Andrew Gordon is a remarkable animator who has a passion for teaching. He not only works full time at Pixar Animation Studios; he takes time out to teach animation. On top of this he helps run the informative site Spline Doctors, a site with a series of tips, interviews and resources for the education of animators everywhere.
In conjunction with Autodesk, Andrew has been running a series of workshops in Australia on the fundamentals and nuances of animation. Martin Brennand 'erilaz', caught up with Andrew Gordon while he visited Melbourne on the Australian Animation Workshops.
Martin: It's your second time out to Australia to teach the workshop, and you've also taught classes at Academy of Art University, CSU Summer Arts, Animation Mentor and so on. What is it you enjoy about the teaching process?
Andrew: Well, I think for one thing when I’m teaching, I’m revisiting the material myself, and it lets me stay fresh.
You're constantly immersing yourself in the content that you're teaching and also trying for your own sake to change up the material, so it's interesting to teach. I see animation clips where I'll see something similar to what I've taught and I'll look at it in a different way to how they did it, and that's inspiring.
But it's also the students. Being around young talented people inspires me, not that I'm old. If there’s a 19 year-old kid who's getting into animation and is really good, a great animator or just knows what they're doing, I just find that it inspires me and makes me look at my work in a different way.
A lot of my students have gone on to Pixar, ILM, Blue Sky and all of these different places. They have surpassed me in terms of work and they’ve reinvented it. They take the information that I'm telling them and they reinvent it. That's always impressive. It's humbling.
Andrew Gordon on stage in Australia.
Martin: Do you think that some of this stems from the fact that when you started learning animation you didn't have access to the same the tools or knowledge, so you're trying to pass on what you think you missed out on at the beginning?
Andrew: That's totally true. I had good teachers at school but they weren't passionate about it. It seemed like they were doing it because that's all they could do, almost like they couldn't get a job doing animation, so they taught it instead. I think that's a danger. You always hear the term "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach", but I don't think that's true. It's really important to have teachers that are working in the industry, in animation especially. Not only are you getting up-to-the-minute information from people that are doing it everyday in the studio or where-ever, they're staying fresh and in production. Unless it's some master who's had a career and retired, you want to have those teaching you to be the people that are doing it.
Martin: Is it this aspect of the industry that made you start Spline Doctors with Scott Clark, Angus Maclane and Stephen Gregory?
Andrew: Well, Spline Doctors actually started off as a goof. It was during a time when everyone was making blogs, and so a bunch of us said, “Let's make a blog, and see if people will visit it.” So we just thought it would be goofy to try this thing and blog about everyday stuff that went on at Pixar.
Immediately when we did it, it got posted around that "there's five animators starting a blog on Pixar!" and then we realised people were actually listening to us so we had to make it serious. Then it became about all the guys who used to go to the Academy of Art University to teach at night. We were animating during the day and teaching Tuesday nights. We just started posting our thoughts. It died off.
Most of the guys stopped posting after a while, but I thought it was a great idea to make an educational site like this, so I wanted to keep it going! I was one of the only guys had much interest. Stephen Gregory, Adam Burke and myself.
So, I just started to expand upon it, doing “SplineCasts”, mp3 interviews with animators. It was fun, because I was finding that I was really learning a lot too. I was also finding that people from Pixar were listening to it. A lot! People would come up to me and say, “Hey, I heard that podcast you did, it was really awesome. When are you going to do another one?” So then it became something I felt I had to deliver. It's a lot of work getting it up and running and actually managing it when I have a full time job. I'm in the process of updating it and making it a better tool for people to learn.
People ask me what school did I go to learn animation or they just don't understand the basics and I had problems doing that too. I do want to make it into a real resource and make it a little more polished, like ‘Animation Podcast’. I think that the presenter of that show, Clay Kaytis, is very professional. That's ultimately what I would like to get Spline Doctors to; the feeling like it's a real site, not just a blog. I really care about education and the kids out there trying to do animation. People really want to become animators, and there's nothing that should stop them from doing that.
I always felt early on that people were preventing me from having information. They were against giving out ‘secrets’ of any sort, and I'm totally against that. If somebody comes along and takes my job because I gave out information, then I deserve to be out, because I'm not good enough to stay in. I'm okay with that.
Martin: Your early beginnings were at Warner Bros. doing 2D animation. Now that you've been at Pixar for over 10 years focusing on 3D, do you miss the 2D aspect of the work?
Andrew: I miss working with 2D animators. 3D animators tend to down themselves a little bit, like they're not real animators, because they're not doing 2D animation. It's a chip on the shoulder of the CG animator. It's understandable. When I was a kid, an animator was someone that drew, and a real animator was a guy at Disney, who was literally drawing every frame.
When I worked at Warner Bros., having these [2D animator] guys around me, seeing it up on the board and talking about it, there was an old school feeling like "Wow, I'm in Termite Terrace!" or "these guys were animating Bugs Bunny!" I was also using them as a constant resource, because they're drawing and designing every frame. They could look at my work and help improve it, really helping me with the pose.
These days a lot of guys in animation are 2D animators that were from Disney and so I have a resource, especially in a place like Pixar, to ask someone who was a 2D animator to come look at my work and give me that same feedback. So I have that, but there was something about seeing the drawings and seeing them flip, that I definitely miss.
Martin: With the progression of the industry leaning towards 3D rather than 2D, the usual controversial subject of motion capture comes up. An example is the recent nod to hand animation in the credits of Ratatouille. Do you think it has a place in animation?
Andrew: I've been having that conversation since the early days of CGChar, [jokes] "Motion capture vs. Animation! Satan's Rotoscope!". It will always be a debate.
If you're saying that if I had some set up that was totally high-tech, where I could sit at my desk and I wanted to do a gesture I just turn it on and it goes BING, and just recognizes a couple of reflective dots on my special Pixar shirt, and then I could just literally gesture and it would be recorded? Would I want to use that? Well, it's definitely interesting, and if it was easy I would say "Okay, i'll try it".
It's not that I hate motion capture. It's been ingrained into me so much that it is a bad technique for animators, like animators are against it. I've been on that side for so long that I would definitely be afraid to want to go there. But if it's going to help me do my job, I wouldn't be opposed to trying it out.
Martin: But you see it more as a tool rather than a replacement.
Andrew: Absolutely. Just an additional thing in the toolbox that I could use. Like "All right! Maya has the new Mocap at your desk feature!" or something.
Martin: Do you enjoy other aspects of the work, such as rigging, lighting and so forth?
Andrew: To tell you the truth, I grew up on all that stuff. I got into the business backwards, as what I wanted to do was CG animation, but I was into the shaders and the rendering of it. I had an Amiga and I grew up on Imagine [software] and was more interested in the rendering and the articulation and the lighting. Then I got into character animation because once I saw Pixar's work, especially the shorts, I thought "That's amazing, how do I create that life?".
Because it's such a pipeline studio and it's specialised, I lost all that current knowledge of lighting, rigging, shading etc. and I definitely miss it. If I had time, I would love to experiment more with it.
Everybody at Pixar gets a free copy of Renderman, so I asked them to set me up with Renderman for Maya and every now and then I bring it up and fool around with the settings, playing with global illumination and rendering scenes, because I really do enjoy that aspect of it. So, I do miss it and wish that I could be doing more of it sometimes.
That's why I hope one day either at Pixar or whereever that I have more of a decision in articulation or if I'm directing something that I can help with the lighting because I love that part of it as well.
Martin: Do you see yourself doing this for the rest of your life?
Andrew: I ask myself that question everyday! "Can I do this for another five or 10 years?". I'm talking specifically about animating. I definitely do have to admit that I aspire to direct my own work one day, like a short, or make my own content. That would hopefully be the ultimate goal of many animators (to do their own work).
When you do your own work, it feels like you have ownership, and I would love that. I definitely have the opportunity, and it's just the matter of doing it. That separates the armchair director from the real director.
Special thanks must be attributed to Joe Millward, Peter White and the hard working team from Autodesk that made these events happen. Autodesk is developing a series of further workshops over the coming months specifically focused on the industry. Stay tuned.
