect, after all, Ged was here to help us with just that. After a read through, I received some incredibly helpful feedback and tips from him that have improved the script tenfold in my eyes. The first problem is that my writing is very "flabby", as he put it. I've always known I have problems when it comes to dialogue, mainly that I cram too much in, and don't tell enough story with actions. (I'm looking at YOU, Antique) This problem was overcome with one simple lesson.

 "If it's not important, cut it. If it's important, make it snappy"

With this in mind, I've tried to cut as much speaking as possible, to get the essentials down, and tell the rest of the story through character animation (OH GEE, A CHARACTER ANIMATOR DOING CHARACTER ANIMATION, HURR HURR) 

The next part of my scripting lesson was to look for illogical actions. This sounds simple enough, but when I get too absorbed in ideas, common sense can sometimes slip. Ged pointed out two or three gigantic plot holes, that I felt embarrassed about later. With these patched up, this version of the script should hopefully be nice and shiny, and ready to send out to voice actors and such.

Overall, working with Ged was an extremely helpful experience, and I was able to have some good talks with him on a level ground, sharing influences and tips. Now armed with this knowledge, it's time to put it to use and animate some characters!