Trent Talks Two Dimensions

+ Considering the release of AWS’s take on The Owl and the Pussycat a few weeks ago, and bearing in mind that the studio is primarily comprised of 3D animators, I thought I’d talk to AWS animator Trent Leighton about his experience branching out into the realm of 2D.

2D animation often appears less complex than it’s 3D counterpart. But is that the reality?

So what were the inspirations behind the style of animation that you used in The Owl and the Pussycat? I think mainly children’s storybooks.

Like Golden Books? Yeah, certainly. We were looking for something that would appeal to children with simple, bold colours and big shapes, which Adam [Walker]’s designs really catered towards.

But how about the actual animation itself? The movements themselves. Well, certainly there’s a real difference in animating for 2D as opposed to 3D; 2D’s got to be more wild.

Wild? Yeah, wild – sharper movements, more exaggerated, yeah. Otherwise it just looks a bit dead when compared to 3D. After The Owl and the Pussycat, we did a small 2D animation for an intro to a website. It was just a little guy that resembled a pen drawing who runs around. And we took what we learned [from The Owl and the Pussycat] and used some really extreme animation. I mean, he just sort of snaps between poses, which you can’t really do when working with 3D.

So coming from a 3D background, did you start to animate the movement in a style as though you were working in 3D before realizing you needed to exaggerate things more? Yeah, that was the case, a bit. I think we could have made it even more crazy, actually. I mean, the tone of the film requires it to be a bit more subtle, but I still think that the characters could have moved around a bit more, been a bit more energetic.

Anything in particular? Yeah, the boat scenes. The movement of the boat itself.

Can you take us through the differences in animating something in 3D versus 2D? Well, with the program we were using it’s much the same. Even though it’s a 2D program, you use 3D principles. So while I don’t draw each frame of animation or anything like that, I still use rigs and bones to control the animation.

With 3D you start by building a character’s model, a rig, in a 3D space. With 2D we’ll draw out the shapes that comprise the character.

So is that the whole character as one image, or the different components – the head, the arms, the torso, etc? You can do either. You then create the rig, which is the basic skeleton; the bones. You can just link the parts to the bones or complete a basic skinning process.

Can you explain that? Sure. The skinning process is where you lock the mesh or the shape in this case to the bone.

So for example, if you had a characters arm, you would, on the skeleton, have the upper and lower sections of the arm hinged at an elbow point. You’d then lock a 2D image of the upper arm to the upper bone and the lower to the lower, and then you’d have an arm that looked like the characters arm and also is now capable of movement, hinging in an appropriate place.

So do the bones exist on a 2D plane or a 3D space? On a 2D plane.

So the program you were using doesn’t factor in depth or distance? It can, but we didn’t use that for The Owl and the Pussycat.

OK, you’ve got your rigs. What then? And then once you’ve got your rigs… I mean, I approached them in quite a similar way. I started by constructing some key poses and matched these to the running length of the film, determining what pose each character would be in at certain points. Then I added in points of secondary animation.

Such as? Like a tail wagging or an ear moving. Or some kind of facial animation. With 2D, you do need to animate that a bit differently.

How so? Well with 3D, you don’t want everything to completely stop. It’d look a bit unnatural, a bit odd. With 2D, you can get away with it. In fact, sometimes it looks good to have a character jump suddenly from one set pose to another. But the secondary animations are still important. They just add an extra… something.

So how do you feel The Owl and the Pussycat turned out? Good, I was very happy with it. It was nice to work with something different, something new.

Taking what you learned from the experience, was there anything you’d alter, were you to create another film in 2D? I would have liked to have used more complex rigs for the characters.

In what way? Yeah, I mean, they were already relatively complex, but we only used two views of them. So they’re either side-on or front-on.

So there only existed two distinct sets of models to be used in any scene – front-on and profile? That’s right.

Did you encounter any problems with the 2d that you didn’t envision? Not really, I imagine you’re going to find a lot fewer problems than you’d maybe have when working with 3D.

So it was easier in a way to work with 2D? Yeah, well the thing about working with 2D is, you don’t have to worry so much about the whole rendering process. I was able to do much of that myself

So what’s the benefit of that? It’s less time consuming? You can take as long as you want, but the rendering can take a long time with 3D, while with 2D it just takes minutes.

Do you have any preference between 2D and 3D now? I mean, you are primarily a 3D animator. Well, I haven’t done a lot of 3D this year, but I really enjoy them both. I think that 2D’s good, because even the software can be cheaper than the equivalent 3D tools.

Would you suggest a budding animator start with 2D in order to build their skills? Maybe, if they can. It really depends on the style of 2D. I mean, The Owl and the Pussycat is almost 3D in a way. But it’s certainly a more simple procedure for one person to use.

So you can really operate more as a one-man team? Yeah, there’s definitely that ability to work on your own – you can begin by creating everything, right through to the output.

So what do you mean when you say that The Owl and the Pussycat is almost 3D? Well, there’s one shot in it in which we go through the forest to find the pig, which has a sort of 3D inspiration behind it. In that one shot we actually did use depth. So, the pig is at the back of the shot and we have trees in the foreground, which move accordingly as the camera moves inward, towards the pig. That was a bit of a problem shot in that there were so many trees and so much happening.

So was the camera actually moving into a 3D space? Or was that a false impression made by making the trees in the foreground grow larger and move to the sides? I think the camera was actually moving in. but we did also have to add a bit more animation beyond just the camera’s movement – making the trees shift and move, that sort of thing.

Was there anything you saw, like a Miyazaki film or something like that, that influenced the way you approached your own 2D work? Ha! Well, Miyazaki would be nice, but that’s a different style altogether, a different design. We definitely tried to make our take on The Owl and the Pussycat a more original, AWS thing.

Trent actually wrote a piece on working with 2D himself during the animation stage of The Owl and he Pussycat. You can read that here. And don’t forget that you can watch AWS’s The Owl and the Pussycat here