Predicament of an Animator

Exactly six months ago I came to England to study animation, after I decided to drop the idea of working as a live-action director. In just six months of animating, I’ve learned more about modern cinema then I did in three years as a film scholar.

What I’m talking about is the behind-the-scenes aspects of film making. Have you watched a movie recently and seen details look fake or out-of-place? Most likely, that’s because of animators like me who sit in front of the computer and create the scenes. The intention of course is always to make it look real, but because of studios pushing for quantity over quality, you’ll often see really bad CGI effects in modern cinema.

Why this predicament? As an animator going into a modern industry, I am of course in favour of increased use of digital effects. However, I am also against it.

Let’s look at movies like the Star Wars prequels. Imagine the hundreds of artists who worked hard on making those movies look good visually, only to have it speed right past you and you never even notice the details. Every second of those movies are the products of months of hard work for the visual effects department. The surprise is that all of the special effects you see on big budget movies probably took a CGI artist only a few days because the studio pushed the artists to have them done in time for release. And as such a lot of corners were cut to make it look as good as possible with as little effort as possible. Kinda like a cardboard bar covered in chocolate.

This is why, as an animator, I like Pixar. They use CGI purely as an animation tool. When you watch a Pixar film you already know everything is fake, because it’s animation. It is an animated feature intentionally, while movies that add CGI just use it to make special effects cheaper and faster. And that is why I’m in a predicament as an animator working on digital animation. There are really good ways of using it, but also really bad ways.

As a writer, would you use digital effects—if it were possible—to make the reader ‘feel’ like it’s an exciting story?