The critical eye - Character development

You don’t need decades of character development experience .. but it definitely helps:

I spent the first 10 years of my career working as a lead character animator in the games industry. I would design, build, rig and animate characters for intro movies orin-game  cut-scenes. Back then the teams were smaller, so you got to do all aspects of the character work. It was slow and laborious at certain stages of the process. Enveloping of the characters was particularly tedious. This is the process of attaching the geometry of the skin, to the skeleton that would drive the motion of the character. 

Once the character had been enveloped and had a control rig attached to the skeleton, that was when you could start the animation process…bringing life into inanimate objects. This was the part of the process that I really loved. After years of studying the work of the greats of animation like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Ray Harryhausen, Richard Williams, Phil Tippet etc, the animation process was where I wanted to bring my best, and create something that in its own way lived up to the principals of animation that I had learned studying the work of the animations masters.

Animation is an iterative process. You’ll do a block pass then you go back and refine it. You’ll do that a few times until you’re happy with it. Sometimes you’re never happy with it, because you’re too close to it. Sometimes it’s only when you come back to it after doing something else, that you look at it and think, “That’s not bad. I’m pretty happy with that!’.

So in the new emerging world of generative AI, are all the old skills worthless? Not at all! AI is just the latest tool in a creative person’s toolbox. Any keyboard warrior can write a prompt that generates an image using one of the readily available AI models. What is clearly evident is that there is an abundance of people hitting the keyboards of the world, who lack the training and experience in filmmaking of any sort. That’s not to say there aren’t people out there right now that are inexperienced but will cut their creative teeth, using only AI, and will go on to create well directed, cinematic output. For sure some people with no production background will emerge and demonstrate story-telling ability. That will take time though.

The reality is that these skills take years to develop and learn, even when you’re immersed in a creative environment full of like-minded people, that are all learning from each other.

The years I spent working in the games industry as a character animator, followed by years in VFX and commercial production, followed by the last 6 years working as a virtual production supervisor on live sets, has given me  the critical eye to evaluate whether something is truly screen or broadcast ready. The knowledge and hands-on experience that I have garnered working across all parts of the production pipeline, now helps me in using generative AI tools in the best possibly way, aiming for the best possible quality of output.

For me personally, this is probably the most exciting time of my career. I like change and I like challenges. What better time to be working in production than right now, when the tools and techniques are evolving at such a break-neck speed!