Animation industry roundtable: Practice makes perfect? 

 

Sidney: Hi, I'm Sidney Gale. I graduated with a BFA in animation in 2020. Pretty much right out of college, I started doing tiny freelance animation-related work along with a lot of personal work, just animating whatever my heart desired and drawing whatever my heart desired.

And that led to a lot of updating my demo reel over and over and over again until I finally landed a test with Spindle Horse. There I worked on the season one finale of Hasbin Hotel and then went on to work on season two of Helluva Boss. I'm still currently working at Spindle, but I've also done some work with some smaller indie productions like Bleating Heart by Allie Vanaman and Enceladus V [by Anna Lencioni]. And then I'm also currently working on some upcoming projects with What Pumpkin Games and Jellybox Studios. 

Felipe: I'm Felipe. I joined the animation industry in Brazil back in 2010, and for a long time I've been doing preschool-type of TV shows. A few feature films here and there. I moved to Vancouver in 2016, worked on My Little Pony: The Movie, then worked on Carmen Sandiego season one and two. I was an animation supervisor in the most recent Peanuts shorts for Apple+, and since then I've shifted my whole working dynamic to be a full-time freelancer in the traditional animation side of the industry.

I worked on stuff like Disenchanted, the 2D animation section of the movie. I worked on the yet-to-be-released in North America, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. So I'm excited to see that one when it comes out.

And yeah, I've been in the whole thing for around fifteen years now, and it still feels like I just joined. Every time I join a new project, I'm nervous as hell and just trying to do my best one day at a time. 

Eden: I'm Eden Timm. I'm from Saskatchewan. I've been working in the animation industry in British Columbia since 2012. I started as a 3D animator, then snuck into 2D and kind of bounced back and forth for a few years. In 2016, I was firmly 2D only, just because I like to draw when I can.

I became a supervisor in 2018. And then I got the chance to direct on a multimedia kids’ show with Global Mechanic called Jam Van. It was a YouTube original series that had a bunch of Broadway stars like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Boyz II Men and a bunch of pop stars on it. It's very cool. Very chaotic with all the different live action collage work, Harmony builds, hand-drawn stuff involved.

And then I went to Wild Brain. I worked very briefly on the Peanut shorts. Then I got to direct at WildBrain on LEGO Monkie Kid’s season five. And then when the industry hurricane hit, I was able to sneak into boards and got to do some board revs on LEGO Dreams and do some freelance boards. 

And I've been purely just animating since like the beginning of 2024. And next week, I start at Giant Ant on their feature, Tangles, which I'm very excited about.

Lindsay Knowler: I've been in the animation industry for almost fifteen years at this point. I'm also another one of the Vancouverites. I've had to move across the country a couple of times. So I definitely understand what that feels like to new artists looking for work. And from the animation industry, I worked at all the studios here. 

I do Harmony rigging. 2D rigging is my trade. And then from there, I started working with you at Toon Boom, and I became a senior solutions specialist, which was a fancy title for a senior trainer. And that was probably the most incredible job. 

I was flying around the world, teaching studios how to use Toon Boom and how to use the programs in a really efficient way. And helping teams thrive in a pipeline environment. And then when the pandemic hit, it just changed the industry. So I think I became very curious as to what that was going to look like for artists.

I had at least ten years of experience by that time working in-studio. And I really fell in love with working with interns. Because digitally, we were all working from home, and they didn't really have a lot of exposure to anybody else in the studio atmosphere. 

So I just thought, “How neat would it be to create an environment where, no matter where you are in the world, you can still connect with professionals?” That was probably the key thing that's missing from the animation industry now. That we probably took for granted back in the day. You could look over their shoulder and see what they're working on.

So I created an animation mentorship collective called Eat Your Peas. And our mission is to really create more opportunities for younger artists, to connect with professional artists, and try to get that behind-the-curtain sneak peek of what the process is.

How do you define practice when it comes to art and animation? 

Lindsay: That’s such a good question. It's hard to define, especially in art and animation, because you have all these different streams. And there's different things that you can practice. One of the things that we've been talking a lot about at Eat Your Peas is the difference between style and structure. And so a lot of people are really good at style because they're free form. And they've really honed in on what it is they're good at.

But they might be lacking structure to the volumes underneath. These are intangible, invisible skills that you have to poke at with a stick and repeat over and over again to get good at. That's why we practice life drawing. If you are paying attention to what you're doing and you're practicing with a purpose, you will see progress.

Sidney: I think it's so amorphous. We were talking about how there are so many skills that go into animation. It isn't just drawing – it's drawing and timing and gesture and structure.

So to come up with something all-encompassing practice is really difficult. I think it's anything that gets your hands moving and gets you creating. If you are making something, especially something that you enjoy, that would be a good definition for me.

Felipe: People who teach music sometimes like to separate what is practice time and what is playing time. There's so much involved in what it means to do animation. Drawing is just what's on the surface, right? There's the physics, there's the acting, there's the psychology at times that you need to dive into, like what happened in the life of this character. 

So it's just so overwhelming to think of every single ingredient that’s involved in making a good piece of animation. I find for myself that the best thing I could possibly do was to separate practice from actually performing; animating something and separating little pieces of what a performance needs and tackling it one at a time.

I like to start with separating it into smaller things; like making an arm stretch and release in a solid, convincing way. So I make little exercises so I can master the most basic things. And then I just add layers on top.

Eden: So like everyone else has touched on, practice is a very abstract thought, and it has to be approached differently for every person, and it will be approached differently for every department. For me, practice is embracing curiosity, looking at stuff and being like, “How did they do it and why did they do it that way?” and then applying it afterwards.

So it's passive and active. There’s the intentional stuff that Lindsay was talking about. And the passive stuff is a little bit like the play that Felipe was talking about. The skills I'm trying to foster when I'm practicing are investigative skills, remaining excited and curious. And then afterwards, there's a level of consistency that you need to keep up to make it worthwhile. But also practicing gentleness with myself, because working full time is a lot.

Sometimes I'm firmly in the passive practice of just observing and intaking information for months before I ever get to the active, applied practicing, just because I have other responsibilities. But both of those are equally important. You have to find a balance that suits you best and achieves your goals the best way possible.

So when I'm trying to get a promotion or move up in from a supervisor to a director role, I am hyper-focused on applied stuff, getting my hands in there, figuring out how to do it to show people that I can do it. And then when I'm just comfortably in a role, I'm just passively experiencing and investigating. 

What is your own relationship with practice like? And what do you like to do to practice to keep your skills sharp? 

Eden: My own relationship with practice is pretty rocky. When you work in the industry for long enough, you get really comfortable and used to making high-level production things. You’re hitting these beautiful marks of quality. And then you go to do something on your own. You're like, “I got this. It's gonna be so easy.”

You have the insight and the skills to know how to make this work. But there's other people doing the boards, other people doing the backgrounds, other people doing the builds, other people doing the comp, the sound, the direction sometimes. And when you have to do it yourself, it's really easy to fall into a bit of self pity.

So for me, practicing a lot of the time is like babysitting myself, like, “Tonight you’ve got to buckle down and you have to do something a little bit boring. You're going just draw a bunch of hands because it'll be good for you. ‘Eat your peas,’ Lindsay.

Lindsay: That's exactly what Eat Your Peas stands for. 

Eden: But then other times it's a lot of play. I have a dollar store sketchbook that I make the ugliest things. I draw with Crayola markers when I'm doing animation practice. I specifically export it as a low quality GIF just so the pressure is off.

Lindsay: I think that my relationship with practice has really changed because my relationship with work has really changed.I'm not working in a studio as much anymore. I'll take freelance projects, but I wouldn't say that I'm working at those speeds that I had to work at while I was working in studios. 

I started surfing in Montreal, and that is such a hard thing for me to practice. But it really reminds me every time I fall, which is every thirty seconds, that it's fun. I'm not getting hurt. I'm here to fail. But I'm here to also get back up again and to keep trying, and whether that's through playing around and turning your brain off or doing something a little bit more structured. 

Outside of the stuff I get paid to do, I really like to take something that I've never done before, or something that I'm interested in figuring out more, and then something that I feel really comfortable with, and mushing those two things together. 

A lot of the stuff I do is character-based, so my practice specifically is taking a look at anatomy and gesture, and then making those two things either fight it out or seeing how I can get them to coexist peacefully.  For a little while I was actually teaching a six hour gesture drawing class. For the first half we would do studies based off of Line of Action. But then in the afternoons we would have live animals and people come in and we would do drawings from life, which is very very important.

Seeing something  in real life activates those different parts of your brain than just staring at a screen. We would also do field trips. We would go visit the zoo, an acrobatics class, coffee shops. 

Felipe: Hearing you guys talking about gesture drawing: that's actually something that I have as a goal for this year. If one of those subtle coffee shop sessions are happening right now, please invite me. I would like to join. For a long time in my early days in animation, because I didn't have access to guidance, I had to find my own ways to get the skills I wanted to learn. 

For a long time, traditional animation was really the focus of my personal study. My study sessions were looking online trying to find entire sequences of old scenes from Disney movies. I would import those to Toon Boom with a transparent background. I used to go to Andreas Deja's website all the time because he has tons of high quality material like that. I would try to understand how people at that time planned their work, how they dealt with spacing, how they dealt with performance, how they expressed certain things graphically.

I've struggled for a long time with producing personal work because I'm not naturally a character designer. Every time I had to create something for myself as a practice routine I would get stuck in the character design part of it. I'll do a very rough silhouette of a character, just thinking shapes. Then I start animating very loosely. By the end of a couple days the motion tells me what the design needs to be. That lets me be able to practice more. 

 

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Have you encountered misconceptions about practice, and do you feel it's possible to practice in ways that might not be as helpful? 

Eden: I find a lot of people push themselves into a corner that they don't want to be in like for a really long time. I thought that I should practice how to digitally paint because that's what “real” artists do. But I found that no matter how often I practiced, it felt more like homework that I dreaded doing. And that's one way to practice in a way that's not helpful. 

And there are times where I become so obsessed with getting better that I end up hurting myself. You have to take care of yourself. You have to remember to drink water. You have to remember to rest. 

Lindsay: There are so many ways that you could practice and not get better. If you are constantly doing the same thing, or you're not really paying attention to what you're doing, that is probably the biggest way that people can waste a lot of time practicing. Because they're not making gains. They're not getting better if they're not getting feedback. 

The other thing is impatience. I think a lot of people get impatient with their results. They're not happy with what they're producing, which can become very frustrating. And that will shut a lot of opportunities. 

The best way for people to practice is really to also teach. When you're teaching, you're learning a language. That's probably how you practice the fastest, but that's definitely not something that will come to mind. 

Sidney: I think as long as you are actually creating something, it's kind of hard to practice wrong. I'll get into the mindset where I'm so caught up on making something perfect that I put things down and I don't pick them back up forever.

As long as you're getting over that first hurdle, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be done.

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• If you enjoyed the roundtable, be sure to follow Lindsay Knowler, Sidney Gale, Eden Timm and Felipe Almeida.
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