Trusting the Animator

As I work on Sublo and Tangy Mustard, I'm reminded again and again that the more creative choices I leave for myself in the animation stage, the more engaged I am, and the better it goes. When everything is all figured out too early, it just leaves a big pile of tedious follow-up work and you lose the chance for spontaneity.

I feel this way not just about the animation, but the whole production workflow. You have to leave room for playing around in voice records, trying different visual ideas in the backgrounds, etc. My entire workflow is about building solid underlying structures that I can stay loose and have fun within when I'm doing the actual work. At least I've found that's what works best for me on Sublo. I've talked about this before, and I'm sure I repeat it somewhere in the Production Notes zine.

Another thing I've said before but feel strongly about, is that it's also true working in the industry. If the storyboards are all posed out and fully cleaned up with breakdowns, overshoots and all that, the animator's job is extremely boring and just feels redundant. Also, that's not what you should be thinking about in boards anyway. That's not what boards are for! But of course letting the animators make those choices relies on trust. On my one-man indie production, I obviously trust myself as the animator. But most US studios just give their outsourcing houses the bare minimum time and money to rush through the animation, and so they operate from a place of fear and mistrust driven by that cheapness. "If we let the overseas animators make any creative choices, they might fuck something up so we just have to make all those choices ahead of time in the animatic." This is the same line of thinking that leads to "hey we may as well just use AI right?"

The funny part is I don't think this fastidious pre-production even saves much money! In a better system, rather than paying the storyboarders to clean up every pose and pose out every footstep, you could spend that money training and communicating with the animation team so they actually understand how to interpret the rough boards, the ins and outs of the show's specific style of movement, acting etc and just generally get them creatively on the same page with you. But that's not how most of my industry experiences have gone. Outsourcing has really skewed the US industry in an unhealthy way, and continues to. But the industry is also in such bad shape right now that I feel like I'm kicking it while it's down by even talking about it. Anyway, my main point is just that animators should always be empowered to make creative decisions. The work can't just be tracing clean storyboards and fixing the foot placement.

I'll post another longer clip from the next Sublo episode soon (for paid subscribers only).