Meet Pang Ren - The Animator from Singapore
Asterix and Obelix - I guess it started from very young when I had a thing for art class. My parents were in the printing industry and I had a thing for the smell of paper. (weird ... I know) Then my mom would always bring me to the library and the first place I went was the comics section, where I will devour all the "tin-tin", "Asterix and Obelix" comics (because cheap newsprint paper smells the best! haha). Then as I entered primary school, I started being very engrossed with Japanese comics. I was part of the "Dragon ball generation" and what I'll do is I'll copy some frames from the comics and blow it up like 2~3 times the size on an A4. And back then, as far as I could remember, it felt as though they were carbon copies. I guess there was where I got my first thought that this art thing wasn't just a passing phase.
Behind the scenes - Well, there is so much to digest that I am afraid that I might overwhelm your readers. But each process is a specialization by itself. So, for me, I am in the gaming industry so what I present is slightly different from the feature / TV/broadcast industry. Firstly, a 2d artist will draw a concept of a game character, maybe something like a swordsman. After he's done and approved by the art director, a 3d modeller will start to model it in 3d, which gives the character depth and now, you can look at this character from every angle in the computer.
After that, that's where I come in, I will add in bones for this character to define where he bends if he has any facial muscle to articulate words and expressions. I define how to manipulate it. To do this, you will have to have an understanding of human anatomy. So there are bones in your body, how they bend, muscles, how they contract and expand. I will add virtual bones to facial muscles from the eyebrows, the eyelids to the different parts of the lips, the teeth, the tongue the eyeballs. All these bones help the character to move believably.
And then I will animate it. "Animation" comes from the Latin word "anima", which means, life, soul/spirit. I'll breathe life into this character. To do this, you'll have to have a solid understanding of body mechanics, gestures, weight just to name a few. You have to understand life and find out the "whys" and "hows" of humanity. (Did that get heavy all of a sudden?) But you'll start to realize that being an artist, you have to understand real life! I study human gestures, eye darts, human expression. Like ... do you know why humans shake their head when they don't want something? That's pretty much universal, isn't it? in almost every country, people do that. but why isn't it the other way round? Or if I ask you to think of what you had for your last meal, take a moment and think about it. Remember how it looks like...
.... OK, you're done? Do you realize that you can't help it, but your eyeballs are probably looking to the right, and slightly upwards? So that's what I do, all these things like walking, gesturing, speaking, everything that you take for granted as part of life, I will have to understand it.
Back to my work, usually, the game designer will give me an idea how he wants his attack to execute, maybe let's say this swordsman is fast and swift, so I will look at nimble human references doing actual slashes with swords. When I have an idea of the weight I want to portray, I will then add in my twist. So while studying real-life, animation also aims to enhance real life, so we give the audience something that is "larger than life".
Something like a double jump is not humanly possible, but in the realm of game animation, as long as it "feels good", it's all well and good. So I will move every bone in this character's body to make him look believable and cool and create some attacks cycles. This involves a lot of to-and-fro with programming and the art director to see if it feels good when the player taps the button. But that's what I do in a nutshell.
After that is in-game lighting, programming, effects, UI (user interface), testing and really, my process is just the tip of the iceberg.
To help others - I have been in the industry for 10 years but frankly, I am new at this. But when I started teaching animation just last year, I kind of started to adopt this new belief, that the way I can improve myself is to help others. This became the way I am approaching teaching. Like the way I find myself improving, is to find a way to help my students improve. Over the years, some things became intuitive to me like how I move a character's hips to portray weight but I have no words for it until I started teaching, I find myself having to find words for observations and workflows. And as I start finding those words, I started rationalising my workflow. Teaching helps invoke clarity in your work and now I start to be able to explain the hows and whys of animation. It is sort of like teaching your native language to non-native speakers, they come so naturally to you until one day you're faced unpacking your language's grammar. And sometimes... your answer is " "well I don't know why that is... let's find out!" My students don't know this yet, but they teach me, probably more than I teach them haha.
Little ones - I have always been an animator, but maybe as an animator, I start curating the better animation for my kids? So, I let them watch the good stuff. I have a list of videos on my phone which includes funny and award-winning shorts. They don't hang out on my phone too much but if they do, I don't let youtube decide what they watch. Maybe as a rigger, I realize the importance of logic and programming, so I started letting my kid meddle with programming apps like Scratch. She's not fantastic at it at all (she's almost 4 years old) but I think being able to process logic and transfer it to art is an asset that kids in the future.
A balloon story - There's this story that's stuck in my head that I keep telling others. It is a common story you might have seen on emails or inspirational blogs, but there is an event in a ballroom. All participants in the ballroom are greeted with a room of balloons but each balloon has a name of a participant written on it. Participants are asked to go in and find a balloon with their own name written on it. After 5 minutes, nobody could find their own balloon. The organizer halted the exercise and changed the rules. Instead of finding their own balloon, they were asked to pick up any balloon and try to find the person whose name is written on it. Within 3 minutes everyone got their own balloon.
This is pretty much how we, not only as artists but more broadly as individuals, as humans can improve yourselves. Not only in craft, but in our hearts. Genuinely, go out and help others.
Truly put yourself out there to embrace helping others. It is not going to be easy and you WILL meet up with lots of your own inadequacies, trauma, ego and failures. Even now when I look at my idols, what I know about animation is still so little, but by picking up whatever is in front of you and helping someone else find their own balloon, you will eventually find your own balloon falling into your own hands.
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