EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Morgan Williams: I knew Joey and I were going to have fun sitting down to chat with indie animator, designer, director Joe Russ. He and his company, MOGRAFI, are currently creating the amazing [00:00:30] indie game Jenny LeClue that was funded by a very successful Kickstarter campaign. I was really proud to have been a part of the original team creating some of the original rigs for the characters. It's just a terrific project that you absolutely should check out. Joe also directed the short film Fathoms, a personal project that he also funded with a Kickstarter campaign. He's not only an amazingly talented [00:01:00] guy, but he's also one of the hardest work and most prolific artists I know. I just can't believe how much work this guy gets done on a day-to-day basis. It's really remarkable and admirable. Joe, Joey and I met in and around Ringling College. Both Joe and Joey taught there briefly, and I teach there now. We've known each other for quite a while, and we all really enjoy hanging out and geeking out about [00:01:30] our mutual loves for animation and technology and all that kind of good stuff. This was a very fun conversation for us, but I think also a really good one for you to hear because we haven't talked much about character animation for gaming. Joe has been dealing with that exact problem and issue with the development of Jenny LeClue, and it's also significant [00:02:00] that Jenny LeClue is specifically 2D character animation. A lot of good topics here that are really relevant to our class, so I hope you guys really enjoy our chat with the hilarious and fun Joe Russ. All right, well Joe Russ, thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today. We really appreciate it. Joe Russ: Yeah, thanks for having me on. Obviously excited to talk to you guys and your class. Morgan Williams: Yeah, it should be fun. Joe Russ: Let's do it. Morgan Williams: Yeah, well let's start [00:02:30] at the beginning of the beginning. You obviously have a love for character animation, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it, so how did you get interested in it? Were you a fan of animation as a kid? Joe Russ: Yeah, definitely. Growing up everyone's exposed to Saturday morning cartoons and animation, and I definitely feel in love with a lot of Japanese animation in whatever that was, the early, mid-90s, [00:03:00] as it was just properly making its way across the sea. I think I was most fascinated by Japanese animation where they treated the animation as a medium, whereas in America even now, it's still really treated as a kids' genre for the most part. I think that's what made me really obsessed. I love drawing and illustration from comics, and I love animation. I love the idea that it's just [00:03:30] another way of telling a story with characters. Morgan Williams: Right, right. Were there any particular films from that time that were your big revelatory- Joe Russ: There's a very specific film that's an anthology of three short films by the famous manga artist and animator Otomo who I think is known for Akira? Morgan Williams: Yeah, sure. Joe Russ: It's called Memories. It's the anthology, [00:04:00] and there's a specific film called Magnetic Rose which is a sort of sci-fi, operatic, ghost story. It's like everything I love, so it's nerdy and kind of emotional. Morgan Williams: Sure, sure. Joe Russ: People should watch it. I don't know. It's one of the greatest animated short films ever, if you like any of those things. Morgan Williams: Definitely. That's one I don't know. I'll have [00:04:30] to check that one out for sure. That sounds awesome. Were you also into humor? You said that it was the adult nature of the anime that attracted you. Joe Russ: Yeah. Morgan Williams: Did you like also humorous stuff and that kind of stuff, too, or was it really the anime that was your thing? Joe Russ: Yeah, I guess I was just attracted to the idea of it as a medium versus ... Morgan Williams: Specifically for kids. Joe Russ: [00:05:00] Yeah. I definitely like ... there's some beautiful ... especially now there's that French wave of animation that's this beautiful hybrid, where they're taking the exaggeration from Warner Brothers' cartoons and ... I can't think of it ... Hanna Barbera stuff and mixing it with the polish of some of that Japanese style. You get these kind of crazy, over-the-top animations where the stylization is so beautiful, and I'm definitely, at least now, [00:05:30] obsessed with that where they could tell you a story where there's no real depth to it, but it's just sold strictly on animation style with characters. It's just really fun to watch. They can often be kind of absurd and ridiculous. I definitely love that stuff, too. Morgan Williams: Yeah, that's good stuff. Did that kind of lead you towards studying animation when you went to school, or was the love for anime partly what got you into motion [00:06:00] graphics, or were those different, parallel tracks? Joe Russ: I think I love motion graphics hopefully like other people where it's a collage medium. You pull a bit of everything together, and I have overlapping influences. Growing up I loved comics. I loved photoreal drawing and painting and sculpture and animation and film. Motion graphics [00:06:30] ended up being one of those things where I could dabble in a bit of all of that stuff, because it brings all those things together. I think initially what happened is I made a bootleg DVD menu for a David Lynch film called Mulholland Drive, and then someone was like, "That's what motion graphics is." I was like, "Oh, I want to do that." I ended up going to school at Savannah College of Art and Design, and they actually had a broadcast design and motion graphics program at the time. I specifically went [00:07:00] for that kind of animation, versus other people went for 3D character animation. Morgan Williams: What made you not choose 3D character? Was it that diversity, that ability to do a lot of different things? Joe Russ: Yeah. Again, I like to have my hands in a lot of pies. It feels like it could be limiting if it was really just about [00:07:30] animation a bipedal or quadruped character, and it's like well, what if I want to do background set design, modeling, lighting? What if I just want to do 2D animated stuff like non-character? What if I want to do kinetic type? What if I want to just do some living painting collage? Again, I think motion design, motion graphics, whatever you want to call it, is that place where you can do any of that stuff. There's [00:08:00] a lot of flexibility in that. Morgan Williams: When did you first animate a character? Was it Fathoms, or was it before that? Joe Russ: I'd done some character animation stuff for clients for commercial jobs. Nothing as long as Fathoms, but I've done a little bit here and there. Definitely like the Android robot thing, I've done some animations with that, [00:08:30] and some other simple kind of characters like that, but nothing as complex as what I did in Fathoms. Joey Korenman: Joe, could you just, for the students that maybe haven't looked at the show notes that are right below this interview ... Joe Russ: Right under my feet. Joey Korenman: Exactly. I'm pointing down and you can't see because it's a podcast, but if you could just talk a little bit about what Fathoms is and how it came to be, and all that stuff? Joe Russ: Sure. It's a short animated film. It's a personal project, an internal [00:09:00] project I made a few years ago. I Kickstarted it, and it was sort of a process art, a cathartic thing for me where it was inspired by the loss of my dad at an early age. For me, it was a nerdy way of expressing my feelings about that in my medium of choice, and also pushing myself as a visual storyteller. I intentionally made it a very [00:09:30] long short film, knowing that would kind of limit its film festival outreach, but it was about me doing exactly what I want, making the creative choices I want, and not being limited by a client or an agency, or any of that kind of design-by-committee. So I could make my choices, good or bad, and tell a story the way I wanted. I don't know if that's what you're asking. Morgan Williams: No, no, that's great. What about the [00:10:00] decision to do the character animation in 3D? That's a huge step if you haven't done a lot of character before. Joe Russ: I'm definitely one of those people who likes to always be in over my head. I think if I was ever really good at something, I would get bored, so I'm always looking for something to bite off more than I can chew. Initially, I wanted to do the characters [00:10:30] 2D, and then I was making this 2.5D rigs in After Effects, and then I had a couple friends helping me, but they were 3D animators so they pushed me into doing 3D characters. They built all these characters and then they fell away because they couldn't dedicate the time to it, and I didn't have the financial resources to pay them to do that much work. Then I was stuck in this weird place where I had a choice between going full 3D and going 2D, and [00:11:00] I think I just decided at that point to try sticking with the 3D. I learned a lot of things, good and bad, from doing that but I think it was part of just being able to experiment with that. I didn't have to deliver a perfect product for a client. There wasn't a three-day deadline, so it was kind of okay if I needed to make some stumbles and find my way through the process of complex 3D rigs. Morgan Williams: [00:11:30] Was that in Cinema or Maya? Joe Russ: That's Cinema 4D. Morgan Williams: That was Cinema. Joe Russ: That was fun, because now there's that great autorigger built into Cinema and at least can get you pretty far along pretty quickly, but when I started building that, there was the bone stuff, but it's pretty rough [crosstalk 00:11:52] by comparison. Morgan Williams: Yeah. They've improved things a lot since then for sure. How did you [00:12:00] approach diving into something so complicated like character animation? Did you get books, did you look at tutorials, or did you just try to figure it out on your own? Joe Russ: I would say a mix of all that. As you know, there's lot of online resources, and looked at reference. For me, a lot of story-heavy stuff like that, I definitely do storyboards and script, and then [00:12:30] a boardomatic, like an animated storyboard first. Then a lot of it was, at this point, I was basically the only person doing the project, so I also looked at like what are going to be some cheap ways to avoid character animation, where it's like it's just me, and a lot of character animation is very expensive to do, and not necessarily important to the story. Like whether you see a full body short of a character walking? [00:13:00] That may not be important, but that may actually take a lot of time to do. Morgan Williams: Yep, shoot them from the waist up. Joe Russ: Yeah, exactly. Morgan Williams: I love doing that. Joe Russ: I definitely learned some things, like a lot of what I wanted to do, actually if I did it again now, I might actually do a hybrid where if I had 3D characters, I would do motion capture stuff and then animate the parts on top of that, like [00:13:30] the face expressions and dialog stuff. But for the overall body stuff, it's actually pretty easy to do motion capture stuff. There's a lot of ... I don't want to call it stock footage, but animation stock you can get of motion capture stuff. That can be a really good base. I was trying to do something that had a lot of moving parts, so I wasn't critical about ... I had to accept it's just me now, [00:14:00] so I can't expect to be the best character animation, since it's more of this bigger story focus. But what is the best I can do with what I have? Morgan Williams: Disney used rotoscoping like crazy all through the classic Disney era, so the idea of using things like mocap and rotoscoping ... OH, and reusing animation. Disney did that a lot, too. That's normal. Joe Russ: Yeah, and I always think [00:14:30] it's funny where people call them out like it's a negative. I'm like, well, if it worked ... Even a big, super-expensive production has to make some kind of financial or time decision at some point. If they know they're going to use the same kind of dance sequence, and they know it works, I don't know why that's such a hard thing to do. Morgan Williams: No, and it's snobby when people get uppity about that stuff, because [00:15:00] it's about the character in the story and the performance of the character. However you get there, it's just a matter of getting there. It doesn't matter how. When you were doing that, you were pretty much working all pose to pose, right? You were figuring out where the key poses were? Or were you using more like expressions, oscillations, things like that? Joe Russ: [00:15:30] Yeah, mostly pose to pose, but there were definitely some places where there was a good shortcut hack I saw. M dot Strange, who's this sort of out-there animator guy ... now I think he's also doing some interactive stuff, but he was doing character animation [inaudible 00:15:52] and he was doing tons of stuff very quickly. You would never say he's necessarily the best at it or whatever, but it's always fascinating how quickly [00:16:00] he could work, how much content he could produce. A big thing he did was use expressions for a lot of things where he didn't need really tightly-controlled animation. He might make a character dance using a bunch of wiggle, automated vibrate tags or something that would just kind of ... even if it wasn't a brilliant animation, it's like, oh, I want to fill this scene with 20 people in the background dancing. It's not important that their dance is beautiful and elegant, because you're watching the character in the foreground. I just need [00:16:30] this energy, so let me have this do a lot of the work for me. Definitely when you are doing something MD yourself, or you're a very small team, it's like where are the places you can make those more creative choices and come at things sideways? Not every single thing needs to be beautifully hand-touched and frame-by-frame posed. Morgan Williams: Right, and [00:17:00] again, the most important thing is the story itself. With Fathoms, it's a kind of heavy story. It's very moody. It's very emotional. You really had to have characters that were performing. Can you talk a little bit about that, about creating that mood and how you thought about the characters' performance? Joe Russ: Yeah. I think [00:17:30] we've talked about this before as well, that whether it's character or non-character stuff, I definitely believe that the concept, the story, whatever the emphasis is informs everything. If you have that strong foundation for informing your design, your color palette, your movement, it explains a lot. In this, it was meant to be a heavy story. It's not really a rainbow and sunshine happy ending story. [00:18:00] I wanted my characters to be physically very like everything's in slow motion and everyone is very ... Some of the story is underwater, but they move like they're moving through butter. It's this kind of very soft and weak movement that expresses, physically shows where they are emotionally and the kind of world they're in. [00:18:30] I think that's something I always appreciate when people bring the movement, whether it's into a single character who their personality is, or into the tone of a world. I'm very big on atmosphere and tone in storytelling, and I think that can even get down to the way you're easing your animation, or the general timing of things. Morgan Williams: Great. Well, that maybe is a good segue [00:19:00] into what you've done next, which is Jenny LeClue, which is also a very atmospheric, moody, and really complicated story because now it's interactive. Maybe you could quick describe for everyone just what Jenny LeClue is in a nutshell, and then we can talk a little bit about the character animation side of it. Joe Russ: Sure. It's an indie adventure game we're working on right [00:19:30] now. It's episodic. It's very story-focused, and it's about a young gumshoe detective. It's sort of a mashup of Nancy Drew and Twin Peaks. Morgan Williams: That's a great tagline. I love it. Joe Russ: Nice. Morgan Williams: Your decision with Jenny LeClue was to do 2D character animation. I guess I didn't realize that you had originally conceived Fathoms that [00:20:00] way, so was Jenny an opportunity to go back and revisit what you had originally imagined, or was it about just doing something different than Fathom? Joe Russ: I obviously love 2D animation. That's why I always want to do it. I don't trust myself to do frame-by-frame, hand-drawn, and I would say I'm probably lazy, so I like relying [00:20:30] on computers to fill in the frames for me. With Jenny, I think it was actually an overall aesthetic choice where a lot of the demand for commercial work and motion design is getting more and more visual effects, now even more interactive, and a lot of the client work I've done is very focused on shiny, 3D things, exaggerating the sense of depth. For me, this being a internal project and I'm creative directing it, [00:21:00] for me it was important to do something that was the opposite of that and get away from that. I'm really looking at creating a world that's very graphic. I'm not intentionally trying to flatten it as in make it feel one-dimensional, but really getting away from that shiny, reflective sphere on a white [psych 00:21:21] and extruded type flying out at the camera. For me it was kind of an aesthetic counter [00:21:30] to a lot of the client work I've been doing. I think that boils down to, if I want the world to have this rectilinear, side-on symmetry, then I want the characters to also reflect that. Weirdly, a lot of influence from Wes Anderson films with David Yeoman, who's been the DP on all of his films, where as weird as that is, they do really push this flat, graphic, [00:22:00] beautifully-curated, unnatural framing a lot of the time. I like the idea of taking that even further and making that something that actually is illustrated, 2D and graphic, and building the characters that way, too. Morgan Williams: Right, right. Jenny LeClue was started in After Effects. I know because I helped you with the rig on it, but can you talk about as you guys have moved forward with the process, [00:22:30] how do you think about creating character animation in an interactive setting? You're no longer just starting from the beginning and going to the end. How do you start to think about how to break that apart and work that into interactivity? Joe Russ: The nice thing is you can reuse ... you basically have to reuse a lot of animations. The first thing is just thinking of, Jenny's our main character. She does a lot of stuff, so [00:23:00] first thinking in the core animation loops she needs and figuring out how those can all seamlessly transition. We're looking at, right now for games, there's two ways you can do it. You can render sprites, which are basically really unoptimized movies where you've saving a giant image with every single frame baked into the image, and those are nice because you can do whatever you want visually, as complicated as you want, [00:23:30] and play it back and it looks the same just like a video. But it uses a lot of memory and a lot of storage space, which is a problem for a game, and part of it is our game ... We're trying to get it onto mobile devices, so we really want to minimize ... there's some technical overhead stuff we want to minimize. The other option is to have a rigged character, animate it. We can do it in After Effects and bring it into C4D or Maya or whatever, and then bring that into Unity, which is where we're doing [00:24:00] the programming. Then you basically just bring in the keyframes and it renders your character in real-time in the game. The big advantage of that is you're using your texture memory and file space, and the amount of memory and file space you need for the keyframes, but you're not baking every single frame. If your game runs at 60 frames a second and you want a sprite that runs at 60 frames a second, you need 60 frames of images for one second. But if you do it the rigged way, [00:24:30] you need just however many keyframes there are for your character, and then the textures or images that you're manipulating like a puppet in this case, or if it's a 3D character, the geometry and the texture. Morgan Williams: Sure. Have you guys pretty much decided that that's the route you're going? Have you figured out your workflow, or are you still working on that? Joe Russ: We're still working on it, but right now, I also totally blanked until recently that [00:25:00] After Effects and Cinema 4D have really tight integration now. Basically Unity has a really nice integration with Cinema where you can bring animation directly in, keyframe things. You can't do particles or expression things. It doesn't know what to do with that, but position, scale, rotation, it can deal with that. We're actually looking at building some [inaudible 00:25:24] and then importing that into Unity so people could animate certain [00:25:30] things still in After Effects, and then we could bring it in realtime, drop it right into our game engine. Most of the people I know who are working on the animation are best at animating in After Effects. I want to make sure our workflow is best for the most people to be able to work on it, but there's always technical stuff. Morgan Williams: I was going to ask about the puppet tool. I seem to remember one of the issues was a concern that if you have a [00:26:00] character rig in After Effects that's largely a puppet tool, and Jenny is like 80% puppet tool, that that's something that doesn't really translate outside of After Effects. Joe Russ: Yeah, so that's true. That's where Jenny, who is our most complicated animated character, she is almost 99, 100% going to be rebuilt in Cinema. Right now, we released this free, playable teaser. Because she's really the only animated character in it, [00:26:30] we were able to get away with still just using the sprites because it saved us time, but yeah, we're working on rebuilding her because she's going to have a lot of animations as a bone-rigged puppet thing in Cinema. Yeah, the puppet tool in After Effects doesn't really translate. At least as of now, there's no third-party tools to translate it. Anything we do in After Effects, again, you can get position, scale and rotation, so for characters who aren't the main character Jenny [00:27:00] LeClue, and characters who have less-complicated animation, we're building them that way where we only need a few animations. They're just parented the forearm to the upper arm to the torso. I think that'll be okay, but Jenny, I think, being more complicated and having a lot more interaction, I think it makes sense for her to be this more elaborate rig. Morgan Williams: Sure. Have you guys looked at Spine at all, the new third-party [00:27:30] Spine that's supposedly made for 2D characters in games? Joe Russ: Yeah, it looks really cool. I'm wary of adding additional software to our pipeline that's not already integrated in one of the other ones, because we already have so many steps. And we have this elaborate way of building our backgrounds now that's essentially like Photoshop to After Effects, After [00:28:00] Effects to Cinema 4D, Cinema 4D to Unity, and we're trying to keep everything flowing roughly through that pipeline. Those are all pretty established platforms, so it's not as dodgy, and we're not as worried that that company will go out of business in three months and not support the software. I'm trying to be really conservative. I'm a big geek and I like checking out what's the newest feature and the latest ... There's the newest Adobe CC suite, but when [00:28:30] you're trying to produce a thing and we have really limited resources, and we're trying to do a lot, all these things are overpowered for what we're trying to do. We're really trying to focus on streamlining our workflow and not creating more potential headaches if we don't need it. Morgan Williams: Sure. Joe Russ: We're trying ... Go ahead, sorry? Morgan Williams: No, no. Go ahead. Joe Russ: I'm just saying, so I'm being very aggressively strategizing about works best for us and what other [00:29:00] people will be familiar with, because also like Spine, we'd either have to find animators who already know that, or other people we bring in have to get up to speed on it as well. If someone's a good character animator, do want to deal with a couple days or weeks or months of them getting up to speed on that? Or do you want them to use that time to animate the characters? Morgan Williams: Right, absolutely. You talked about mocap before. Have you investigated the new [00:29:30] Adobe Character Animator, I think is what they're calling it? Joe Russ: Yes. That's the one where you can use your webcam? Morgan Williams: Yeah. They call it character animation, but it's basically just a simple built-in mocap system. It looks really interesting. Joe Russ: Yeah, it looks cool. It's still kind of a preview thing, right? You can't actually- Morgan Williams: Yeah I think so. I think it's basically in beta, is my understanding. [00:30:00] It's definitely interesting, although I think it's also worth mentioning, when you look at the example, the animation is horrible because, like I always like to tell students, animation is a performance. Motion capture is great if you've got access to Andy Serkis, or you're willing to be a performer. You have to perform, and it's a [00:30:30] great tool, but the example is just some dude sitting in his office waving his arms around. You're going, "Well, that's not really animation. That's just waving your arms around." Joe Russ: I think any tool that helps you do what you need to do is cool. I agree that a challenge with that is now you're taking a performance with character animation where you have time to revise it and process it, is now it's a realtime [00:31:00] thing. Like you're saying, yeah, not everyone is an Andy Serkis. There's one Andy Serkis. Then the challenge of that is A, can that tool get the nuance of what he's doing or what you're doing, and are you able to translate that physically? I know I definitely don't have that performance ability in realtime. I think it's another tool, and if they [00:31:30] stick with it, it might be a nice thing. I don't know a lot of people use it, but even After Effects has that ... I can't remember what they call it, like Live Trace or something, and you can move the mouse around in real time and it'll set keyframes in. Sometimes I'll use it for stuff where I'm just simulating someone moving a mouse on a screen, but sometimes I use it to just really quickly rough something out that wouldn't make sense to do with just three or four keyframes. Sometimes [00:32:00] it's helpful. It's not something I always use, but I think it could be cool. Morgan Williams: Well, and it's also like we were talking about using expressions and doing little "tricks" like that. Something like that might be great for background characters if, once again, you just have to really, really quick get a crowd of people waving their arms. That might be a perfect opportunity to hook that thing up, wave your arms around a little bit, and you're done. Again, as long as your main characters and your main story is getting across, [00:32:30] so what if ... I always look at it like if you save a little time on that crowd, then you can spend more time making the main character's performance better. Again, I don't think it pays to be snobby about that kind of stuff. Joe Russ: Fair enough. Joey Korenman: One of the things that's Morgan teaching in this class is how to basically link different actions together, and he's got this cool formula, how you go from a neutral pose into an anticipation [00:33:00] into an action. Basically you string them together. But when you're doing that's interactive like Jenny LeClue, how do you deal with that? For example, if you're animating her running but then the player might have her run and then immediately hit a button that triggers a different animation. How do you transition between those things? How do you deal with that? Or do you even care? Are you just like, "Oh, there's going to be a little bit of a jump there and that's okay. The player won't notice." Joe Russ: Well, like you guys, I'm an animation snob, so of course I [00:33:30] care. If there's anything I can do to make that smooth, I will. This is another advantage ... if we do sprites, if we want a seamless transition, we have to build another animation that transitions between wherever we are in one animation and in another, and that's never perfect. As you're saying, if you're doing a run cycle and she stops halfway through and you need skidding to a stop and a little overshoot animation, [00:34:00] it's never going to be perfectly aligned with wherever her run cycle stopped. But you at least try to make a transition, and that's what we've done with sprites. The beautiful thing of course with a rigged character that's happening in realtime in your game engine is just like you can blend shapes, morph poses in Cinema, you can do motion clips and you can blend them and fade between them, and it literally blends the position, scale, rotation values [00:34:30] between animations to create a transition. You can do that in realtime. If we create Jenny who's sort of this realtime rig, if you create the run cycle and you create the stop running cycle, you can blend between them. It's not as perfect as hand-animating that moment, but it's dynamic and you can still get that smooth transition of her running and having this stop running, skidding animation cycle. [00:35:00] Or if she's going to run and them jump, and we want to have her run, dip down, have that anticipation before she jumps, instead of just popping off the ground, we can have both of those animations, a full jump animation, the full run animation, and we can spend six frames on some kind of transition. It's a trade-off because with the player having control, it is not this 1 [00:35:30] to 1 animation where we know Jenny needs to run for one second, right here she stops, dips down, jumps, grabs this bar, drops off it, catches her balance when she lands. The player's going to choose when these things are going to happen and the animation needs to be general enough to be these loops that can do the different states she's in, and then find some way to blend between them. Joey Korenman: That's awesome. That's pretty slick. Morgan Williams: Yeah, really interesting. Joe Russ: In some ways, it's actually easier, [00:36:00] because if she's running, we just make one good running cycle. If she's stopping, we need one stopping cycle. The joystick is analog. The further you push the joystick, the faster she'll move, so we even can basically time-stretch in realtime the keyframe cycle of her run cycle. If you move the joystick 10% of the way all the way to the right, then we might play her run animation at 10% [00:36:30] speed. At a certain speed we'll just switch to a walk cycle because it looks bizarro. It looks like slow-motion running, but you can do that nice thing where instead of having it keyframe 50 different run cycles, we can have it play full-speed when someone pushes the joystick 100% to the right, and at 50% it plays back a run cycle at 50%. Again, if we think that feels too weird, we'll make a mid-speed run cycle, and then it'll transition, almost like fading to that [00:37:00] in the keyframes. It's really nice because that dynamic thing lets you create even more complex animation in realtime. Morgan Williams: Neat. Is Jenny going to have a lot of facial expression, and is she going to emote facially, or is that going to be a little more limited, or what are you planning there? Joe Russ: Yeah, we have a certain mechanic where the camera [00:37:30] is closer in on your characters, but most of the time, you're seeing your characters at a distance. There we'll have facial expressions. The way we're doing it right now is a hybrid of basically being able to switch between specific mouth shapes. You're basically turning on and off different mouth shapes if they're talking or making a different expression, but also we have some rigged parts. If it was in After Effects, it would be the puppet tool, like [00:38:00] that rig you made where it is that hybrid, where maybe her eyebrows are floating above her head. They're their own shape and they can be moved up, down, left, right, rotated, but you also can switch between two or three different actual eyebrow shapes, which are different images. It's this sort of hybrid expression. Morgan Williams: Right, right. Awesome. I've got a couple student-y questions here because we've got a bunch of students, [00:38:30] many of whom are approaching character for the very, very first time. As you said, you kind of taught yourself. You've kind of learned on your own. Joe Russ: Yeah. Morgan Williams: What do you think is maybe the most important thing that you've learned about animating characters? Joe Russ: Wow. It's definitely characters are complex, so I couldn't say there's any one thing. I'd say whatever works [00:39:00] for you works, but I definitely am not precious about it, so there's definitely times where I'm trying to nail some kind of specific animation with the character, and it's just not working. I will just straight up record reference of whether it's me or a friend, or I will just rip reference from the internet, go find a YouTube video of a cheetah running and just animate over that, and go, "Okay, now it kind of looks like what I wanted it to be. Now how do I tweak this to work?" [00:39:30] It's not being precious, like we were just talking about Disney rotoing their own ... reusing their own animation because it worked, and that's definitely one is just being okay with figuring out whatever you need to get you there. In those cases, also, I'm able to look at, frame by frame, what is it that's actually happening in that animation? Why is that working and what I was doing without that reference wasn't? As we always say, reference is king, [00:40:00] whether it's a style thing or motion, whatever it is. Definitely reference, reference, reference. Real life, other people's art, your own reference you make. I think that's the biggest one. And then for me, a lot of times I like to ... If I was getting into character animation, I would say get all the complexity out of that way. That's definitely a thing. In Fathoms, I have these fully-rigged people. [00:40:30] They have 10 fingers. They have 10 toes. There's so many moving parts, and it's so easy to break the thing, that it gets overwhelming sometimes. It's like you're trying to animate a cruise ship. Is this thing supposed to be nimble? Because it doesn't feel like it is. That's where sometimes it's like, if you're getting into it, go in After Effects. Make a 2D square solid or shape layer and say, "How do I tell a [00:41:00] simple story with this if it was alive? How do I bring those animation principles in to make it feel alive?" Because then you can really focus on just a few properties and how to communicate a story with the motion and emotion that your animation communications. For me I always find that really good because you can strip away a lot of that technical overhead that can really cloud what it is you're actually trying to do. If you're spending all your time fiddling with the knobs, [00:41:30] you can't focus on whether what you're doing is communicating an idea or an emotion properly. Morgan Williams: Right. That's great advice. I 100% agree. You might have already answered this question. What I was going to ask next is what was the hardest thing to learn? And was it punching through that complexity? Or was there something else that you really banged your head against while you were learning? Joe Russ: I would say I'm definitely still learning. I'm certainly not [00:42:00] any kind of master character animator. Hardest thing I think like a lot of other things is knowing when to shut it down. You've been doing a character walk cycle and you've been working on it for four days, and it somehow seems to just keep getting worse. Sometimes there's that point where you go, "You know what? It might actually be better to take what I learned from this. Scrap that because I just can't save this. Do it again [00:42:30] with what I learned." Sometimes you can kind of figure out where you got off on the wrong path, like where you went wrong and fix it. That's one of those I'm still learning. Again, if you have a complex character rig, that can be a dodgy thing. "Okay, I've got 500 keyframes in this three-second shot, and two-thirds of it looks great. This one moment feels bizarre and it's not communicating the personality or the message that this [00:43:00] character is doing." Do I figure out how to scrap that part and redo it, or do I just push through it? I still find that very difficult. I think that could apply to other things as well. It's just knowing when to sustain and when to pull the plug, or restart, not pull the plug. Morgan Williams: Right, right. When you're looking at demo [00:43:30] reels, when you're looking at an animator to hire for a project, specifically looking at character, what do you look for? What do you want to see in that reel? Joe Russ: If it's specifically character animation, I'm probably not going to worry about the aesthetic of what they're showing me, but ideally that ... I'm sure you guys have talked about the fundamental kind of [00:44:00] character animation principles, but that their characters have a proper sense of motivation. Whether it be just physically believable ... because a lot of those principles come out of a sense of physics and motivated movement. Whether it's motivated by physics or motivated by emotion, so I think I would look for animation that has that understanding, even if it's not perfect, that they show an understanding of those [00:44:30] principles and motivation. Again, whether it's just that the cube is jumping, that it first needs to squish down to build up that kinetic energy, or whether it's figuring out how to, in a pose and in the timing, convey a character going from smiling to crying and them understanding some of the human nuance of that. Morgan Williams: Do you think as a motion [00:45:00] designer yourself who's kind of gotten into character, do you think that's a smart thing to do for motion design people? Is it useful? Is it helpful? Does it make your motion graphics better, if you're good at character? Joe Russ: That's a good question. I don't think it would make you worse. Joey Korenman: I beg to differ. Morgan Williams: Love that answer. Joe Russ: I think when I look at great animation, I think it's [00:45:30] clear that this person has an intuition and a passion and an interest in a strong sense of the way things could be. Again, what's the thing beneath that's causing this thing to move and informs the way it moves, why it moves? Whether it's a complex character or they're moving a piece of type that's unmasking, I usually can tell when I watch something they understand timing and they understand making appealing movement that isn't distracting [00:46:00] or reinforces whatever the message is. For me, I think if you're better with your character principles it can help, but there's definitely that area where you need to understand the appropriate usage of style. Just because you might want to squash and stretch your character when they're running and jumping and stuff does not mean you want the end type for Citibank ... you do not the type to come out and smoosh together [00:46:30] and look like it's made of springs, because then it's like, is this for little kids? Are you saying that they're spongy? You want to convey that their type is strong and firm and balanced and safe. If your type is bouncing around like an idiot, that's not appropriate motion. There's certainly that to consider, but I think again, a great animator, character, non-character, is going to understand even appropriate motion. If you have a sad [00:47:00] scene and it's about a nuance of facial expression in a human character, you don't want your character bouncing around and being made of jello, unless that's some kind of joke you're playing with the scene. I think a great animator understands even that appropriate kind of movement. Morgan Williams: I love that you're using the word appropriate, because I use that word a lot. You think about something like South Park, and South Park doesn't have " [00:47:30] good animation", but it's appropriate for the style of those characters and the style of humor. The show wouldn't be as funny if the animation was good. Right? Joe Russ: Yeah. Morgan Williams: I think that's a perfect example of it's appropriate movement rather than good, bad, limited, whatever terms you want to use. Does that make sense? Joe Russ: Yeah, and I definitely subscribe to a phrase from ... there's [00:48:00] this writing website I read, and he says, "Let's always remember, whatever these things are we're using, they're tools not rules." The whole idea is it's great to know the animation principles, but that doesn't mean you should die hard say, "I always need to have my character having anticipation before they jump." Is it appropriate for the situation or not? If it's a piece of type or something else, is that where you want [00:48:30] to go? Like you said, style's a big thing. Understanding that sometimes you will specifically ignore these kind of animation common fundamentals, like you're saying South Park. You're specifically doing that jumping between holding poses, and it's part of the style conveying that it is ... they've still kind of built it out, but conveying it's this originally paper cut-out, stop-motion animation, and this energy that the storytelling is supposed to be [00:49:00] crude at times, and so the animation reflects that. Even though we know now they have a really tight pipeline where everything's done in Maya, and it'd be very easy for them to tween everything to death. They still lean heavily on characters snapping pose, pose, pose, and it gives you that energy and that reflection of that kind of tone of the world. I think that's always important to keep in mind, for sure. Morgan Williams: Oh yeah, absolutely. I 100% agree [00:49:30] with that. Let's talk hardcore geek shit now. Let's talk plugins. Joey Korenman: Yes! Morgan Williams: What are your faves, man? Let's talk plugins, expressions, scripts. What do you like? Of course we all know Duik. That one we can ... Joe Russ: For After Effects, there's basically nothing better if you're going to do a rigged character than the Duik tools. [00:50:00] I don't know. I'm becoming a grumpy old man where I'm kind of becoming more and more anti-plugin as I go. I'm trying to think. Morgan Williams: Or even little scripts that you like. It doesn't have to be anything super fancy. Joe Russ: I get pretty nerdy with expressions anywhere I can. If you're looping any kind of animation, which I actually find in a lot of character stuff, even more when making a game with animation, is [00:50:30] anything where I can use expressions to loop an animation instead of manually copy-pasting key frames ... anything where expressions will save me work and keep my workflow more flexible, I like to do that. Other plugins specifically for character? Morgan Williams: Go nuts. Whatever, man. Joe Russ: I think Duik is really it, man. Morgan Williams: Yeah, it's the king, isn't it? Joe Russ: Yeah. It's hard to beat that in After Effects for character [00:51:00] stuff. Joey Korenman: I have a question, Joe. As far as rigging goes ... we've asked a couple other people this, too. A lot of people, especially if you're learning After Effects, you learn it backwards and you learn to rig a character before you actually really understand how to animate. I was curious if you find that having an understanding of character animation actually makes your rigs better, because maybe you understand [00:51:30] the controller needs to be on this part of the foot, otherwise the toe doesn't actually touch the ground and weird stuff happens. Have you found anything like that? Joe Russ: Yeah. I think like anything in the character stuff, you can get really deep into it. It's a dark, black hole that goes deep into the earth. I think it's that thing. The more you make characters, the more you being to intuit, like you're saying, how you need to set up those characters, [00:52:00] but even that stuff is dynamic. You might have a three-legged character with enormous feet, and they're going to have their own requirements versus a character that is in a hover car and is just a torso floating around. I think there's some stuff that you get better at that, but ... I have no idea if I answered that question. Joey Korenman: Well, I guess what I'm wondering is do you ever find yourself, with Jenny for example, fighting the rig, and [00:52:30] you can't get it to do what you need? Joe Russ: Yeah. Okay, so one thing me and Morgan have talked about that's a big pro tip. It's like the more you make them, the more you know to anticipate problems when you make a character, and just rigging itself is definitely its own art form. Big thing is you've got to try to anticipate what is the most extreme version of a thing your character needs to do? Because definitely if you don't, the less you can anticipate, [00:53:00] the more, like you're saying, you're going to be fighting the rig when you're animating. Me and Morgan have talked about, sometimes it's worth investing more time up-front to say this character can do an extreme unrealistic pose that we don't think we're ever going to need, and then when you're in the heat of animating, you go, "For three frames I need this character to be able to go unnaturally stretch their body like Stretch Armstrong, just for this one thing that I never thought I would do, breaking all of the rules we expected," and if can just do that for us without [00:53:30] looking like it's exploded, awesome. If you haven't built the rig for that, then like you said, it might collapse and you go, shit. We have to do a total hack here or rewrite everything around this. That's definitely, I think, as you do it more, you can anticipate more how much you need to build your structure for that. It's like you're building houses in SimCity for natural disasters, but you don't know what they are, and [00:54:00] you don't know when they're coming and how extreme they are. You're going to lose a few houses and then get better at preparing for it. Joey Korenman: That's a great metaphor. Morgan Williams: That was perfect. Joe Russ: Right? And it always feels like your house is built of toothpicks, and it just weathers the storm that is your animation. Joey Korenman: Beat this horse to death, please. Joe Russ: Okay, I will. I think that's [00:54:30] definitely ... Morgan is great about that. We've been talking about character rigs for Jenny, and he'd be like, "Now Jenny can literally Stretch Armstrong her body in this moment. It could stretch to 11." I'm like, "We're never going to use that," and two months later we're stretching her into that pose for some exaggerated moment. Thank god Morgan was like, "No, you need to really be able to go extreme with your character." I think [00:55:00] that's just a general pro tip is if you are properly rigging someone, build them so they can do way more than you think, and even if you always use 30% of what they're built for, like you said, if it means you're not fighting with the rig, it means you're saving time and focusing more on your character animation which is already complex enough. Morgan Williams: Absolutely. I agree 100% for sure. Great. Well, this is awesome. [00:55:30] Tons of nuggets here of wisdom. Joey, do you have any last questions for Joe? Joey Korenman: Yeah. Just one actually. A lot of the students in this course have no character experience, but maybe they want to start doing more character. Maybe even me, maybe even myself, I feel like I'd like to do a little more character. I start doing it, I start doing the [00:56:00] exercises and holy crap does my character animation look awful. It's really bad, right? But my question for you is, as someone who has only fairly recently been really diving into character animation, how long has it taken you to overcome that feeling, or do you still feel that way like, "Man, my stuff's just not as good as I'd like it to be"? Joe Russ: I think I'll always feel that way, like [00:56:30] it's not as good as I want it to be. I definitely, again, am not saying I'm any kind of expert at it, but it's like all this other stuff. The more you practice, and with the practice, the more that you are self-aware and try to learn and grow from what you're doing ... Not just hey, don't just animate 50 things and never think about it, but if you animate 50 things and you think about, "I hate this. What is actually going on that makes me [00:57:00] dislike it besides just being self-conscious? Where can I find people who are better than me to learn from, or references of ways to solve this, and how can I improve it?" Definitely especially character animation's so complicated, a lot of it's just learning as you do it and doing it and doing it and doing it till you at least feel competent, I guess. I'm assuming no one is ever shouting from that rooftops [00:57:30] that they're the master of character animation, and if he did, everyone else would knock him off the roof. What about the rest of us just trying to make it work? I don't know. I think a big thing, though, actually wanted to touch on before is you were asking about what I'd look for in reels. If I'm hiring someone, especially character, I'd look even more at the person as [00:58:00] a worker. I don't have a better term for that, but because character animation is so frustrating, and I think even if you're good at it, there's a lot of revision that happens and it's complex revision, I'd look for someone who has a really good ... which in general I'd look for this ... attitude, is passionate about it, and doesn't go, "It sucked the first time. I can't do anymore work today," [00:58:30] or even the fifth time. You need someone who is relentless at, "I'm going to nail this. We can do this," has a positive attitude and is passionate about doing what it takes to solve that. In character animation, a lot of it is just ... you might have to animate your walk cycle 20 times to find the one that feels right and fits the personality of your character. It doesn't work if you're someone who goes, "Oh, I'm going to get it the first time," and you don't and you give up. [00:59:00] When I'm hiring someone, I'd look at the reel and hopefully it communicates that they understand and intuit and have a skill for animating whatever it is they're animation, but then I'd also want to know personally them as a person and a worker, do they have that determination and stubbornness to sustain through the pain that is character animation. Joey Korenman: That's really good advice. [crosstalk 00:59:30] Morgan Williams: Great. Joe Russ: [00:59:30] It's a little bit of a masochistic thing. What is your threshold for pain? Joey Korenman: What is the Greek guy and he rolled the boulder? Morgan Williams: Sisyphus. Joe Russ: Sisyphus? Joey Korenman: Yes. Joe Russ: Yeah, it's like how much are you cool with having to push that boulder back up the hill, knowing that you're doing that and going, "Yeah, we're going to get it this time. This is going to be the one." You always get a little closer, but I think that's actually a huge thing. If I was looking [01:00:00] to hire someone, especially for character animation, because I don't know anyone that comes out with great character animation the first time. Even the best, most-seasoned people, it's always a process and it's always a lot of work and dedication, and weirdly, very technical problem-solving. You have to really be able to break down why something doesn't feel right in the nuance as well in the really simple functional ways. [01:00:30] That just takes a lot of skill and a lot of patience, I guess? Sustain, yeah. Morgan Williams: Great. That's awesome. Love it. Joey Korenman: Perfect. Morgan Williams: That's probably a perfect place to stop. What do you think, Joey? Joe Russ: Don't give up now, guys! Joey Korenman: Yes, you can do it! Joe Russ: Do it! Joey Korenman: [inaudible 01:00:55] Yeah, exactly. Joe Russ: Yeah, exactly. Joey Korenman: Yeah. That was awesome. Thank you so much, Joe. Joe Russ: Yeah. Morgan Williams: [01:01:00] Yeah, thanks so much. Joe Russ: Thank you guys. You guys are awesome and I really appreciate you having me on, chatting to me about the little that I know about character animation. Morgan Williams: Joe is a great guy, a very funny guy, but also an incredibly thoughtful artist. It was great to hear his insights and his thoughts about character animation and his process a little bit. Please follow Jenny LeClue. If it's already out by the time you hear this, make sure and [01:01:30] get it. If it's not out yet, follow it and watch for it. It's a really beautiful project that I think you'll get a huge kick out of. Keep an eye on MOGRAFI. I think we're going to see a lot more amazing things from Joe in the future.