Alumni Award Nominee VIOLA BALDWIN
Hannah Brecher, the Head of Alumni Relations, sat down with award-winning animator and Watersprite alum (2014) Viola Baldwin to talk about launching her career, animation in live action and the current state of the animation industry.
Q: How did winning a Watersprite award for your animated film ‘Wedding Cake’ help your career get started?
VB: WEDDING CAKE was my graduation film, but over 50 people worked on it. It was one of my first 3D animations – I come from the hand drawn [animation] field. It was very challenging to finish it; it’s a nine-minute film, I didn’t have much experience and it took a lot of time. Even 10 years later I still can’t quite believe we did it! It won a lot of prestigious awards including an Annie and Watersprite of course! It’s interesting to see the reaction of new viewers now that it’s online, how they relate to the metaphors in it. It was a great thing to showcase at the beginning of my career, and it got me a lot of attention early on. Winning Watersprite was a factor in me starting my career in international animations.
When my film got nominated at Watersprite, I was just so surprised and felt so honoured and happy to be able to showcase my work. I would have never dreamt that so many people that I didn’t even know would get the opportunity to see my film. So I was really just very thankful to the people at Watersprite.
Q: What did your life after film school look like?
VB: The [way the] animation industry [works] was something that I had to learn. It’s a project-based industry; you get hired based on the films and productions that teams are currently working on. So usually you jump around quite a bit between studios and clients, and that means that you have to relocate a lot. For instance, my first job after graduation was at a studio in Paris. Then after that was over I had to find my next gig. I moved to London, where I worked with the live action side of animation, where you have to work from a more realistic style. You think ‘will I be able to live up to the challenge…’ to animate hyper-realistically and integrate it seamlessly with the live action footage. I think you can benefit from trying out the different styles [of animation]. All the things I did on the ‘cartoony’ films helped me elevate my approach on the hyper-realistic side of animations.
But you always have to look – where’s the next job, where’s the next project? After London, my next opportunity was in Sydney (Australia). So you fly around the globe and you're on the other side of the world from your family and friends, and basically start life all over again. It’s a great opportunity and travelling is really exciting.
I feel so lucky I had the chance and opportunity to do that, but it also means you never know where you will be long term. You’re never really settled and live out of a suitcase. That can also be a challenge. For me, after Sydney, where we worked on PETER RABBIT, I went to Canada. The big animation cities there are Montreal and Vancouver, and that’s due to some tech subsidies that the companies get from locating there. There are a lot of studios clustered in those cities.
Before COVID, it was mandatory to work in the studio, but during the pandemic that wasn’t possible. It was amazing at what speed the industry adjusted to that, creating a work-from-home environment for everyone. Within two weeks everything was back to our production standards, you could continue working un-interrupted. Even now that the pandemic is over, a lot of studios give you the option to work from home. This gives you a lot of flexibility. It also helps because a lot of the ‘animation cities’ are expensive places to live. And if you are an animator, you don’t know how long you will be somewhere, and finding an apartment is expensive. So now it’s possible to live somewhere else, and still work for those studios, which is great.
During the pandemic we (myself and my husband) were in Canada, and our families were in the USA and Germany – we didn’t see our families for over two years. Now we can be closer to family and still work.
Q: Could you give us a brief overview of what your day-to-day as a character animator is like?
VB: Any type of animation filmmaking is a process. It’s very time consuming; you have to plan a lot in advance. You start out with the script. Then you start to visualize the script, making visual images of what is written on the page. In big productions you have a specialized person or specialist departments taking care of each step in the process. You start out with a storyboard. A storyboard is where you draw the camera angles for characters that are in frame, it's like a guide to what's happening. At this stage, you can play around with different ideas, find the best solutions. And then once it's ready, once everybody's satisfied, you give it to production. Usually, you try to make an animatic out of it, or a layout process, where you take drawings from the storyboard, put them in the computer and move them a little to get a rough timing of how long the shot will be. And then you go into production.
In 3D, you start with a Character Designer who designs what all those characters will look like in detail. The designs then go to the Modelling Department. A 3D Modelling Department takes the design drawings and models a 3D sculpture out of it. Once you have a digital model in the computer, it goes on to the Rigging Department, where they put a virtual skeleton within the model of the character. It's a technical rig insight that allows us animators to get customer friendly handles, for instance, a bracelet around the wrist. We animators can click on that bracelet, and then it's activated, and we can move it around. We get the rigs, the environments of the scene and place the characters in the environment, or that's done for us with the layout department. Then we take those digital puppets, and pose them (one important keyframe pose for what’s happening in the shot). And then we take a snapshot of that pose.
For example, let's say I pick up a pen. I, as an animator, would pose my character's hand and take a snapshot of that. And then I slide forward in my little timeline in the program, and go to the next frame, and pose my hand maybe like this. And then I have those two recordings of snapshots in time with different poses, and then the computer interpolates what's happening in between. And that's basically what we do. Of course, it’s more complex because [the character] must avoid looking robotic. It’s just about finding the right idea to convey what the character wants and what the scene is about.
There's a whole chain of departments after animation. Once our job is done and the director is happy with the performance, our animation goes on to the Lighting Department. People pose digital lights and make it look nice. And then there's the Texturing Department, which makes the textures of the cloth look realistic and the Hair and Grooming Department who are responsible for the natural flow of hairs and things like that. And then it goes to Compositing and is combined with all the background elements. And then there's a whole process of Grading where the colours are adjusted to make them coherent across the film.
Q: What are the differences between being an animator for 2D vs. 3D?
VB: I started out with the 2D side of things; what I saw as a kid. My first movie in the cinema was THE LITTLE MERMAID. I was so fascinated at how a drawing could evoke so much emotion in the characters. I drew all through my childhood. Then when I made my first studio animation, suddenly all the drawings were alive, and starting to move, and the character took on a kind of soul of their own. This is what makes the magic of animation. Within the process, you learn by doing. When I made my first studio animation, I didn’t have any formal education about how to do it, but I look at it today and it still works.
As a student, I got the amazing opportunity to do an exchange with a very famous French animation school. And I was in the first year, where you learn all the basics. We went from just a bouncing ball to more and more advanced and complicated animations.
For me, the switch to 3D was an economic decision; there are a lot more jobs in the field of 3D animation. 3D has many advantages, it's faster than 2D and of course you don't have to draw twelve single frames for each second. But it also comes with limitations because of the rigs. It's very similar, just a different approach. 2D animation still plays a big role in my 3D work because sometimes when you have a complicated rig, you can pitch an idea to your supervisor or the director by drawing over the screen to show your basic idea. Within a couple of sketches, you can kind of present an idea before going into the technical details needed to make it work in 3D with a complicated rig. I would really recommend still incorporating drawing into 3D animation work.
Q: How do you connect and develop your work in a live action setting?
VB: With live action not many people are in this [the animation] field so they do not understand how long it will take or how crucial it is to plan things properly for animation. So that is sometimes a challenge. But luckily, I have worked in films with great production teams who have had a great link between our department and the client side.
The challenge is that the film is shot before we do the animation in most of the cases. The actors are on set with dummies and stand-ins and then you have to replace whatever is there with your animation, but you also have to respect what the actor is doing in that footage, you have to react to the things that the actor is doing. For instance, in LYLE, LYLE CROCODILE there is a lot of interaction between the actor and that digital crocodile. You have to make sure there is a reaction with your animation of the actor petting the crocodile’s head. If the character said something you have to make sure the timing of the reactions that you read in the faces of characters are lining up, the eyeline lines up so they look at each other the proper way. I think these are the challenges for us in animation roles for live action films – to make it both make sense and look good where live action and animation are combined.
Q: Do you think the animation industry is undergoing another period of change due to AI?
VB: It is a very exciting time. Things are also scary as an animator since everything is moving so fast. Two years ago, there was no talk of this and now you see productions [that are] fully AI animated. A lot of things have changed, and you need to understand that [more changes] are coming because the technology is here and is going to be used. What is important to me personally is to not lose the human side of it all. It is easy to press a couple of buttons and have something amazing visually but the main thing for most people is connection and emotion and if that is missing it will show in the final result. Therefore, I am really trying to stay optimistic that there will still be a need for the human artistic side of things. But to be honest it is getting easier and cheaper to produce things with the help of AI and there will be a lot less need for workers in our field.
Q: What advice would you give to any students thinking of animation as a career?
VB: I was recently just asking myself this question. If I was now where I was 15 years ago, what would I do? Would I be scared? But I think I would have still done it [pursued animation] because if I hadn’t tried, I’d have regretted it my entire life. I think the key thing is to do what you love and just enjoy the process without focusing too much on the results. No matter what happens your art will always be your art, and nothing will change that. People learning now can keep up with emerging technologies and take the full advantage, moulding what is to come. So, I would advise you to follow your dreams and see where the universe would take you and trust it.
