As an animatic artist I'm most often hired early on in the pre-production stages of a movie. The director usually meets with a storyboard artist and me to discuss how a particular scene should play. The storyboards are drawn and scanned. I digitally cut the drawings into foreground, middle-ground and background layers and animate them to the director's instructions, including sound effects, dialog, music, and I include 3d elements and animation as the action in the scene warrants. The end result is a mini-movie - or "animatic" - that resembles an animated version of the scene that has yet to be filmed. A lot of creative ideas can be tested this way, as well as detailed planning that can save time and money on the day of shooting. Even after the film is shot animatics can be used as placeholders within the edited movie for complicated visual effects shots yet to be completed. I've been a storyboard artist for the last 20 years and have created animatics for films for the last five years. The "digital revolution" of recent times has made the creation of sophisticated animatics cheaper, faster and easier to do than ever; and directors are discovering what a great help animatics can be to realizing their vision.
A few years ago it became obvious to me that 3d animation could add, literally, a whole new dimension of accuracy, clarity and realism to the traditional 2d animatic process. I knew I wanted to experiment with 3d, but committing to a 3d package is expensive. A friend told me about Blender back when I think it was only available for Linux. The first version I downloaded for Windows was 2.03. I started playing with it, printing out and studying all the on-line tutorials. I eventually bought the Blender Book and then the Blender 2.0 Manual. I was completely amazed at what this free program could do. I figured I would try using it for animatics along with my 2d animation package until I ran up against a challenge that Blender could not meet. Well, that never really happened. Along the way I learned about modeling, texturing, lighting, UV mapping, particle animation, compositing with background plates, even rigging, skinning and animating fully articulated IK characters. The more I learned, the deeper it seemed the program got. At one point I remember that I was using Blender professionally 12 hours a day, five days a week for weeks on end.
Finally, in order to share assets, save time translating meshes, interface rapidly with other animatic artists, and therefore keep my job, I made the switch to LightWave 3d. But even then Blender completely pulled through for me. Because of what I had learned in Blender I was able to produce my first shot within one day of having to run LightWave for the first time. Within two weeks I felt completely confident in using LightWave. I credit this to (1.) having learned so much about basic and even advanced 3d from Blender, and (2.) some amazingly fundamental similarities in the two programs, even down to some similar keyboard shortcuts. The last version of Blender that I've run was version 2.28. The news that Blender has finally got a ray tracer as well as some improved mesh editing tools has really excited me. However, I may have to postpone checking it all out as work is keeping me hopping, and coming up next it seems I will have to totally immerse myself in learning Maya to maintain my employability. But words can hardly express my gratitude to Ton Roosendaal and company for creating Blender, this powerful, deep and incredibly useful tool which has directly helped me earn a living doing exciting and rewarding work in the Hollywood motion picture industry.
Los Angeles, July 2004