Video Reference

Once more Kevin writes:

When I first started working in animation in the late 1990’s, video reference was looked down upon, like some kind of unworthy crutch. I remember during Quest for Camelot another assistant whispering to me that he’d seen one of the animators enlarging frames of live-action reference at the photocopy machine. The animator looked embarrassed and quickly went back to his office. At DreamWorks every now and then I’d get a glimpse of an animator doing a bit of reference photography or videography, and I noticed it was usually done at a time and place where it wouldn’t get too much attention. Even using self-produced reference as a general tool, without taking individual images and registering and pegging them up, was seen as cheating. Plus it was a big hassle for a variety of reasons, even after video camcorders became commonplace ...

Somehow the shift to CG animation has taken the curse off using video reference. Maybe, with everything digital, it’s just much easier to shoot and use your own reference at your desk. Maybe it’s that CG animation tends to require more realistic movement to not look wonky. I think a big part of it is that CG animation is less spontaneous than hand-drawn - there’s no CG equivalent of a scribble test (at least not yet), and few CG animators (even those who started in 2D) do extensive thumbnails. Shooting a few passes of video reference can go a long way towards organizing one’s thoughts about basic timing and posing, while also revealing bits of nuance that CG animation is particularly good at capturing.

That said, many animators still never use video reference. Jeff Gabor [seen above] clearly enjoys being in front of the camera and performing. Most animators are a lot more shy. One of my old office-mates, Kevin MacLean, is one of the best animators I know, but he’s shy enough that I had to take his place in a DreamWorks improv class. The class would have been torture to him. I know he never shot reference for his scenes, yet he turned in some of the most sensitive and expressive acting shots in "Over the Hedge". On the same film, my pal Sean McLaughlin did some beautiful, dead-on video reference of himself, sometimes playing multiple parts, with great results ...

The full post is, of course, at Synchrolux ...