To the first-time visitor, arriving at the Animex International Festival of Animation and Computer Games feels rather like walking into a family party.
It isn’t just the size of the show – with a capacity running into the hundreds, not thousands, the lecture theatre at Teesside University is a far cry from the vastness of Siggraph or fmx – but the social life that surrounds it. As studio heads rub shoulders with students at a constant round of after-show dinners and impromptu drinks sessions, and speaker after speaker reminds you that they have been coming to the festival since 2006… or 2005… or 2001… you have the odd sensation that you have walked in on an affectionate and rather boisterous extended family.
Yet Animex, now into its second decade, is a show with global ambitions – and with speakers ranging from the former President of Warner Bros Feature Animation to animation legend James Baxter – the line-up of this year’s animation and VFX-focused Animex Talk sessions seemed designed to prove it.
DOING IT FOR THE KIDS?
The student origins of Animex are still apparent in such staples as the recruitment summit; while presentations such as Senior VFX Producer Tripp Hudson’s session on the stereo work on Avatar juggled a desire to explain Framestore’s technical innovations with the need to set out how a production pipeline actually works.
But for the professional, the show also offered a glimpse of what life was really like on some of the year’s highest-profile projects. Tracing his rise from independent film maker to co-director of Kung Fu Panda, Mark Osborne discussed the sense of risk-taking that has underpinned his entire career.
“Even on the good days, you’re beating the wolves back – and there are wolves, always,” he commented, before going on to admit that he felt that “my whole three and a half years on [Kung Fu Panda], I could have got the axe.”
Osborne’s presentation offered a fascinating insight into the fluidity of the movie’s design process, from the revelation that the panda community was conceived as a rural economy based around the manufacture of bamboo wind chimes; to rejected character designs for Oogway (“more of a senile grandfather type”); to the fact that Tai Lung was originally beaten up to “Hasselhoff level” in the final fight scene.
“[When we started, DreamWorks] knew they could sell a movie about kung fu, and they knew they could sell a movie about pandas, but they didn’t know what story to tell,” he said. “In the end, we went back to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and said, ‘Let’s make a movie as cool as this – but with Jerry Lewis in the lead.’”
James Baxter, Head of Character Animation, DreamWorks (left); Paul Wells, Director, Animation Academy, Loughborough University and session host (right).
ARTISTIC VIRTUES
The intricacies of the development process also featured in the session on Up, with Pixar’s Andy Schmidt revealing the strain the movie’s idiosyncratic character designs placed on the animation team.
“Carl was the first character we had that was only three heads high, and he basically has no neck. Head turns were a nightmare,” he commented. “We also lost a lot in the shapes of the animation because of his loose clothing. In traditional animation, you can really control the [silhouette of the] cloth, but we haven’t got that yet in CG.”
Back at DreamWorks, Head of Character Animation James Baxter was also focused on the difficulty of coaxing a believable performance from a 3D rig. His snappy one-hour masterclass began with the relationship between acting and animation (“Actors do, but animators describe”); went on to boil down many of the 12 classic Disney principles into the unifying concept of bodily inertia; and ended with extensive – and heavily embargoed – clips from the studio’s upcoming How to Train Your Dragon.
According to Baxter, the film’s blend of slapstick and emotional resonance make it “perhaps the best movie I’ve ever worked on” – high praise, coming from an animator whose credits include both The Lion King and Belle in Beauty and the Beast.
Party atmosphere in the reception hall of Animex.
BUSINESS SAVVY
While business matters were covered in a separate one-day programme, Animex Talk also explored some of the financial realities of life in today’s 3D industry.
In a session entitled ‘Global Effects’, Rhythm & Hues Production Technology Lead Hans Rijpkema traced the rapid trajectory of technology from “cutting edge to cookie cutter” and discussed the effect that government subsidies and overseas labour costs have had in further diverting VFX work from its Hollywood heartland.
Contrasting Rhythm & Hues’s willingness to embrace the global marketplace – the company now operates facilities in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kuala Lumpur – with conventional outsourcing, Rijpkema points out that, far from weakening the original Los Angeles studio, the option to divide work between four teams has actually strengthened it.
“Strangely, outsourcing has increased the number of people working in [our LA office],” he commented. “It’s completely counter-intuitive, but it’s true.”
The recruiters Summit. [L-R] Rachelle Lewis, Founder, Rachelle Lewis Talent; Hannah Acock, Recruitment Manager, Double Negative; Ben Owen, Recruitment Manager, Framestore; Shelley Page, Head of International Outreach, DreamWorks.
Former President of Warner Bros Feature Animation Max Howard was also keen to set out the benefits of new business models. In a presentation that traced the parallels between his own career and the development of the industry as a whole, Howard called for studios to diversify from high-risk flagship productions into a new tier of mid-budget independent animated features – an approach being pioneered by his own current company, Exodus Film Group.
“When an animated film does well, we all want to make animation. When one does badly, all the money pours out of the marketplace. We don’t [think that way] about live action. If we go to see a film that’s good, we say it’s a good movie. If it’s not good, we say it sucked. But we don’t say, ‘Oh no, that’s the end of live-action film-making.’ And we have to stop doing that in our industry.”
[L-R] Dougy Pincott, Head of Animexperience; Max Howard, Former President of Warner Bros Feature Animation; and Chris Williams, Festival Director.
NEXT STOP, THE WORLDHoward’s call to arms closed Animex 2010 on a high, with the audience rising in a standing ovation. It seemed a fittingly international note on which to end what is becoming an increasingly international festival.
Whether Animex can reconcile its current breezy informality with the demands of a growing audience remains to be seen. But as festival director Chris Williams remarked, getting up on stage to encourage students to buy the speakers more drinks at the after-show reception, “Where else are you going to find a line-up like this, eh? Not at Annecy, that’s for sure.”
It was a sentiment that might have raised some eyebrows in France. But on Teesside, no one was betting against him.
