The 2019 Animation Microtalks

[Music] who here has been to the micro talks before awesome if you haven't brace yourself you are in for something a little bit different than a normal GDC talk where we have 10 speakers who are going to speak over the next hour and they each have very specific guidelines they each get 20 slides that play for 16 seconds apiece no more and no less they are set on a timer it is very emotionally intense to be up here and it's always under one overarching theme which this year is creative voice and I'm joined by the amazing Mike jungbluth who's gonna kick it off alright here we go hi I'm Mike Douglas a lead gameplay animator at Bioware and I'm creator of the animation bootcamp and the animation exchange so

for the next 6 minutes it makes perfect sense for me to talk about the benefits of supporting a creative voice both your own and others the core of what we do as animators technical animators and animation programmers is support other people's voices and help bring them to life this goes for both our teammates and the characters android games and that support as well it's just so tiring I mean when you've made so many similar combat and locomotion systems from game to game that it feels like Groundhog Day summoning the strength to get excited about another mashup of other proven game systems and power fantasies can just get harder and harder so if I'm being honest here more than some altruistic idea of supporting other people's creative voices this is really about what are we doing with ours we all hit a point where we sort of say what the hell am I really doing with my animation and these characters that I'm helping to bring to life do I want to work on giant games with giant teams or do I want to work on a smaller team and

goes the indie route after all these years figuring out the skills I need for the type of work I do now can I even scale that up or out is needed for the other type of work and who the hell do I think I am that I could even say anything that anyone would care about to begin with okay imposter sis room eye syndrome what should i do i could go skydiving to be a little live there we go ha ha that's the sweet adrenaline boost that I needed maybe that can masquerade as confidence for my remaining four minutes four minutes what have I been talking about for the last two minutes all right let's uh let's check my notes okay that doesn't mean anything that doesn't help what okay support supporting a creative voice right look at that bastard faking confidence on slide one Oh fake it till you make it right we could easily waste our next three minutes on if you ever stop feeling like a fake or if you can ever really make it and the very feeling of making it leading to the tedium that got us here but let's look at the space between fake

it and make it knowledge and expertise are the Bridget of the bridge over the fake it to make it gap there's the reason we're all here there why the the boot camp and the exchange exists the more you learn about a subject the lest of a fake you are and the more you can share how you made it well the better it is for everyone but that's really been largely focused on the how of the craft and while the howl remains important the what you're saying and why you're saying it of our craft now needs a lot more focus otherwise we've really just built a bridge to nowhere or worse and unwelcoming forest because the knowledge and expertise we needed to get here is often separate from the expertise required to pass through we need to become versed in sociology psychology philosophy economics anthropology archaeology a whole bunch more ologies sure you don't need to know what all of these things are to share you're hot take on the what and why but we as creators should strive to engage with everything in life to the degree we do

our animations it can be your torch as you venture into that unwelcoming forest but if creativity is the spark that lights your torch knowledge of the subject is going to be the fuel that will keep it lit and like water to a flame lack of knowledge will actually weaken your torch until it's eventually extinguished leaving you in the dark alone and relighting an extinguished light is even harder than lighting a new one the amount of knowledge to cover the doubt you and others will have about your ideas and approaches will make even the brightest of creative sparks feel dull and well lifeless so we need to make the forest less of that and more of this to help the people crossing the bridge of how not succumb to instant burnout and cynicism because like the bridge we built and maintained we now have a lot of forest paths to light which isn't going to be easy so when you see people speaking about the what and why even if all you want is the how listen it can

matter some day if you're thinking this isn't an animation talk well I see you but my remaining minute can't be the end of this conversation we all need to be open and honest about what we know and what we don't know when you have a source of knowledge share it when you don't listen then we can all know how much fuel we have and where to fuel up when any of us need it we need to then know our platforms that we engage with social media conferences or games that allow us to engage with different amounts of immediacy agency and directness which can multiply the intensity of your light and each is going to require different amounts of fuel because the what and why our less objective than the how so we need to be better at balancing our engagement with what we and others make take care not to burn out your own torch or to burn down another's path when trying to light the way my hope is that this week we have a

lot more what and why conversations on our path through the forest because in the forest is a new world full of inspiring and unique creations pushing all of us to know more about the craft and ourselves but also each other by honestly supporting each other's voice thank you [Applause] our work is never finished only abandoned or how to ship unfinished animation and feel good about it hi my name is Kristen I'm an animator and I've been the industry for almost 10 years in my career I've shipped over 16 titles and have been credited I'm probably more than 20 doing the math that's almost 2 games a year or more than that if you take everything into consideration yeah that's a lot of projects this isn't a brag I bring it up because it means I've dealt with some very tight deadlines and

when you don't have enough time or resources you have to find ways to ship unfinished animation and feel good about it shipping on finished animation that sounds kind of embarrassing sometimes no matter how much time and energy you put into something it's not going to be good just because video games it's up to you to dig into your creative toolbox and tackle all the problems expected and unexpected that are thrown at you you know there's the age-old problems perhaps game design isn't locked down perhaps some big opportunity arose and you have to ship early or perhaps you just never even had enough time to begin with and then there's the weirder problems perhaps all your animations are sped up to batch that match the beat of a song out of your control or your animations are shared across totally wildly different characters or you can animate your characters body but their heads are controlled by a avid VR headset all real things I've had to deal with and no matter how normal or weird

your problems are things happen you just have to get it done don't get me wrong I'm not saying you should death march crunch your way through it but don't just give up and half-ass it work smart not just hard and real talk focus on what's important and work on the extras if you have time don't sacrifice your friends and family crunching up something that no one's gonna notice but you because players are not going to care that you stayed late to put that subtle offset in your characters fingers and that's who we're making these games for the players on one game I worked on I decided it was better to add animation variety than to polish few animations to a perfect polish I wanted the player to be delighted it's price when their character did something fun and unexpected always remember who your game is for and yes that means for that game I didn't end up with many demo reel pieces but that doesn't mean the animation was bad it accomplished what it needed to for the situation and the players enjoyed it you're making a game not a demo reel and that's the point really think about what's right for the

situation sometimes a small set of hyper polished animations is what you need or may be variety is key and sometimes things are just a mess and you have to be flexible and once you have decided on your direction try to get animations in the game quickly test them throw them out and make new ones this is especially true when the design is constantly changing and don't spend time polishing something until you know things are working as a whole once everything is roughed in and working make a Polish priority list take the time to identify what animation is most important even and hit polish for them first even if they aren't your favorites don't get caught up in the little details and ignore the big picture and the next thing to do is to work in passes it gives you some leeway when your team pulls the rug out from under you if you haven't focused on polishing animations one at a time you won't lose as much work if someone cuts something or

changes the design you'll also know that everything is at sating even level of polish as a whole it will be cohesive and use the tools you have for example use key pairs instead of stepped animation in an emergency you can ship a blocked out splined animation but you can't ship a skipped one you can also use animation layers and stay graphic to create new animations quickly and speaking of state graphs use them being able to set up and integrate your own animations is so powerful it allows you to get your things in the game faster and test them on yourself waiting on engineering to integrate animations is frustrating and often just bottlenecks to the process and about engineers plug them for tools to help you if you have an idea for a tool that will save you time then talk to your liate or talk to engineering directly if you can often something that will take them an hour will save you days worth of frustration your time is important too so work with your team to make your job and speaking of your team when somebody comes at you with an unrealistic request

that'll blow out your schedule push back you're a team member - and your time and opinion is important offer solutions and find a middle ground is appropriate for your timeline and your team size and if you know you have a difficult task before you don't panic make a realistic plan and execute go in with a clear creative vision and identify prioritize and focus on what's most meaningful for the game and the player if you've achieved that then that's a success even if you're shipping with some unpolished animation and as a final note putting your best effort but not being able to finish things to a perfect polish is not a reflection on you as a person a lot of the time that unfinished animation is only imperfect to you to everyone else the animation is finished and remember you can always go back and polish your favorite animations for your demo reel later thanks everyone I'm Kristen and you can find me at stuff like Kristen on Twitter everybody my

name is yousef cole and i'm from the bronx new york and this is the home page of my website there's a reason that it looks like a bad choose your own adventure game it's because I claim very two different lines of work as my profession oh hold on a second I just broke let's try that again I am a motion graphics animator and I specialize in software like Adobe After Effects and cinema 4d I animate shapes and typography for 2d screens and I've been doing that for over a decade I've worked on projects for companies like Facebook naik and so on and I'm also a freelance games critic I write essays about video games where I try and dig into unexplored themes and how they reflect politics in history in the world I've written for sex like Waypoint paced unwinnable and Zam which brings me to

what I'm going to talk about today picking passions for years I've done motion graphics as my main gig and picked up freelance writing on the side why because it's interesting as the process of animation can be a lot of the jobs I've taken haven't been that intellectually stimulating there's a lot of creative potential in motion graphics but the content is usually a little hard to care about snowflakes were a car commercial animating cute mascots for health insurance company is helping a social media network apologize for being shitty before they then go on to be even more shitty so in August I started working as the head of animation at patriot act with Assam Manoj and this is a show it's first time in many years that I felt truly invested in the end product and the content I'm making I get to work with fun brilliant people coming up with the fascinating topics that I actually care about and this presents a problem for my side hustle writing I'm many many previous gigs I was able to take weeks off for research brainstorming and pitching now my time is super compressed we make an episode a week from this

start so I can't give this job just 75 percent but I still love to write so I've spent the past few months wrestling with how exactly to do that that means squeezing and my passion projects where it can like on the train for work writing at night before passing out waking up early to write never going to the gym ever of course there are some limitations to these methods trying to finish an essay on my phone in the middle of rush hour not getting to spend time with my partner or my cats after work being perpetually sleep-deprived never going to the gym ever there's there's got to be a better way a lot of the friction comes from trying to do two totally different things at once it's really hard sometimes to switch gears in the brain especially when one of those gears is huge and overwhelming and sucks up all of your time here's how I attempt to invest both in writing unique challenging essays and engaging more fully in the creative process of this

show I remember to turn with my animator brain and to turn on my writer brain I can apply the ideas we came up with come up for the show as inspiration for my own work in the future so I think Karl Marx may have been onto something when he told workers that seize the means of production what I mean in my case is how do you take something that doesn't to you your labor and your time on a job and make it work for your own interests so some background I enjoy writing about culture and politics and how they intersect with games some examples are foreign winnable I wrote about cuphead and the racism of the 1930s cartoons that inspired it I was able to dig into the history of minstrel see and American entertainment for for this essay for Waypoint I wrote about Detroit become human and I talked about the game's questionable analogy between race labor and fictional Androids I also talked about how the studio itself Quantic Dream is also plagued by labor issues and how that knowledge infects the message is trying to get across so both these essays were deep historical dives which acquired a lot of

time spent on research I don't really have that time anymore Patriot Act result but luckily Patriot Act is a show about historical deep dives though so the solution to my lack of time then is to allow my main hustle to work for my side one here four of the episodes some of the episodes that we've done so far on the show one is about student loans one's an amazon supreme and Saudi Arabia without spending too much extra time I can generate some really interesting pitches off of each of these subjects is it worth going to school for eSports for student loans how scarcity culture affects the value of rare old games for supreme what Amazon's history of cannibalizing its own as competitors means for its game publisher and games in the Arab world and youth culture and modern Saudi Arabia I haven't written any of these yet so you guys are free to pick one of the most important practices of games critic is looking outside of games for inspiration rather than seeing my day job as a slog something that doesn't apply at all to writing I now see it as a creative goldmine with plenty of excess ideas and energy

spilling out i'm daily inspired by being on a creative job that thankfully seems to have a lot of parallels as my side hustle but the kind of job you have shouldn't matter the key is finding the right similarities and learning how to make wildly different disciplines inform each other the result can be something greater than some of its parts am i still tired yes time will never be on my side I still have to write in the mornings and on the train and the weekends but it's something I love to do and I will always love doing so I'm gonna I'm glad that I found a way to not only make it work with my day job but to make my day job work for it thank you hello world so I am Heather Alexandra McIntyre I am a staff writer for Kotaku comm a video game website about video games and I have never made a PowerPoint since high school so here we go so we're talking about

creative voice today and sometimes that means looking at games from perspectives that we might not not have considered them before so I want to kind of go through what that might look like for a very specific thing in this case in this case it's idle animations I'm just gonna start with what's basically my thesis once the slide moves forward but the idea is that even the smallest things inside games that we love have really really strange and large implications that we need to examine I told you at the start of what I was talking about is it moving there we go so what's the big deal here so I'm going to talk about idle animation so let's go so the goals of players and the goals of fictional characters often online but there are times when players exert control over actors and subvert their wants their desires idle animations are places where they're free from player tyranny we will get into that and you should treat them as these very special places so with

video game characters are many different things at once this is Sora from Kingdom Hearts on the Left he's in gameplay on the right he's in a cutscene video game characters exist between very specific dipole States they're being tugged between two things at any given point and we should define what those things are they are both actors by which I mean that they are controllable persona manipulated by players and their characters by which I mean individuals within a fiction but also like people in a world and we need to start treating them like actual people because they're being pulled in these two different directions there's conflict though what Ryden wants as a character in Metal Gear Solid 2 is incredibly different than what a player might want for riding at any given time and because video game characters fulfilling two roles it's a problem here's an example of that on the left there is a youtuber who is making a compilation video of all the death animations and Resident Evil 2 the objective here for the actor is to die over and over Claire Redfield's objective as a character is to live

these two things are not compatible that's super screwed up but good news these two things can align Solid Snake wants to sneak through a base and he wants to complete his mission the player wants to you not get spotted and get the highest rank at the end of the game great things are in alignment but we need to be careful because players are tyrants I know we're supposed to say like players are the best in everything but players scare the out of me they control everything about video game worlds they can make these people and I mean it these people do things that they do not want to do the implications of that are very scary I think video game characters want freedom and thankfully there are places where they get it thankfully yes cutscenes is one place where they actually get to act as like entities solely within their fictional world by which I mean they just get to be people and then idle animations where they finally get to express just for a moment a little autonomy this is Sonic the Hedgehog this is very well known idle animation this thing expresses a very specific tension Sonic the Hedgehog's objective is clear here right

now he wants to move but the player is a tyrant and they are not pushing buttons on the controller and so therefore we don't just learn something about some of the hedgehogs personality because of that idle animation because look at him he's a nice fun guy he's like all his buddies are smiling or whatever but also that animation starts to express something about Sonic and his actual relationship to us and players um which is to say you know Arthur Morgan goes in debt into town and he shoots like 50 people because the player is like I'm just gonna be a rootin tootin and shootin but then when they stop Arthur shakes out his hand when he's on his horse that moment is beautiful to me it's the moment or Arthur gets to exhale finally after being controlled sometimes Arthur Mergen will pet his horse and in these moments we can ask us like questions like what is Arthur Morgan value but we should also be asking what does Arthur do and what does he value before the player asserts control over him as an actor those are the things I want to see when I return to Arthur um because small moments aren't these people these entities are being

controlled constantly by players by tyrannical people and so the moments where they get to even express a tiny moment of themselves even though those things are being crafted by us are important this can happen in game play too here Mario is skidding this is not just about game feel it's not just about having good platforming mechanics this is a moment where I'm reminded that like Mario is a person in a place with weight and validity and that's really really cool tracer is reloading her guns oh wow how flashy those Blizzard animations are really great aren't they Atlanta but also like you can you can kind of cancel this animation by hitting like melee but otherwise I will suggest to you that this is a moment where tracer is free good news even better news you can bake some sort of some of this knowledge into your mechanics so Arthur values his horse a lot but we get a chance to pet Arthur's horse - because if Arthur values it we should probably give players a chance to value those things - if Arthur values it enough to do it by himself bridge that gap and allow your players

to do it with Arthur because empathy is key you need to be treating the people that you're animating as people I keep on saying people because I mean it these are entities and if you start to find the moments in your games where people can break away that's great there are exceptions to this like digital worlds are a huge exception because the bodies that we inhabit in digital worlds tend to be a little bit more like extensions of our limbs so we get to sort of define the poses and idle animations in there but otherwise find the moments where your characters can break free from player tyranny and emphasize them you won't just have moments where your characters find relief your players will find relief with your characters and your games will be kinder and I think that's something we all need right now in this world is just a little bit of kindness so there we go howdy everybody my name's Brandon Nason and I'm a 3d animator currently working

at Pocket gems a mobile gaming company based here in the city it's about three blocks that way after nearly three years of development we recently released our newest title wild beyond late last year and I'm now assisting with the creation of new assets for the live product so by profession I'm an animator but I'm also a landscape photographer I'm a Spartan racer I'm a leader of a nearly undefeated escape room group and I'm a very lucky boyfriend now you're probably asking yourself why is this guy yet peer sharing these personal details with you at a game that's our talk is supposed to be about game development because I believe that having a robust an enriching personal life outside the walls of the studio can help you be a better game developer and artists I believe that our industry always has had this problem finding the proper work-life balance force developers and I'm up here today to make the case of why it's absolutely vital that we keep this relevant in our community honestly there's a little bit of a sickness within our community where having a personal life is that best seen as a nice perk and at the very worst weakness there are vast creative and emotional benefits for for balancing personal professional priorities and I would like to go over a few of those with you today I think that we often get

a little wrapped up in finding reference and tree animation and a little bit too cerebral II sometimes we count frames we analyze spacing and we make these really embarrassing reference videos and we try our damnedest to get these massive tangles of sine waves to somehow create life the animators are also actors need to animate a character falling in love yeah of course you can find a reference video on YouTube about of somebody falling in love but how much were well-informed would your decisions and acting choices be if you'd actually gone through that experience I believe that living boldly and seeking out new experiences will help you develop a creative catalog that you can draw upon while animating it also works for the physical realm does character need to rock line again you can find video reference of the physical mechanics of that but if you go rock-climbing yourself and experience the adrenaline rush and the muscle fatigue when you get up to the top of the wall and you look down you'll be able to animate with far more fidelity you'll feel it I'm I run Spartan races with my friends for fun and I can't tell you how well that's informed my understanding of the physical physicality of body movement in wait have you guys ever jumped over a fire climbed a rope thrown a spear those

are experiences that you'll never forget and help me each and every time I animate now why is that important I believe that knowledge gained from real-world experiences like these can elevate your animation from something that is merely functional to something truly artistic and nuanced that type of knowledge cannot be gained from sitting in front of your computer stuck in the office crunching to meet a deadline so let's take a moment to talk about the emotional and benefits and prioritizing your personal life animated so animating professionally can be grueling as amazing as is filling as a career in animation can be it often comes with a price we've all heard the horror stories the rumors even the news reports especially over the last couple years analyst crunch low pay living contacted contract with no stability and enormous economic anxiety substance abuse even divorce if you are personally experiencing these aspects of our industry you surely know somebody who has our passion drives us to work hard sometimes with such force and fervor that we a burnout is inevitable for the record I consider myself extremely fortunate to have found a company that values them employs enough to make

work/life balance a priority I know however that I'm the minority on this issue but for those of you who are have to deal with some if not all the problems I listed highly I would highly recommend putting the time and effort into cultivating your friendships I mean just being able to go home in a rage when things aren't going well at work to give members the rate and even problem solved with people that love and care about your personal well-being is extremely important especially during times like crunch I know of how to experience that from time to time when you're sitting in front of the that monitor bleary-eyed from lack of sleep I shifted up to the clock of the wall trading that looming deadline just knowing that there you're not alone in the world and that there are people out there that believe in you can be the proverbial thing that keeps you afloat both creativity and passion are not ever flowing Springs they're more like buckets pushed you hard and for too long and those buckets can empty or even start to develop holes it's important to have the self knowledge that allows you to know what we feels this creative reservoirs and to give yourself enough time for you to fill them back up outside of work for me planning on going on adventures gives me something they look to look forward to which is always nice traveling the world and seeing new

places with friends and loved ones leaves mean you're fresh and ready to get back to work it can be different for everybody but I challenge you to go and find your passion find your inspiration and give yourself the time to enjoy it being emotionally and creatively healthy makes you a better animator and an employee who's going to do a better job the walking zombie you have a human being sleep-deprived and burned out or well rested the animator fresh off a weekend spent doing what they love with friends and family creativity requires inspiration epiphany and hard work it also requires the state of mind to be receptive of those things remember that at the end of the day in spite of all the various programs we interface with and the professional obstacles that we must navigate we are artists first and foremost and as such we thrive off inspiration and personal experiences just like any other artists but discipline note to that we are all only human and that we need some recovery time in the Solidarity of friends and family to get us through the tough times each and every one of us only has this one life to live jobs will come and go your work will ebb and flow but your personal relationships and emotional and creative health lasts forever so get out there make friends call your

mom experienced life and above all else make sure you take care of yourself you'll only be a better artist and game developer if you do thank you I call my mom she's gonna like that all right I was told to put this under my chin is that working hi my name is go ahead I love this room my name is Gwen I'm an animator I'm an indie developer and the theme of this talks this year is creative voice so let's talk about how to be creative let's talk about how do you actually be creative science has already figured this out thankfully it turns out that the way you be more creative stuff constraints it turns out that having limited resources forces your brain to work different and will actually make you more creative which is good because we have a lot of constraints in this industry we've constraints on bone counts on frame counts and all sorts of things these talks are ridiculous I've

constraints for this talk right I have 20 slides to talk Auto advances after 16 seconds on each slide I have to work within these ridiculous technical constraints and I have other things to write like I've got it constraints on my tone because I give this talk I've given it several times and every year I do like kind of maybe a quirky funny sort of talk so now I've got an audience built up and they expect me to do a talk like that and if I do something different my audience will be mad about well they just won't like it as much and then I have this other audience just people in this room right like look around everybody here's an animator you want to hear about animation you don't want to hear about like my book club or Lana's haircut or design or comedy you want to hear about animation it's why you're here right so I have to figure out what you guys want which is easy because you fill out evaluations every year you fill out those those evaluation forms right and what you guys like is any time you have a take away technical talks things were you of something that you can take back to your studio and use right we know this you felt like the forms and tell us this but in spite of this every year Lana the person who runs this says no no no not the micro Docs

this is different this isn't me about culture it's gonna be about feelings right this is how we end the day we're gonna do something cathartic we're gonna inspire people we're gonna you know like do something really different my creative director is a whack job who has a different idea for what this should be than the market which is also different from what honestly like what I care about if you really break it down and you look at what I care about all I care about is this this is my indie game I spent my nights and weekends working on it I quit my job at the end of last year and I got it funded I've it's going extremely well I've spun up a small team I'm bringing the game here I'm showcasing this game that I've been working on for years in the x-ball this year at GDC and I'm over the moon about it it's all I think about right this is my baby but it's not what you want to hear about you don't want somebody standing on stage marketing at you I know that what I care about what's most important to me and sometimes you're gonna experience this in your career the thing that's most important to you isn't necessarily what your audience wants or what your creative director wants a lot

of times you're being pulled in a lot of different directions and it's difficult to marry them all right like let's again just take a look at this talk like this talk has to be a little bit funny it's got to be about culture it's got to be about animation so you guys are happy it has to be about kind so that I'm happy and a little bit it's got to be about peanut butter and I know that's gonna be sound unusual but I've got financial constraints and I just need you to bear with me here all right because I don't have a lot of money and I got this contract to promote peanut butter and I don't really need the contract but if I don't take this contract this year then I won't have one next year and I might really need that contract next year and so I don't really have a lot of time to do this other stuff with the peanut butter but I'm gonna jam it in anyway and why not because peanut butter is great like there's nothing wrong with peanut butter I don't feel like a sellout by promoting peanut butter I don't think that diminishes this talk at all peanut butter is delicious I would have probably put the peanut butter stuff in here anyway so anyway if we're getting back to it this talk is gonna be a little bit funny it's gonna

be about culture it's gonna be about animation it's me about kind and it's gonna be a little bit about peanut butter which is well all right here we go this is kind it features a lot of animation smears so if you look here you'll see I'm going forward and then when I undo these smears are even more exaggerated I'm gonna do it again right here I'm gonna move forward you see like kind of a smear and what I undo you'll see really exaggerated the way I achieve this is I create several cylinders I I sketch traditional 2d smear frames on these cylinders these cylinders are bound between two bones so they can kind of pull apart or orient how I need to in order to make the a certain kind of a shape when I start the effect I spawn a cylinder and the cylinder I choose is basically I have to create a series of these for the ends of each character the extremities and for the body I create three cylinders for each one for the three different directions that could be

pulling in so here we're looking at the cylinders for the T shape and in engine I basically spawn this effect which responds the cylinder I you see it I leave one boat in world space and I have the other bone attached to the end of the extremity I also have a couple bones in the middle that it will push out sometimes if I need to make an arc like this so that's the talk and it had some constraints all right it's it but I mean did it that those constraints make the talk better I don't know they made it more creative though I think we can all agree that the science is right that talk was more creative because of it and I think that's a good thing so if you're ever pulled if you feel like you're being pulled in a lot of different directions by your director and different people at your studio embrace that that's a good thing that's gonna make you more creative in the end my name is Gwen the game I'm showcasing this year is kind you can play it in the expo floor later I hope you enjoyed the nut butters in the rest of your day [Applause]

hello my name is John Paul Ryan Miller I have been in the industry for about ten years animation specialist at Vicarious Visions and I've been a lead on eight projects since I've been there almost the whole time actually which is kind of hard to believe but it should advance and it won't before that I had some experiences at Rhythm & Hues as an animation lead and before that I was in the military for eight years and had some opportunities to lead there as well so why am I telling you this why why does this even matter why should you listen well what I'm saying here is that although I'm an animator I've spent lots of my career as a manager as well some of you in here may have had completely different experiences and I don't want to act like I know all of them so this

is from my perspective with some of my experiences so I've struggled ever since I became a lead to find a balance of creating animation content while helping foster creative direction within my teams so what's the problem with that well because animation is all I know and care about and this is what got me here so I need to be good at this I need to keep doing this this is all I have right with that mindset though comes its own set of challenges because I have always been focused as an animator with some leading involved it's like I have two pieces of my brain kind of fighting over each other constantly in battle to save the hearts and minds of I'm not really sure where I was going with that but oh yeah that's right my animator brain my animator and that's right so I don't always have time to take on the shots that I want so I take on some shot some of the time so my team can stay passionate games already

operate on tight tight schedules it's hard to take those animations to polish now take on the duties of being a lead I just need to animate boys suck I still need to manage the team with its own responsibilities and the project with its own responsibilities like tracking assets career advancements pipe issues outsourcing art directors lots to think about and use energy towards but you all know how much energy goes into a single performance or a complex body mechanics there's so much new stuff to think about all this added responsibility that was rewarding in a sense but also a bit tense since the same old question kept creeping in I need to animate right so be a successful lead I realized that I needed to reach out I needed to find this new brand of creativity that would empower my role as a lead rather than distract from it I started to think back on all the areas I had the privilege of being creative in having impact as a lead working with narrative and art leadership to help shape who these characters were in our

games through brainstorms revisions concept thing figuring out new ways to tell stories and games maybe sometimes the same story this allowed me to challenge my own knowledge of what I thought storytelling was I thought about how my direction was impacting animation quality it wasn't just about holding myself accountable anymore understanding how different animators work in learning from them I had to learn how to manage them differently to get the best team results in the end learning how to give the best feedback for that individual helped me understand better and more precise ways to give feedback and funny enough it actually helped me understand the type of feedback that I that helped me to I didn't stop becoming an animator just because I was a lead I needed to rely on them just as much driving how to communicate story through this process at an early stage and sell the idea honestly felt like this creative break I would get more excited about this phase sometimes and it taught me a lot about myself as an artist and surprisingly something I was passionate about outside

of animation I've stopped thinking about all the problems I've stopped thinking just as an animator and now I lead but more importantly as a game dev I learned too how to contribute to many areas of game tomorrow and not just animation and I also learned how this can influence animation at my studio as we develop games I learned to grow leadership on the team training and mentoring new leads it is important for the health of your department and your team and some people want the opportunity and being able to provide that support helps foster an environment where people can challenge themselves as well and yes growing leads and leaders on your team will allow me and you possibly to still be animating content I have stayed strong against production and told them that I will never give up taking shots but I'll take on shots sometimes that aren't as intense on the workload opening up space for my team to stay passionate and engage and the struggle continues to be very real I am still working on the right balance because just like me it has evolved I

know now that I will be creative and I will have a voice it's just up to me to help define what that balance looks like and now with all of that out of the way I can get back to making a really important decisions I like on Fridays it's donut and bagel day so which one am I gonna choose finding your creative voice in what we do comes with challenges and struggles and that's okay I don't know which way to go all the time but as I look out at how I contribute to the creative process of being a game dev it has become clear to me that leading like animating is what you make of it the choice to find your voice and all this is what has empowered me to be creative thank you for listening I'm John Paul Ryan Miller an animation specialist at Vicarious Visions you can link up with me on Twitter or all week at GDC let's help this place so my name is

Athena Terran Duke I've been animating for five years four of those ears have been in mobile games and more recently my first year in PC console on January of this year and I currently live in reside in Orange County California and I work out next on OC so okay this thing doesn't want to play okay I get this playing so what did I learn about my during my journey I learned that I have a lot of problems as you can tell first of all I want her to grow but

I didn't really know where to begin am I considered a good animator now that I have a job in the industry I really have no idea but early on I was struggling to make a connection with my job subject matter initially everything was exciting I was just happy to have a job and be doing animation but over time I got complacent and I began to lose my motivation plus my traditional approach to animation of diving right in without planning or researching at all wasn't really working for me so I was really passionate but it left me anxious and I had to figure out a way to solve all these problems but still make it an enjoyable experience for myself so let's talk about growth it's hard to push yourself right so settling on your surface ideas may leave you bored and be reflected in your work and you don't want that so embrace being a nerd being a nerd lets you dive deeper into your research and help you fight it help you find your voice as an artist for me being a freak encyclopedia of random

facts and knowledge gave me the confidence behind my artistic decisions and opinions there's a reason why they call them growing pains finding your confidence can be a challenge for some so maybe all you have to do is change your perspective speaking of perspective I worked on Marvel's Avengers Academy a mobile game I am NOT into Marvel comic books I know please don't hate me but I do have a healthy obsession with mythology and folklore and by reframing Marvel Marvel as a modern day meet those I was able to take a look at character progression like Thor our characters like Thor and take note of house personalities change over time just as an example a Shakespearean actor that we all know and love spired by classic mythology in the first round film - the more goofy and awkward badass of the by the end of the third film I want to talk about passion really quick have you ever seen a shot that you could feel the animators having fun with it well my friend Lindsey Lydecker animated the shot and she's incredibly funny and naturally animated I think that she was very successful with this animation by establishing a personal connection with

the character which led to other artists being inspired by her idea and creating art on their own so if you can make a personal connection with your character you can make anything they do interesting right be it running around with a cardboard box in your head playing with a soccer ball or simply sitting down in a chair however it's not enough to just be passionate I like to jump in and start doing things but that would often lead to frustration and that was just simply because I just didn't have enough information however I discovered that YouTube has plenty of information including summaries that I could listen to without having to read the entire Marvel omnibus I was on I was on tight deadlines and I had I had a really tight schedule so I had to make do with what I had in the case it wasn't moon girl and devil Dino I had no idea how either these characters were all they had to go off where visuals watch which often depict the devil Dino is just a crazy dinosaur but getting to another relationship helped me focus on his playful puppy attitude instead and devil

Dino had more to him than being just another angry dinosaur even with all these strategies in full swing researching was still a pain I loved comedy and working on Family Guy's quest for stuff but I learned that was a very good at comedy with a suggestion of my peers I went straight to the source and watched as much Family Guy as my brain could handle so like all a Family Guy I began to get a better understanding of the show style and really figured out where the connect characters were coming from this also caused me to have a more of a snowball effect and I started ended up studying comedic icons like Buster Keaton Charlie Chaplin on my own turns out I was having fun and I used the same approach when task seized and tasked with dancing I match animations I'm naturally a horrible dancer so I got tasked with all the dance animations and it turns out that studying the complicated mechanics of body of dance was actually enjoyable experience for me so let's recap this mess researching first of all helps you grow as an artist

without noticing it fake it till you make it only makes gets you so far and I couldn't just keep firing from the hip I had to learn to be invested with my research which grew my confidence as an artist and animator finding the interest in assignments is going to be your responsibility shift your perspective perspective until you can make that connection and the more you know about what you're animating the more informed your decisions will be in the end and finally use creative ways to make research and study fun for yourself if you're frustrated and it feels like a chore try a different approach instead of form instead of treating it as a formality treat research is an opportunity to learn something new researching ultimately either friend in a powerful tool and helping you find your artistic voice my name is Akita Taryn Duke you can email me any cute errand you get email calm find me on Twitter and they keep you turned thank you very much [Applause] my name is Nikki Roth I'm a tech animator at Google and I'm here to talk

about confidence with confidence all right so let me tell you a little bit about my first career in gymnastics I grew up as a competitive gymnast and as a gymnast you are literally judged on your confidence and ability to execute skills there was this one skill the full twisting side gainer I remember spending an entire summer training this beam dismount I practiced it and practiced it until I felt confident I could perform it under pressure you can imagine how nerve-racking it is to throw yourself backwards and upside down on a four-inch piece of wood beam was not my favorite event it was more of a mind game but it was time to debut this skill so at the next meet my coach gave me her pep talk she told me I could do this she reminded me how many times I've done this before

and she went over the ten different things I should focus on but what really mattered was that she and my teammates were there cheering me on I went through my own rituals the internal monologue all right Nikki you got this the drills that were now mantras lift set wrap and all the ridiculous mind-melding it took for me to believe I could do this as gymnast we are taught to stand and walk with attitude so I strutted to the beam I saluted took a deep breath and began the routine the moment came lift set wrap and I nailed the connection the forum called me biased but it was solid and when we gymnasts stick a landing we salute not with one but with both arms if you break down a gymnastics routine in two frames like an

animation it's all about posing strong lines silhouettes in a single pose we can recognize confidence in a single pose we can read misery or mastery so if we frame this on my current career which is basically digital gymnastics I am still being judged on my confidence to execute skill and it's not easy it takes practice courage and it really helps to have support I want to help my teen do great things but I need to show what I can offer I need to own what I can do and own what I can't for me I struggled with owning it it's hard to walk into a room with confidence when you're not sure you have what it takes to be there imposter syndrome is real like gymnastics or anything else it's more of a mind game you are there because you put in the time you are

there because you want to be so be there sit at the table literally sit at the table you belong there be present and engaged listen thoughtfully but don't just listen form your own opinions your perspective and your experience is so unique that you and only you can bring it to the table but don't just bring it share your thoughts say them and say them with conviction speak up ask questions amplify your voice and be part of the conversation we can read body language but we can't read minds I used to be a chronic mumbler I was constantly having to repeat myself I would be interrupted or talked over but when you come from a place of passion you will

energize the room if you are authentic in what you have to say others will care if you are transparent and show empathy others will appreciate what you choose to share on the other hand speaking up does not mean being the loudest or talking the most speaking up is about sharing your voice and sharing the floor by including others around you you can create a dialogue and a space for everyone we all have different personality types we digest information differently express ourselves differently and everyone prefers speaking in front of large crowds it makes us feel vulnerable when you are considerate of this when you empower others it empowers you it builds a network of support and Trust that will

absolutely help to build your confidence and allies can give you the courage to speak up when you need to the most so it's time to debut your skills confidence comes with training courage and support I encourage you to practice sharing and share what you practice trust it own it and when you nail it salute with both arms [Applause] [Music] [Applause] wait Oh father's water last one of the day last night eh this is it hi everyone my name

is lana Basinski i am a senior animator with blizzard entertainment hi I'm Ryan Duff and I'm the animation director at Bioware in Austin were you the kid who drew in class when it was against the rules were you a straight-a student troublemaker or a fool do you recall with y'all you dread the promises intermission said so you spend all your money on an atom patients still have no principles but in your memory you still think you'd argue that it should have been would you sacrifice for your dreams and make dates move on Xbox treats what's the price you paid to get in the game industry life timeline where others

pitch me wrong when art school came a-knockin we buy display we choose to live our lives this way one key frame at a time [Music] graduate from college with the 50 grand degrees but now you've got your first job with the decent the project begs for overtime you're young and eager this is fine when broken down by our you'd make more ad migizi you started on your second game without much introduction to calm your Nisha mug on institutional dysfunction from step to block to polish flights you've Rita is hole shot 10 times because your

directors never heard a pre-production scrub along a life's timeline where others pitch we rolled we eased out from a life of cycles boots and boots we chose to live our lives this way one key frame at a time get a corporate job and now you're making better [Music] the legacy your game of work Kumar's main web [Music] but baby gets lost in steam and you'll have to file for bankruptcy by corporate hours are no surprise and six months out you've worked all night you think and be more organized than 15 games [Music]

you shipped a few titles now you've done this for some years there are options for you to grow none of them are here do you compromise work in life to not displace your man or wife or sacrificed ability to further your career puts your heart and soul in X you're driven to it's a decade down the line you graduate to leave now you've got your spreadsheet so tight you forget what Michael looks like and spend your days and twice as many meetings as we stalagmites timeline brothers pitch we roll who takes master be a bernard instead of chasing gold adorable i'm it has a path for us it has a spline we chose to live our lives this way one key

frame at a time now you're looking back over your successful career you've gotten some good and bad credits over the years but it's a fight to stay relevant is there such thing as retirement in a couple decades will there still be room for me here others we're old and you can feel the framerate change as we grow it's hard and old a normal life it has a path for us it has a spline we chose to live our lives this way one keyframe at a time we scrap a long life timeline we

keep our Labour's clean because we can undo a load above fresh sea a normal life it has it has a spline we chose to live haha lives this way one keyframe at a time which ours to live our lives this way one keyframe at a time we chose to live our lives this way one keyframe [Music] you [Music] [Applause]