 Welcome back to NFNA and today I want to talk about how loving the process of animation has helped me continue to animate in this industry for almost 20 years. Now how did I get to this topic? So it's kept it around about way and if you're one of my students you know I go off on tangent and talk about a bunch of stuff so how did I get there? Well I was listening to the animation happy hour which is awesome I have a recommendation clip definitely check it out it's a great podcast and one of those episodes there had a Q&A and they talked about a bunch of different things and one of the topics that came up was the industry and how difficult it can be and generally if you love the process of animating going through the defining of ideas the shooting of reference finding reference acting things out blocking things out going into the whole native creative animating into the final polished process if you love that it will help you go through this long journey of being an animator. That being said this is a something that I apply for a general remedy but something that I do for like your day-to-day trials and tribulations of being an animator and that does not cover extreme cases that constantly come up in the news which are a reminder that this industry is facing a lot of really tough problems and just loving the process of animating is not going to help that. I'm talking about your daily struggles with motivation potentially software problems client notes most cases you do an animation for someone and especially revisions either for yourself or for someone you're always going to do something some iteration some update for someone either for yourself or a client or a supervisor a leader whoever's around you if you do something for someone and that's what I mean when I talk about loving the process it covers that aspect which is something you will face every day for weeks months and years so you still have to find something to go through your daily life even if everything's okay you don't go through those extreme cases where you have either mental abuse physical abuse financial abuse again each industry has some really tough aspects of it but even if that is not there you're still going to face a daily struggle to continue every day to perform at a really high level because the thing is and again this whole topic thing this whole remedy whatever is for me personally whatever it works for you I don't know let me know the comments I'm very curious what you have as a motivation or as a trick or something so that you can continue every day but for me is I have an idea for a shot and it's not at work because at work you get a lot of input and feedback and turnovers if you know what to do to some degree but if I do something at home I have that initial idea it's that initial oh this is cool this is really exciting I want to do this and as I continue to work that excitement flattens it just goes eh is that really good idea and then you start getting into revisions and fixes and technical problems that they really want to do all this and that's what I'm talking about for myself so as you continue even if it's something that's at home it almost starts to feel like a job like you have your initial excitement and then you go like okay well this is something you have to work on every day and chip away and how do you continue doing this without losing your motivation and for me it is the process of animating and just as a caveat I don't know how I can make you fall in love with animation again this is why this is such a subjective upload I do and it started way back I can blend in somewhere one of my first assignments was getting out of a chair assignment I've done stuff before there was a Maya one where you modeled the character you rigged it let me try to animate there was no animation lecture or an explanation of animation principles so it was just kind of doing something I had no idea what I was doing and it was horrible the second class I didn't even have the example saved up anymore it was just going through something again was rigging and texturing a lot like nothing worked then I had my actual animation class this was in fall 2002 so it's very close to 20 years now and that's for me like the first time where I thought oh this is how you animate I had a great teacher Lisa Mullins she explained the principles animation she had examples she acted things out like that was the class that really showed this is what you got to do these are the expectations this is the amount of work that you have to do and we did the bouncing ball and we did a flower sack pantomime type of thing but I remember the getting out of the chair clip being de-clip that made me fall in love with with the with everything the whole aspect because we just have to do getting out of the chair but me being an idiot and not knowing how much time it takes and the amount of work that is you know falling on to this assignment had no idea I had the character and I modeled the chair because I say model that's basically you know spheres and cubes and stuff but I rigged it so that this the chair could rotate could fold could do a bunch of stuff and there was a book that you at least you can open close is the bunch of stuff that I rigged up and I just loved setting up set pieces except the camera but everything around that assignment I wanted to animate and manipulate and do something with it and the assignment was the same it was way too long I got a bunch of notes it was great but it was a really good learning experience to go through and for some reason that has always stuck with me I did this super weird clip that I didn't even put on my demo reel well it's the same thing where I added stuff to the to the characters but I added props and added a little extra there's a fly fly I had some sound effects and I did a bunch of stuff to it and also the reason why I'm doing all this clipping and not just because of that clip in the animation podcast it was I started animating at home again and I want to do like my own little challenge of animating something once a month will never happen maybe once every two months but I don't know like each clip I want to do something that I haven't done before like right now it was heavy on renders and now the next one is going to be a different kind of render I want to do something with cloth I want to do something with water and simulations different techniques like animating on twos haven't done that or doing everything in steps at the beginning I've really done that for such a long time actually in school so this is something that I want to do but as I started and actually finished the clip with the kid little Jedi kid again I went way off track and started animating not just the camera but the camera was a different tool that I want to talk about later but a bunch of set pieces that are all hand animated as things break apart and roll around and I have just as much fun animating that as the character to me these are the same things I love this I loved animating everything in this shot it is kind of like the roundabout thing of when I did that getting out of the chair shot I feel like none of it has changed from way back to now I love animating everything within a scene this could be a prop a vehicle the camera characters like you know human creatures I just like the process of setting keys and seeing how your character comes alive or not and going into those provisions and making it work kind of sculpting away at the shot until it hopefully works and the reason why all of this has helped me it's like at work you might face a situation where you have to do a lot of revisions and this is probably like one of the main things why I'm mentioning all this because revisions are the the land or the area where your dreams die this is so much like it's it chips away at your motivation when you have to redo the shot over and over and sometimes there are bigger changes and sometimes they're just really small incremental changes where you stop seeing what the change really is and after 40 50 versions you go back to version 17 you go okay they're like this one now and then you start iterating on that version so you have to find a way to be able to do all those revisions while still putting in 110 percent of the work and a quality of it so that you can convince whoever needs to see this that this is going to be awesome and it kind of fulfills their vision right because you're at work or whenever you work for someone you're doing something for that person you're working on someone else's demo reel and you're you know you're trying to fulfill someone else's vision right but for me and this is not something that I had from the very beginning but it is a struggle when you think this is the best thing I've ever done and then you get notes and it turns into the worst thing you've ever done and then you got us to the revisions so there was there was a switch at one point where even though I loved the process of animation already there's still the frustration of redoing things over and over and at one point it was just a switch and it was mostly after that experience on battleship where I was animating something for like six months and like 80% of that work was thrown out and a conversation with uh an anim soup who just mentioned like that's the job like he said it in different ways but the gist of it is that's your job you're doing this doesn't matter how yes it could be more efficient but again that is part of the job you got to deal with this and still produce really good work for someone else in this case it was for a client and for me after that moment the switch was that if I have to do something 50 times that means that that's 50 opportunities to make it better 50 opportunities to find a better idea in terms of workflow how to get to that idea faster and better and also just practice if at the end I don't like the shot like the climb I like it I don't like it doesn't matter I've done this so many times even the minimum positive effect of all this was that I'm now a better animator in terms of speed because I've done this so many times now this is like muscle memory like grooves in your brain we're like I've done this move now so the next time I have to do this move again for a different shot I know how to do this I've done this a bunch of times so revisions and doing things over yes can be frustrating and it can be really tough to keep that motivation going but for me is that even if that motivation is gone I still love that revision because it's animating it's that process of I can animate a ship a creature a human a camera or a combination of all of these and just that it's just great I just at this point I just love that and when I did that little kid Jedi thing I just loved everything the moment I sat down with I worked on this in the mornings and evenings and weekends actually as well every time I sat down it was like this is this is just fun I like doing all of it and I still have to revisions for myself I'm my own client but it's just something that helps me going because the thing is you might have your idea of a shot and you're super motivated but motivation it's not going to get you through that process neither is discipline but discipline is still better than motivation because motivation you need this to start it might be your initial spark like I'm going to do this but then you're going to lose that motivation somehow through some outside effects notes or something and the only way to continue is going to be through your work ethic and your discipline to continue but that will be a pain if you if you don't love it and for me it's that extra step so after motivation and discipline the love of it the love of animating is what keeps me going and I can do this over and over and over because I know doesn't matter what the end result is I'm at the end a better anime so if you do love the aspect of animating a human or a creature or props or vehicles or the camera everything it just increases the chance that you will find something in this shot which at this point you might hate but there's always one thing then that you can hold on to like I love animating this it could be whatever it was there's a lot you can animate and if you find that you can hold on to that and that gets you through all those revisions and if there's more to it even better but I'm just talking about those worst cases again not those edge cases that are horrible in the news that you may have faced these are just the daily things because they're like the death of a thousand paper cuts if in a way it's you have those bigger moments but you still have the daily grind and you might not feel it that day but if this continues every day week by week and months after a couple years it's just it just you burn out and I don't know so far I still haven't had that burnout effect it's just there's just too much that I love about it I might hate the next year I don't know who knows but for now it's just something that I'm not rediscovered but it was a reminder when I did that personal clip that the old Jedi kid where I just I love going through A to Z and now with renders I really liked looking and learning because it's horrible but you know I am learning but like looking at the lights and what's good lighting and just the render process and figuring out why do the render times take so long and just it's another thing that was super cool to learn that now I want to do a next clip and I'm going to use instead of Arnold it's going to be wretched so I want to go through that same process with the different type of render but I'm already excited to go through the animation and setting everything up for that render and I want to go through like I said for cloth and effects I want to go through more aspects of animation for me it's like an outlook of if I start animating this and that is the end result going through this whole thing until that final render just sounds awesome to me and again this is very subjective I don't know I don't know what other people you know what your process is again like I'm very curious what is the thing that has helped you to continue day by day weeks months and now years if you have animated for 10 years 15 years 20 years then again like anybody who's who if anybody who's anime for 20 years is watching my channel I don't know why like these are none of the things that I talk about here will help you like you're the season pro but just in case just in case you're a season anime professional and you're watching this I'm very curious what is the thing that helps maybe it's none of this and you just have your favorite music on all the time or some tv show on the side that gets you going like that helps me through like the polish process or like the less creative process I have stuff going all the time music tv shows it's just something in the background and it's usually stuff that I know that I like some Star Trek movie Star Wars Indiana Jones Ghostbusters whatever like my childhood stuff but there's just something that can trick me into like oh I like this day today it's going to be fun despite the repetitive task of whatever your shot is so but anyway let me know I'm very curious and again this is very subjective this is just something that's helped me and it's just something that unfortunately I can't conjure up in someone through tutorials or a speech through a camera it's just something I don't know I don't know if that's something you just you have to love it or if there are certain aspects that will make you fall in love with I don't know because I constantly watch movies tv shows animation I look I mean through the animation minute there's a bunch of demos you see online there's always something I try to listen to lectures to me just always try to learn and hear new aspects of the animation different processes like what people do and how they go about their their daily life or whatever like the animation podcast just listening to that there were so many great tips and stories in was it was fun to listen to the characters the characters the people on the podcast they're fun to listen to they almost became characters and it's just it's another thing where I go this is just another cool aspect of animation that just makes me love it as a whole even more and that's all I can say so for me this has and again it's not like I have done a bunch of stuff I've gone through some really tough things in this industry I've been super lucky but after almost like it's almost 20 years of animating in almost 18 years of animating professionally I've done a bunch of projects like on my my ndb is probably like around 50 projects so I've gone through a lot of different type of animation like requirements or clients have asked different different types of shots or just going through the daily process or just dealing with people this could be like politics and social stuff within within the company I think I've gone through I don't say enough again that sounds like I've gone through enough but I think for myself I've gone I've had enough highs and lows it's frame it that way where I can say okay how did I go through this why am I still liking this so much how have I not given up after all of this and it always comes down to I like animating like this is really the simple phrase but I just but I like everything from A to B and I'm not always super motivated of course not but that summary I guess of my ramble clip right now is that that clip that I made at home was again a reminder of this is awesome and I love it and it's something that will always drive me forward so even if the client's not the best client in the world whatever the the show or even I can't really say the team because the people that I am in that war is they're so great like there's really nothing I can talk about in terms of it's like the people around it but sometimes you go through stuff where they're almost my 18 years I mean I've met some arrogant animators and some animators that are not exactly my favorite you will have some you know cons throughout your industry experience and I think at the end of the day you're going to spend a lot of time actually animating again just those edge cases that can be a pain with production maybe I don't know but the majority of the time will be you spending English animating so you better like animating since that is the majority of the time you're going to be spending I mean so yeah I don't I will end this ramble curious what you think what is your way of moving forward I don't know I'm very curious what what your trick is in a way or or if you love it maybe what is the thing that made you fall in love with the animation or the whole process or just I don't know so yeah I know let me know I'm very curious after all those years I just wanted to mention that maybe like in the States we had the Thanksgiving week so maybe that's the opportunity to say thank you I want to say thank you to everybody animation happy hour people who post stuff online obviously already at work who's inspired me and it's just I want to say thank you to all of these like all of those things all the people who post things they do lectures they have stuff on YouTube like anybody that contributes to these to the the animation industry is for me another like a power up in terms of motivation of that's cool that powers me up again this is all thanks to everything around so thanksgiving so I say thank you to all of you besides listening to this clip which is now tremendously long but everybody that contributes to this industry through their work their lectures their whatever they do the interviews like fellow youtubers who do animation stuff like anybody this is all for me a massive inspiration and motivation and I'll say thank you so I guess I'll end this clip with thank you to everybody who has contributed from 20 years ago up until now it never ends the the motivation never ends it's great so I say thank you so much and I say thank you for watching and maybe listening for doing all this and that's it so yeah I'll end it like that and I'll see you next week maybe hopefully in an upload