Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas

Blur Studio | 2003
DVD release

My first full job when I got hired at Blur was to do layout on this direct-to-dvd release for Disney. It's a little funny when I think about it now, because I love doing layout, but wasn't hired to do that and probably didn't tell them that I wanted to do it either. But I've been doing layout since then, specially on the projects that I supervise the animation later.

I think it's one of the most rewarding departments, even though almost everything that you put on the screen ends up replaced with more polished versions. I say almost, because some of the most abstract aspects stay to the end, and they happen to be extremely important to film work: composition, editing, camera work (moves, lenses, etc.) and basic timing. You may be thinking "but isn't layout just making the 3d version of the storyboard?". Well, in some studios yes, but at Blur layout guys have tremendous autonomy, and if that fits your personality it's a great way to do it.

 Moving on after we were done with layout, I started animating my own shots. The process was quite messy as we were still figuring out the details on the pipeline, since Blur had never done anything that long (around 40 minutes, if I remember well). We ended up with more than one animator working on the same shot on different passes, which may work from the scheduling point of view, but is a bad idea from the artistic side. Lesson learned, we never did it again.

We had some some extremely helpful guidance from Disney vets, who turned out to be great people to work with too. At different moments, we had Chris Buck, Eric Leighton and Bert Klein. Here's a shot I did with the help from Bert (who did the awesome - and potentially NSFW - short "Boys' night out" with Teddy Newton), along with some key poses sent to us as a style reference. It ended up being my favorite shot.

In the end, the whole project was a great learning experience for me, not just about how to do a larger production, but also about what not to do. After this one, I landed as Animation Supervisor in one of our shorts, In the Rough, feeling more prepared as an animator but completely unprepared as a supervisor. More about that in one of the next posts.