Death of Ruber by Alex Williams (FX by Michael Gagne)
In the summer of 1996, I started work as an animator at Warner Bros. Feature Animation on Quest for Camelot, directed by Frederik Du Chau.
It was an exciting time — Warner Bros. was building its feature animation division, hoping to rival Disney animation, and was recruiting artists from all over the world (including me) to join its team.
Way back in 2004 I got my first job as animation supervisor, on Frederic Du Chau's live action VFX movie "Racing Stripes", about a zebra that wants to be a racehorse. It was filmed mainly in South Africa - where zebras are plentiful; while the VFX work was done at Digiscope in Santa Monica, with other studios such as Hybride in Montreal animating the two horseflies "Buzz and Scuzz". About 30 VFX shots were completed in London at the Peerless Camera Co. Part of the animation process was to create expression sheets for the characters in the film, to inform the CG modelling process and to make sure the animation would be as realistic and expressive as possible.
In the short video above (15 minutes) I describe my experience working on the Disney live action feature film "Underdog", animated at Cinesite (and also Framestore) in London back in 2006. As part of the development process I did a large number of expression sheets, a few of which I have uploaded below. The purpose of the expression sheets was to help the modelling department create blend shapes for the character rigs, showing a range of expressions and moods, which could then be captured in the animation. Underdog was a great project, directed by veteran director Frederic Du Chau, with whom I had worked previously on "Quest for Camelot" and "Racing Stripes".
One of my YouTube subscribers recently asked me to talk about what it was like animating "Ruber" on "Quest For Camelot". I worked on "Ruber" on "Quest" back in the late 1990s, when the animation industry was booming, and there was a lot of optimism about the future of 2D animation. "Quest" was a great experience for me; I got to be a lead animator on the villain, which was a big role, and a really fun one to do. Plus, I got to work with Gary Oldman, and I was even invited to draw him delivering the lines in the recording booth - drawings which I was later able to use for key poses in the scenes I animated.
