Thursday, 22 December 2011

Interview with Matthew Stephenson - Bradford Animation Festival (BAF)

[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!

Here is a link to Matt Stephenson's personal website: www.mattstep.co.uk
Disneyland Adventures Kinect: http://youtu.be/1-zI_-DCXt0

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