Iterative Design: Working on my first Animated Film

A few weeks ago I started work on a film called "Flip" directed by two talented people by the names of Juan Sierra, and Martin Bueno. The basic overview of the film is that adults tend to kill their inner child by obsessing over their work and not leaving any time for fun. This is expressed by main character, a skater boy, being stalked by a man with a faceless mask, in a suit, who tries to kill him. The twist of the animation is that the Suit is actually the kid as an adult, and that it was all a dream, ironically, waking him up to the reality that he was losing himself. It's a great storyline and the concept art was great as well.

This being my first time on an animation film, and also a project where I was not a director or some kind of lead, It was a daunting task, having to follow as close as possible to someone else's ideas. However, if Mark Rosewater has taught me anything it's that constraints breed creativity. Working within the constraints of a set in stone concept allowed me to experiment with new techniques as well as problem solve on the fly to maintain cohesion with the original concept. I found myself consistently breaking my own habits in order to preserve the integrity of the original look and feel of the character.

I mentioned in the title this idea of iterative design. In short it means that you enter a loop of execute a draft, critique the draft, revise the draft, and repeat until satisfactory. It's a very tight and precise way to create a concept, which I found helpful since I was working for someone else and my responsibility was to give them what they want for the project. That doesn't mean I had no input however, I was still the artist, part of that means that at some point the directors need to trust my decision. Juan and Martin always sought my input when making a decision on the character, which gave me the ability to try out new things, if I thought those decisions would help the overall aesthetic and character.

This was the first iteration that we critiqued over. It's still incredibly rough, but starting the process so early on meant we could be very agile with how the model would change over time. Juan had broken the model down into straights and curves so for the first few iterations I focused in on really nailing those shapes.

Skipping ahead once the basic shapes were blocked out and solidified I moved on to clothing, I predicted this to be the most difficult part and I was proven correct as time passed on. This is where I appreciated not being the helmsman steering the metaphoric ship, as I did not have to make anything up on the fly. I had a concept with very strict guidelines and two directors who were incredibly skilled at getting across their wants and needs what this did was allow me to shut down all brain function except the necessary jelly-bits needed to stay alive and the creative wibble-bits needed to do art at a level of quality that exceeded the base requirements. Using this method and tuning out any external thoughts or queries I was able to just look at shapes, and not what the shapes would become once they formed Voltron. I find it much easier to put things together that way, especially things like suits.

After many iterations this was the final result, I put different colored materials on the Suit mostly to get a picture of his look, since I will not be responsible for the final textures of the character. The thing I learned most from this work was the new problem solving skills that got me through this work. It was also a great experience having to work under someone and following a chain of command to get something done. Which in college, where you are always in a group of your peers, is not a very common occurrence and I was happy to get the experience.

Thanks for reading! I hope this article proved interesting and helpful.