[Interview date: 9/11/2011]
Matthew Stephenson is a freelance character
animator from the UK with 7 years industry experience under his belt. He most
recently held the role of Principle Animator on Disneyland Kinect Adventures
(Microsoft) for Frontier Developments.
I caught up with Matt at BAF Game where he
held a talk about his work on Kinectimals and Disneyland Kinect Adventures.
University of Bradford has been a BAF venue
for many years. Could you tell me a little bit about your time here as a
student and why you chose to become an animator?
I studied at the University of Bradford from
1998-2002 on the EIMC course, before it split into different parts. We got
introduced to 3D stuff in that course. It was quite a small part of the course,
but enough of a taster for me to decide that it was something I'd like to
pursue a bit more.
While I was a student here (Bradford), BAF was
definitely part of my inspiration to become a character animator. I saw Richard
Williams, the guy who wrote the Animator's Survival Kit and lead animator on Who
Framed Roger Rabbit, speak here. He was really inspiring and brilliant.
Also, as a student I spent a lot of time not
doing work, but acting at the theatre in the Mill; therefore along with the
graphics stuff, I found a way of combining these and so character animation
became the career I wanted to pursue.
After graduating, I worked for a year then
used that money to do an MA in 3D Computer Animation at Bournemouth.
Do you have a 2D/traditional animation
background?
No. Drawing is probably my weakest point as an
animator. I draw thumbnails sometimes, but I'm
much more likely to get up and act something out and use other kinds of video
reference for my animation.
I've started doing 2D work more recently; I do
a bit of stop-motion work in my spare time and I've done some silhouette
cut-out animation. It has been really good fun and an eye-opener trying to do
an animation that is both 2D and is also straight -ahead. You've got to plan what you're doing quite
meticulously and know everything that's going on every frame. It makes you look
at your 3D animation in a different way because you start framing through it
and being a lot more fussy about every frame of that animation. This is a good
thing.
You mentioned BAF being an early inspiration.
What/who inspires you now?
[laughs] There are so many! Obviously, Disney is
really inspirational. They invented all the rules and discovered the techniques
that we now use and still struggle to re-create.
At the other end, I really love animators like
Michael Dudok de Wit who did the Monk and The Fish and The Triplets of
Belleville animator, Sylvain Chomet.
David O'Reilly does some really disturbing
animation that uses a lot of pop culture and video games culture references
which makes you feel empty inside, but in a good way!
...How about Pixar?
CG animators can get stuck in a Pixar rut so
they don't see the broader world of animation beyond that. It's one particular
thing making a feature film with these lovely expressive characters that the
whole family can enjoy, but that's only part of animation; the Pixar style is
only a small subset of what you can do and what potentially could be done.
Going to animation festivals is always a big eye-opener. It always makes you
realise how narrow you could become in what you think is good animation and
what it means.
What is your opinion on government tax breaks
for the British animation industry?
I’m in two minds about the whole thing because
it's obvious for the British games industry and the animation industry, as
Aardman have pointed out recently, that tax breaks would help a great deal.
It's becoming cheaper and easier to do animation in other countries where
labour is cheaper or in countries that have tax breaks themselves. So if a TV
company is going to fund you to make a program or a games publisher is going to
fund you to make a computer game they're going to say, “Well, you can do this
animation in Thailand or Canada for cheaper, so why don't you do it there?”
There's no real answer to that.
Britain’s strength is that we are extremely
good at what we do. But other countries are also getting really good and
there's absolutely no reason why they won't get better than us. So part of me
believes that we need it but another part of me thinks, “Who am I to say that
the people of Thailand don't get to make games and television programs? What right have I to say that it will only happen in my country?” So I'm really torn about
it.
You can make a very solid economic argument
for having those tax breaks: If we have these breaks it can bring more work
here doing that particular thing that we are good at and make more money out of
it rather than it getting lost in tax revenue. But there's a broader moral
question about those tax breaks that I don't think anyone has dealt with, but I
have no solution. It feels like the government largely ignores the video games industry, which is weird because the country is getting a lot out
of it and you feel like you should have at least some acknowledgement that they
recognize that we exist. We are an enormous industry and they don't seem to
want to talk about it. I think it's partly because electorally it's not
popular. The majority of the electorate probably see games at best 'a bit fun'
and at worst,' a dangerous waste of time.'
Any advice for budding animators trying to
crack the industry?
The only reason you’re going to be employed as
an animator is because you are a good animator. And that really is it. So
you’ve got to do animation that you are happy with and that other people are
going to respond to. On a very basic
level, that is all you need.
Your CV is important, but your showreel is a
million times more important than your CV. It is really important to have good
showreel which shows that you can do the sorts of things that would suit the
type of job you are going for. If you
are going for an animation job in games then they will want to see some runs,
walk, jumps, lifting things, putting things down, climbing and some
performance. It is important in games as well as TV and film that you can make
a character appear to be thinking about things. If you are going for a job in
films, you really need to push your performance animation work and fill your
showreel with beautiful scenes with characters talking and interacting with
each other.
It’s also important to get feedback from your
work. That is a reason why the Animation Mentor scheme has been so successful.
The more feedback you get for a piece of animation, and even if it isn't from
some genius at Pixar, the more you can improve it and the better it will be. No
matter how good you are, your own eyes let you down after you've watched the
same thing hundreds and hundreds of times. I've worked on animation for days
then I'd show it to someone else and they'd point out a flaw that was so
obvious, but I didn't see it myself. So getting other people’s eyes on your
work is really important.
Would you say having a degree in animation
gives you the edge over other animators?
No, not at all. But I have not met many people
who have had the staying power to put enough effort to working on that graft
without that structure around them. So higher education gives you two things:
It gives you the time and space to do animation; It can be very difficult after
a hard day at work to sit down, look at a screen and start animating, but if
you are at university you have more of your own time that you can dedicate to
it. The other thing is that you have people around you that are potentially
pursuing similar goals.
One of the great things about my course at
Bournemouth, in the National Centre for Computer Animation, was that almost
everybody on that course was really dedicated to animation and we all pushed
each other. And that makes all the difference. If I had been sat at home working
on my own, I would never have got that experience.
With something like Animation Mentor, you get
the feedback from your mentor and the people who are on the scheme with you.
Were you on the Animation Mentor scheme
yourself?
No, but at Frontier we employed quite a few
people who had done Animation Mentor. It's a good scheme but if you do
Animation Mentor, try and get something that isn't Animation Mentor onto your
showreel. At first, it was a massive novelty in itself and when the first
Animation Mentor graduates started coming out, we were like, "Ahhh wow
this is amazing! This is amazing too! This is ... the same. This is the same
too..." They tend to come out at a fairly high standard, fairly uniformly,
so you think that's great, but once you've seen a lot of them you start to
think, "But what can they do on their own?" When they work in the games or animation
industry they're almost certainly not going to have a mentor of the calibre
that they had on the Animation Mentor scheme. They're going to have to be able
to be self-critical and use the feedback from just their peers. It's not clear
from their showreels whether that person is capable of that and you only find
that out once they start working. So it's always good to see someone who has
completed Animation Mentor and then done a couple of other things afterwards,
but still be really good. That clinches it.
What is your opinion of performance capture
animation, like that in Tintin?
Oh yeah, those creepy people running around in
latex suits! WithTintin it's like my brain doesn't know what it is looking
at, but I hear that kids really love it; they don't get freaked out by that,
but I get freaked out by it. There's a fundamental problem there that if
everything about the style is caricatured apart from completely realistic
movement, then the movement is going to sell itself short. So you need to
caricature the movement. If the characters, lighting, models and everything
else is stylized then the movement has to be stylized too. And that's why it looks,
to my eyes, pretty strange.
I think that those performances in the film
would have worked better as a live action film with those actors acting or as
an animated film that animators have animated. I don't object to performance
capture. Probably computer games are its most useful application because in
computer games you want to look at performance from all different sides. For
films, it has yet to totally convince me although it can work as special
effects for live action like in Avatar.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just done some stop-motion animation that
will be projected onto the sail of a boat behind the band, Sharks Took The Rest,
during their gig in Newcastle. I’ll be over in there this week to check it out!
