EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Morgan Williams: I first became aware of the animator and director Mike Roberts when his short film Rumble Seat hit Vimeo and was a Vimeo staff pick. That was such an amazing [00:00:30] short film. I was struck by the visual style, the animation style, and I could see that he was doing things with after effects that were beyond the work that I was doing at the time and I just thought it was a really exciting and interesting piece. Later he joined up with the Terrific Shadow Machine, which is an LA based animation studio. And you would know them if you spent any time watching adult swim and you've seen Trip Tank, Oh Jack Horseman, is another [00:01:00] Shadow Machine production among others. You should definitely check out their website and see all the things that shadow machine are involved with. They're a wonderfully diverse studio and they do a lot of 2D character work. And Mike is one of their best directors. 

Mike and I sort of circled each other for several years. I was compacted by a couple of his producers to potentially work on some of his projects. He wasn't really even all that aware of [00:01:30] me. His producers, I think, had just found me in some Google searches. And I was unfortunately unable to work on those projects because I was already booked at the time and I was heartbroken because I loved his work and I really wanted to participate in the project. But I kind of kept my eye on Shadow Machine and Mike's work. And I was incredibly flattered when, a few years alter, he sent me just on [00:02:00] his own a wonderful little note just saying that he'd seen some of my work and had enjoyed some of my work and I couldn't have been more flattered because I really admire Mike so much.

So we began a really pleasant correspondent and I did finally get a chance to do a little work for Mike and Shadow Machine. I built them a rig template, a 2D character rig that could actually turn smoothly in space. And it was something that could actually turn [00:02:30] smoothly in space and it was something that I'd been working on for a while. They had need of something similar and I was super excited to be able to pitch in and help them out with that. Mike is a terrific guy and I really hope you enjoy this conversation with the brilliant animation director Mike Roberts.

Okay, well Mike Roberts, thanks so much for talking to us. Let's start kind of back at the beginning. How did you get into doing 2D character animation?

Mike Roberts:	Well, I started out ... I was one of those guys who kind of always [00:03:00] drew since he was a little kid and it was all I wanted to do. I think from about five years old to probably 14, I wanted to be a comic book artist, which I'm sure a lot of people have that same thing if they're into drawing when they're a kid. And then I got into film arts in high school, which was essentially a class where you made music videos on VHS tapes, and it was super fun, I really liked it. And he'd kind of go through the chase scene from bullet and [00:03:30] some sort of important film moments that he thought were important. The teacher was amazing; a guy named Jim Ziegler. And he sort of said, "Why don't you go to Sheridan college?" Because I sort of lived down the street. I didn't mention I'm from Canada originally. 

So he said, "You should get into classical animation," And the more I looked into it, the more I realized it was this crazy program that was super hard to get into and I didn't think I had much of a chance. But after a couple of tries I got in there [00:04:00] and became very traditionally trained, and by that I mean without any digital understanding of anything, it was just paper and pencils, which was great. It was really great. And from there, I basically got a job after school, realized that nothing is traditional anymore, which was probably about 2000. 

So I had this great kind of formal training and absolutely no technical training.

Morgan Williams:	Oh, interesting.

Mike Roberts:	And the first job I got was ... Well, one on [00:04:30] a show called Angela Anaconda, which was like After Effects, but done in Houdini, which is sort of killing a fly with a machine gun. And then the second one was a show called Hoobs, which was a Jim Henson puppet show that had these two minute segments and one of the guys said, "Hey, let's not do this in Houdini, let's do it in After Effects," and it kind of made it so we could just do these two minute episodes, like one artist every two weeks would kind of pump out these [00:05:00] little shorts. And that was my kind of After Effects crash course.

Morgan Williams:	Oh, cool. That's great. Who were some of your early heroes? Who were some of your early ... You said you were sort of more of a comic book guy.

Mike Roberts:	Yeah.

Morgan Williams:	Was it more kind of comic book artists that you were inspired by or were there animated films or cartoons that you were into as well?

Mike Roberts:	Well, I think like everybody, I loved the Disney movies and all that kind of stuff, but there because that [00:05:30] kind of jaded teen period where ... And I was a teenager right when Disney was at its most musical, 2D, with Aladdin and the Lion King and all that. I kind of understood how important and hard it was to do that, but it felt old fashioned and uninteresting to me. So I was definitely more into Dave Stevens, the comic artist, or Mike Allred or guys who reminded me of ... I'm going to [00:06:00] pronounce his name wrong. Liedecker. You know, that old style of illustration. And that was always what inspired me was sort of this story telling and I loved the story telling aspects of comics, but I felt like the printed page ended up being very limited. You're kind of limited in two directions. 

If you love comics, you're limited by how still things are. If you love animation, you're limited by how prolific you have to be to create content. And that's sort of where After Effects comes in because you can skip [00:06:30] the whole 24 drawings per second stage and actually get quantities done, which is what interests me.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, sure. That's a really interesting way to look at. When you were learning character animation at Sheridan, and I know it's an amazing program, what did you feel is the most difficult thing to learn? Obviously, the drawing is a huge component in that type of work, but in focusing more on the movement-

Mike Roberts:	[00:07:00] I think, to be honest, what always killed me was how ... When you're learning classical animation at that level, in order to become a good enough character designer that you can design a character that you can then animate and be productive when you animate, a character that you can draw and then animate with any speed, you have to make such ... Sorry, I'm kind of stuttering through this part.

Morgan Williams:	That's all right. 

Mike Roberts:	In order to design a character that you [00:07:30] can actually practically animate takes a lot of skill. So you're almost too young or inexperienced to be designing characters at a level that you can draw them and still like them on this mass scale. So I felt like that was really frustrating, is getting performance from characters that you liked the way they looked, always felt like a compromise.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, interesting.

Mike Roberts:	That's what was hard for me. Performance is super important and getting characters to feel right and seem right and seem developed I [00:08:00] think is a really important, hard skill to learn, and that was always something that ... You're constantly throwing your drawings away because it's not good enough and sometimes the only way to learn from that drawing is to crumple it up and throw it away and start again.

Morgan Williams:	Sure, sure.

Mike Roberts:	So that was always the hardest part to me was by the time I'd finish my animation, I would be a better designer and a better animator in that one ten second animation I just did. And then it kind of all had to be thrown away and started again.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right.

Mike Roberts:	[inaudible 00:08:28]. [00:08:30] Performance is hard. I would say [inaudible 00:08:34] particularly animation. Sorry, let me say that again. I don't like animating because I don't like the job I do. I don't think I'm a good enough animator to do the job I want. It won't come out the way I want it look, if that makes any sense? So I'm always excited now, getting into [inaudible 00:08:53] people who are better than me at animating.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right.

Mike Roberts:	Because it always felt like that was the part that was missing. I like [00:09:00] designing, I like story boarding, and structure and all that kind of stuff, but the classical animation I would look at as I have to do it, rather than I want to do it, because people who make it their craft spend their whole lives getting good at it.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right. Well that's interesting talking about the difficulty in creating performance in a classical hand drawn setting because of, just like you said, you have to be so good at the drawing aspect and it's so time consuming. [00:09:30] Moving into After Effects, can you talk a little bit about how that changes that equation a little bit in approaching how you build those performances when you're now working with a puppet rather than frame by frame drawing.

Mike Roberts:	Yeah. Well, what I like about it is you can, and similar to 3D, you can maintain the look. So once you've established a look and you're there, you can say, "Okay, well, at the vert least it's always going to look like this." And then you have to work against the fact that rigs [00:10:00] will break and do things that aren't aesthetically pleasing. But worst case scenario, that body's going to look like that and that face is going to look like that. So it's a bit of a compromise to get there, but it's less of a compromise than what you have to do to make classical animation practical at speed.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah, for sure.

Mike Roberts:	But that's what I really like about After Effects is you build these rigs and making the character becomes part of the fun. Like getting a character in a rig you're happy [00:10:30] with becomes part of the challenge. Which makes, I think, the whole production a little more fun because character design sometimes, from my experience, you make the character with the way it looks and you hand it out to a team and that team has to then interpret it and you're at the mercy of what their skill set is and what their tastes are. So this way, you can hand a character off and say, "Okay, this is how it's going to look, here are the constraints, and if you break it, we've got to figure out a plan, but at least in the meantime it's going to look a certain [00:11:00] way. And then you have clients who are happy because they signed off on something and received that back from animation.

Morgan Williams:	Yes, yeah. Here, here to that. That's been a huge improvement in my work life, too. When did you start getting into directing? How far along in your career did you start moving into directing?

Mike Roberts:	Well, I took this weird detour into motion graphics from. In a sense, it's [00:11:30] very far from classical animation, even though the principles are there. I always feel like the best motion graphics guys kind of understand classical principles like bouncing balls and weight and they call it seaweed when we did it, but it's basically a moving S curve, you know?

Morgan Williams:	Right, sine waves.

Mike Roberts:	What's that? 

Morgan Williams:	Sine waves. S-I-N-E waves, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	Totally. So I took this weird kind of, I ventured into [00:12:00] motion graphics because I felt like I had a bit of a leg up because the stuff ended up feeling more finished than what a lot of the other people were doing because of these classical animation principles. So I sort of climbed that ladder pretty quick doing titles and graphics for commercials and, you know, the Chevy would drive by and I'd animate the logo kind 'boop' above it. And it felt kind of like a lot of pay off. You got to see your stuff on TV and it was really exciting. 

[00:12:30] And then from there I got a job doing titles and designs for a guy named Ron Mann who's a documentary filmmaker and he's really experimental in how he presents his ideas. So he kind of let me go crazy with designing stuff for that. So I went on to this motion graphics world only to kind of come back, essentially, to directing, because I was in charge of these huge portions of these films. And then it just became [00:13:00] ... You know, I guess I had ... I forgot to mention, at one point, I got into doing a lot of storyboarding for a company called Cup of Coffee Animation in Toronto.

Morgan Williams:	Oh sure, I remember them, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	Yeah, and I worked on Henry's World and Jo Jo's Circus.

Morgan Williams:	Oh, great.

Mike Roberts:	And by the time I finished on Jo Jo's Circus, I was essentially doing all the boards for the show with my team. And then from there, it kind of felt like, well wait a minute, storyboarding is essentially directing. [00:13:30] So I started getting more and more into handling these things and I was kind of lead animator and I would be finishing this whole thing going, "Well, wait a minute, I'm taking this from script all the way to post, why am I just animating? How is this what I'm doing?" And then I said, "Okay, I guess I have to kind of draw a line in the sand here if I'm going to be a director," which seemed to be what I wanted to do from there in.

So from there, basically, I said, "Well, I've got to stop and just make a film." [00:14:00] And that ended up being ... Essentially the only difference is I had a film in my pocket, so now people ... I'm a director, you know?

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	I could've stayed as this lead animator, essentially doing the same job forever.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	But you have to kind of draw a line in the sand and that was sort of make a film and then move to Los Angeles, basically.

Morgan Williams:	Was that Rumble Seat?

Mike Roberts:	Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Morgan Williams:	Oh, great. Cool.

Mike Roberts:	So that was really great because a bunch of things came together because I had a great relationship with a band called The Sadies [00:14:30] and I had a good relationship with this director and a producer in Toronto who kind of vouched for me to get a grant. So I had this, basically, an amount of money that covered costs, you know? I'm sure that the actual money I probably spent was three or four times the grant, but it just made it so that there was a number and I could point to it. It was like a film with a budget rather than just me doing it on evenings and weekends. [00:15:00] And it meant I could pay for sound design and all this stuff that ends up ... It's a weird barrier for entry, making sure that it's polished.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	And then from there, it went to a bunch of film festivals. And that was great. I had a lot of fun at film festivals and it played at a bunch, a lot, but Rumble Seat's weird because it looks like animation definitely, but it doesn't look like what an animation block at a film festival thinks is animation. [00:15:30] And it also doesn't look like a regular film, obviously. But it is a kind of, I don't how to say it. Cinematic might not be the right word, but it's as lighting and shadows and dark, so it kind of plays more into a narrative film way. So when I get into a film festival and they just would program it randomly, it seemed to do really well. And then if I'd get in an animation block, they'd be like, "I don't know what this is," and there'd be a judge who'd say, "Well, it's not really animated."

Morgan Williams:	You're kidding.

Mike Roberts:	It's this [00:16:00] puppet style.

Morgan Williams:	Oh, jeez.

Mike Roberts:	Which was funny, because that was kind of by design. I said, "Look, I'm a director here making this film," so anytime I could make something limited and still and quiet, I sort of chose to do that so the focus was off of character animation. Performance is always important, but it was-

Morgan Williams:	Sure.

Mike Roberts:	I made this film that was kind of a collection of shots, so it never really hurt my feelings if someone was like, "Well, it's not well animated," because that was sort of by design. But anyway, the [00:16:30] thing about that is; so I'm in all these film festivals and I think, "Oh, I'm done getting there, I'm someday, I'm in film festivals. That's what the world says is the thing." And then finally, I just posted it to Vimeo after a year, I spent thousands of dollars going to film festivals, I posted it to Vimeo and probably within a couple of months it got a staff pick. Which, I don't know how that happens. There's some voodoo there and one day you get a little badge and they say, "Congratulations." And then you get 100,000 views.

Morgan Williams:	Right. 

Mike Roberts:	[00:17:00] But what that did is it meant a manager from LA called me. I was living in New York at the time and they said, "Hey, I want to be your manager. Come to LA." And I was like, "Oh, all right." So I kind of did. It was funny because it ends up ... And that, I think, is a funny thing about me. If I'd thrown it up on Vimeo and done a little promotion, that might have all happened a year earlier and I might've saved four or five grand in hotels.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, [00:17:30] right. It's amazing how Vimeo has changed the equation. It really has become so vitally important for people communicating and finding each other. It's really kind of changed the game in a lot of ways.

Mike Roberts:	Yeah. I look at reels on Vimeo all the time for people to hire.

Morgan Williams:	Yup.

Mike Roberts:	A good reel on Vimeo is a hell of a lot more important than any other way you can show what [00:18:00] your skill set is, to me.

Morgan Williams:	Yup. No, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. That's great. That's a real golden nugget for the folks listening to this. That's fantastic. Now that you've moved into directing, and you were kind of talking before about how in a lot of ways, you would kind of rather be doing that than the actual animation. Do you still get to do a certain amount of character animation?

Mike Roberts:	Yeah.

Morgan Williams:	You do [00:18:30] still do quite a bit yourself?

Mike Roberts:	Yeah, I have a great team who the majority of the animation for sure now, and I sort of jump in on the stuff that either I maybe can't communicate or something that needs a different look or often I'm just trying to help out by getting the deadlines met. But I do a lot of the rigging and a lot of the stuff that ... It's funny because, ironically, the rigging ends up being very technical, 'get it done' kind of part of the process. [00:19:00] So it seems ironic that maybe the director would be doing the rigging, but what it does is it helps out for people. Because it takes so much time to learn this stuff; what expression goes here to link to this and how to navigate the stuff that doesn't work. That it ends up being those things where me spending an hour could be two days of another person doing it.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yup.

Mike Roberts:	So in a weird way, I can kind of help out. So then my time ends up being planning, taste, and then building these rigs and then handing them off to people who [00:19:30] animate, and then deciding what's good, what's finished, what's not, what we can get away with on our time.

Morgan Williams:	Sure, sure.

Mike Roberts:	It seems like everyone ... It's funny, when I meet people who ask me what my job is, the quickest way to say it is just someone to make choices. Because you realize how much of the process is someone coming to a standstill, because it seems like everyone's job gets broken when probability gets brought into it. So someone [00:20:00] will come up and say, "Okay, I've got to draw a hat. Is the hat green, purple, blue, red? Okay. I'm a person who knows that green looks good there, go." And then you keep doing these things where you're constantly faced with these choices and then when you get to a wall, it's essentially the director's job to make sure there are no walls to production.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	So it's like if you're someone who just loves the character performance, that's what you should focus on. And find a way to make the kind of money [00:20:30] you need at a company that wants to pay you to focus on that. But if you're the kind of person who wants to make these broad choices, then that's what I would say is someone who wanted to decide how to be a director. It's like, "Do you like that stress you get from being faced with stressful choices that have to be answered and living by that?" A lot of people just end up don't; they don't want to do that. They don't want to be on the hook.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah. I totally understand that, yeah. So you [00:21:00] mostly use After Effects as you've talked about. Are there other tools that you use in your productions?

Mike Roberts:	Yeah, I use everything I can get my hands on. The main reason I would say I use After Effects 90% of the time is because After Effects is your last stop. Because I use a lot of element 3D, I'm sure everyone on the internet who has touched After Effects knows about video co-pilot and Andrew Kramer, and he's sort of one of those things I always joke about; it's like [00:21:30] the force in Star Wars. There's two sides. You can go and learn these incredible lessons from this guy, or you can kind of become like a minion of his style and it turns you into a guy that just does what he does.

Morgan Williams:	Yes.

Mike Roberts:	So in a weird way, you see it all the time where it's just kind of versions of stuff he does. But if you're wiling to kind of riff on and treat it more like jazz, you know? He's the amazing guy who gives you this incredible tool set. And [00:22:00] the reason I bring that up is because I use Element so much that sometimes I feel like a disciple of his. But what it is is he's done this thing where he's given you the ability to add 3D into your workflow. Now I'm using Element as an example, by the way. Element is the perfect program to stay inside of After Effects as much as you can. And what that means is, if you have a shot that's finished, you don't have to worry about compositing it. It's done. 

So my team laughs at me because my compositions will sometimes have 15 [00:22:30] cameras and 25 lights because I'm basically setting up cameras in shots sequentially. So I'll have a puppet that needs a long shot, a wide shot, a medium, another angle, up, down, sideways, and I'll set those all up in one [inaudible 00:22:44] because I know that that all exists in one render.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right. Oh, that's interesting.

Mike Roberts:	So that's probably not the best way to do it, but what it does for me is it means that if the light looks right, if the vignette looks right and the texture looks right, I don't have to do it six [00:23:00] times or set up ... Because I'm not the kind of person who likes to set up pre-sets. I do, but I hate it because I feel like that's where the technical gets in the way of the creative. And I like to think of everything as just sitting out on a table and I get to move everything once. So I try to, every scene gets one set up in my head and every time I have to sub-divide that, it's better for rendering, it's better for tracking. It doesn't always work good for the workflow, but it definitely gives you a product that you can say, "That will consistently look like that throughout." [00:23:30] And that's what I love about After Effects.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah.

Mike Roberts:	I see a lot of workflows where they're using flash and Photoshop and this and that and then they finally have to end up in After Effects and if you started from the beginning planning in After Effects, it just would save so much time.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah.

Mike Roberts:	But of course I used Cinema 4D and Illustrator and Photoshop. I'm dabbling in Story Board Prop just because it's so well laid out.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah. Do you ever use 2 In Boom?

Mike Roberts:	[00:24:00] Here's what happened. Someone showed me 2 In Boom Harmony's character rigging and I went, "Oh, that's the best thing I've ever seen." And then they showed me the price and I was like, "Mmh, maybe I'll wait." So apparently it's come down a lot in price, but it is pretty amazing. It's sort of like all the problems with Duik and character puppet rigging in After Effects seems to be kind of handled.

Morgan Williams:	Yes, yes. Although, I have to say that in my experience, the user interface leaves a fair amount to be desired [00:24:30] and I think that in combination of the fact that when you're working After Effects, you're kind of in sync with everybody else that's already in the Adobe universe. That's sort of why I still kind of come back to After Effects even though 2 In Boom has some really cool features. But it's sort of like once you're in 2 In Boom, you're in the 2 In Boom universe.

Mike Roberts:	Well and that's the thing. If someone could say, "Okay, listen, we can give you 2 In Boom and it's going to be your last stop," [00:25:00] I'd be like, "Well, maybe we'll figure that out." But it always has to come around the corner back to After Effects or Photoshop or whatever.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah, exactly.

Mike Roberts:	So it just makes it so it's like, "Why don't we just do it all in After Effects."

Morgan Williams:	How about Flash? Have you worked much with Flash?

Mike Roberts:	I've worked with Flash a lot. It's funny, where I am now ... For a while, people thought I hadn't ever used it because I avoid it as much as I possibly can.

Morgan Williams:	You and me both. 

Mike Roberts:	Here's the [00:25:30] thing about Flash though, I feel like every time ... To get it to do what you need to do in production is always a compromise. So it feels like using one of those pieces of software that you find in maybe like the app store. Like you'll find "Fred's Animation Pro." And then you try it and it's just not there.

Things like you can break the entire way that Flash works in After Effects. If you push a camera past a Swift in After Effects. It has these crazy, [00:26:00] composition braking, job ruining glitches that everything that you get out of using Flash is just better avoided. So always find if you can use Photoshop Illustrator and After Effects, you will have a rock solid workflow. If you start mixing Swift in there, good luck. Hopefully you don't have a deadline.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah. When you're looking at the different tools, and maybe we can sort of focus particularly on After Effects, that's what this [00:26:30] course will be working in as well. And I'm a big proponent of using After Effects for character as well. As you look at After Effects, or even looking at other tools like Flash or Cinema or whatever, how does the tool dictate the types of movement you're trying to create or how much do you negotiate between the toll and what you're tying to get out of the motion.

Mike Roberts:	Well, I definitely try to think ... You have a set of ten shots [00:27:00] and fie of them will have to be reasonably executed with a puppet, and the same puppet, or else it's not a practical. So what I mean is if you have like an up shot and a down shot and five straight on kind of neutral conversation shots, then it's a good workflow to use the puppets. Because maybe you have to do these sort of bespoke shots where it's an up shot and a down shot and you have to redraw your [00:27:30] art work to match that. But when you can keep the shot selection dynamic and use this puppet that's essentially one angle, that's where I find it's a really practical use for After Effects.

Morgan Williams:	All right.

Mike Roberts:	And I hate that sometimes I'm led by that a little bit. I find myself picking these neutral camera positions because of that ... That's why I like Element and Element and I've started using Element to do background almost exclusively because you can push it and you can push the camera way in and [00:28:00] get close, then you don't know what the body's going to look like, and have this really dynamic background that you might not have done because of the limitations of it. I maybe lost track of your question there. I don't if that answered it.

Morgan Williams:	Oh, no, that's okay. I was just talking about the relationship between the software and the kind of movement you're trying to create.

Mike Roberts:	Oh, yeah.

Morgan Williams:	Do you kind of let that lead you or what's the negotiation? And you're discussing that.

Mike Roberts:	The negotiation for me is ... Here's where [00:28:30] you get in trouble with After Effects. After Effects loves to like Vesie and Squine your animation, and that is the immediate killer of good looking animation to me is any time you're essentially letting the computer make the decision, you're kind of screwed.

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	So we do a lot of things to mitigate that which is things like adding grain and texture. I know that's a very top level change, but even things like 90% of the time, if we have an animation that kind of looks reader, if we switch it to [00:29:00] like 12 frames per second. All of a sudden, those problems are fixed. Something about the way that these computer lines move in 24 or 30 frames looks really computer-y. So when I watch something like ... I'm trying to think of an example of a show I really think does a kind of ... Wonder Pets is funny. It's the one I've been referencing for years, because the way they handle stuff is so great. 

And then I'm always like, "Man, if that was at 12 frames per second, this show would look so much better." You know, it's that kind of thing because you get into these [00:29:30] ... It's the way After Effects interpolates your decisions is probably the hardest thing to deal with. So when I have a guy start out, I'll often make them use only hold frames, absolutely no splines, because it gets them out or the mind set of thinking that A to B over 10 frames is somehow okay for the computer to decide? It'll just look bad.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right. 

Mike Roberts:	Now, obviously, if you know what you're doing, it doesn't matter. If your taste is there, you'll just fix it and it'll be fine. [00:30:00] But that's what I find one of the harder things about it is negotiating what the computer does by default. Because you're constantly having to set and fix After Effects so that it's not doing the work for you.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So when you do approach a sequence of animation, what's kind of your process? Do you start with thumb nail sketches? Do you actually get up and act things out? How do you kind of begin [00:30:30] approaching a sequence of animation?

Mike Roberts:	Especially with puppets, I always find the most important thing is to get your shot selection right. So I will start with thumbing out positions where the guy's going to stand, medium close up, getting the story right, and it's all drawn. I'm a big fan of Photoshop and Premiere or After Effects for doing the animaticis. I think your animatic is where you'll end up doing most of the planning. And if you don't feel like the animatic is working, then you're probably starting too soon.

So [00:31:00] that's kind of the main thing. I really like pretty story boards, and maybe that's kind of just because I spent a lot of time drawing them on paper. So I don't like doing story boards in Flash, I don't like doing storyboards even Storyboard Pro is pretty great for drawing, but I love texture and tones. I like adding that in, but it's unnecessary. But what I feel like is if you spend a lot of time falling in love with your storyboards and your animatic process, then you're just going to have a better product. 

So that would be like step one is locking [00:31:30] that animatic. And that can be, you know, on a show ... I'm just trying to think of perfect examples of shows that I've worked on. But something like Trip Tank, which is very get through it and rough, you can get away with very limited; here's the shot, here's the shot, here's the shot. And that's your whole animatic and just make sure you get the timing right. But on Bojack when you're shipping something, you want to make sure your animatic is super tight. And almost every pose is in there, so that's the thing. Every project is going [00:32:00] to have a different set of needs, but I think making sure that you can watch an animatic and it's not boring or it's not undermining the story you're trying to tell, that is the most important step one.

And then, if you're using puppets, what's great about that is if you get the rough feel in there for an animatic, you can just straight [inaudible 00:32:23] the animation. That's not a great lesson for me to teach, but I would say [00:32:30] is if you have the puppets right and you have your animatic locked, you can say, "Block your poses." You could do a pose every two or three seconds and get away wit ha lot that keeps it alive. Because the problem is, is if you don't want to plan it out too much when you have to schedule. You spend your whole life planning and then you don't actually get the work done. So if feel like if you do a little extra on the animatic, it lets you dig into After Effects [00:33:00] and do it all, it's not really straightforward, but almost, or, sorry, straight ahead, but almost straight ahead. If you plan with the animatic, it allows you to kind of be lazy about some of that key planning that you would have to do otherwise?

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	But if you skip that step, you're going to get into ... I feel like that's where you get I and trouble with After Effect is trying to do your camera on the go. That kind of stuff will really get you in trouble.

Morgan Williams:	Sure. How do you break down the key poses for a complicated [00:33:30] sequence? How do you figure out where those key poses need to be to make a movement happen?

Mike Roberts:	Well that's where you kind of ... When I say all the straight ahead stuff, I am more talking about performance. Let's say you had someone saying, "I'm going to walk over there and get that, here I go."

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	You can storyboard out, with those puppets, you could say ... In the animatic, I'm just going to have him stand there and say the first part, and then I'm going to move it in the animatic and show that he's over here. [00:34:00] You pretty much then have to go through with After Effects and put those global movement. So maybe you'd have a puppet on knoll and the knoll would be position one, position four, or position one, two, and three keyed out with a hold key. So you know that that puppet's going to be here, here, here. And then, that's kind of enough planning to then go in and just flesh that out. Rather than traditionally you're keying out every, almost two or three frames sometimes. [00:34:30] That's a lot of keys. But you know what I'm saying; it used to be that your keys were so important because you had to keep things on model and because you had to keep things moving from place to place. 

Key framing's incredibly important, but you can get away with keeping it in your head rather than having to articulate each key pose. And then that's maybe bad advice because you can get lazy, which is what you want to avoid. But that is kind of the idea with [00:35:00] these puppets is getting stuff done quickly.

Morgan Williams:	Right, sure. And that brings us right around to what you start with talking about being the most important thing, and I certainly agree, which is the performance of the character. I always say to my students that animation is a performing art. It's a performance through a puppet or through drawings or through whatever, but it is essentially a performance. So how do you think about that aspect of it? How do you think [00:35:30] about creating and performance with your characters? 

Mike Roberts:	I remember for a long time, when I was a lot younger, I would listen to writers talk about how a character they had written almost like they didn't know what was going to happen. So they would say, "Oh, I can't wait to put this person in this situation." And my brain, I don't know, my teenage brain would go, "Come on man, just write it. Why are you acting like this is something out of your head?" [00:36:00] But in a way, once you set limits on what a character does, then all of a sudden, something becomes something that character does or doesn't do. And that I think is the most important thing, even before you start. 

The reason I'm using the writing thing is because it's almost like you ask questions about the character. Is this a character who would jump when he was happy? And that answer has to be 100% yes or 100% no in your head. You need to know what this character does. And I think that [00:36:30] is more about how you plan for puppets. What I think you run into a lot of the time with puppet animation is everybody gets the same treatment. And you've got to think about ... One actually really good trick, because I guess I'm speaking, I'll leave the high end stuff for people who do that all day long, but for when you're going quickly, which I think is the goal with After Effects, is you want to set up ... Some people like to set up a series of [00:37:00] poses that you'll hit. 

So the character will scratch its head or rub its leg, but I think it's important not to have a toolbox that works for every character. I think you have to have a ... Sorry, that works for all characters. You need to have a toolbox that works for each individual character. So it's good to say, "Is this a character who touches their face when they're nervous?" Those kinds of questions. And its yes or no and make sure that in the scene, you don't have two people who do that. 

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah. 

Mike Roberts:	So it's more about [00:37:30] setting up limits of what you think this person will do. And if you're working in a team, I think that should be reflected in the storyboards. Is this a guy who speaks with his hands? That's a really good way ... So if you want to get into it and you say, "Okay, I've got to hurry, I don't have a lot of time. I want this character to have a lot of personality, so he's a guy that speaks with his hands." That's your guy that speaks with his hands. Then you have another character. This guy shakes when he gets excited. And you can tell that with its body or its shoulders or its hand positions. [00:38:00] And I think making sure you kind of go, "Okay, I'm going to make these choices ahead of time," and always remember to hit those beats, is the difference between a performance that's just kind of doing it or not.

I watch a show like Archer, which is one of my absolute favorites, and a big inspiration of how I set stuff up and mixtures of 2D and 3D. They kind of do quick animation right, in so many ways. It's the ultimate mixture of smart choices and [00:38:30] doing more than you have to do, you know? You'll see a lot of the time that they speak with shoulders. Everything's like, "mm-hmm (affirmative)." And then the shoulders will go up. And if you watch them, they do it. And maybe it's not such a good example of characters doing different stuff for each character, they tend to have similar actions for everybody, but they do so much with mouth flap and shoulder shrug.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, right.

Mike Roberts:	And those kinds of choices are so much better [00:39:00] than being in production and going, "Okay, this guys speaks with his hands and he's big and he moves around a lot." So that is the production thing because they're saying, "Listen, we can't have all these characters doing all this broad acting, so let's keep it subtle and just move the shoulders." And that's a really good directorial choice to get your show made.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right.

Mike Roberts:	Then you can say, "Well, what about this character maybe just moves his shoulders a little more or doesn't do it as much?" That's when you start to get into individual characters. But it's important to have this [00:39:30] kind of language of the world you're creating. So you don't want to have a guy made of rubber hose, stretchy stuff keeping small and [inaudible 00:39:40]. Because otherwise, it'll look weird that his arms are bent. You know?

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	I don't know if that-

Morgan Williams:	No, absolutely.

Mike Roberts:	I feel like I ramble.

Morgan Williams:	No, no, no. This is gold. This stuff, you just have no idea. This kind of stuff is so great for the students to hear. Everything you're saying is [00:40:00] fantastic. We talked a little bit about rigging earlier and you said it's sort of become, at Shadow Machine there, part of your directing job is to create these rigs. How far do you take the rigs? Or maybe I should ask, how do you determine how far to take the rig?

Mike Roberts:	Well I think it always comes down to the style of the design. 

Morgan Williams:	Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Roberts:	[00:40:30] So a lot of the times we do a lot of these phone calls on Trip Tank. That means every episode, we'll have three new characters. And they're very subtle. They're usually like waist up kind of stuff. Sometimes we go a little further, but in that case, the rigging is like IK arms and maybe the torso will have, not even an IK, just a little bit of movement to it.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah.

Mike Roberts:	And then the face will be articulate. And that's kind of how we decide. It's sort of like what does this character need to do is how far we're going to take it. So there's a character [00:41:00] called Animal Hitman on Trip Tank and he is like a film noir, comic book style guy. Sort of looks a little bit like he could exist in ... I forget the name of the movie. Oh, Sin City. He's sort of got Sin City kind of vibe. And that character is more of like a turning rig. I think you helped me out a lot with that one. 

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	And that would be incredible overkill for almost anything but that character [00:41:30] who has to turn and chew and look certain ways. So we're rigging characters right now that have to switch side. And in a perfect world, we'd come up with a way to rig it so that you could flop looking left to right. But being pragmatic, it just makes more sense to have him act to the left and then push scale to negative 100% when he needs to turn. And that's just a get it done kind of decision.

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	Maybe one day they'll figure out a way to push [00:42:00] a button and have all that math reverse itself. 

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	But right now, sometimes you've just got to get it done. So if you're not thinking cleverly along those lines ... You spend all your life in these rigs, if you wanted to.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Roberts:	So I think you always should ask yourself, "How much motion is this going to make?" Or "How much motion is this going to need? And what's the fastest way to get from here to there?" So I think you get a lot out of making a face rig really developed, because you [00:42:30] can do so much with the face. But you start to, it's diminishing returns if you're flopping a character from left to right when you can just push scale on negative 100 kind of thing.

Morgan Williams:	Sure, sure, absolutely. Well, obviously, we all use and love Duik. Are there any other plug in or scripts that you love that are your favorite?

Mike Roberts:	It's so funny. I think everything I would mention would probably be covered somewhere [00:43:00] in one of those Andrew Kramer tutorials. But the things I use every day is Wiggle. And again, I think Wiggle's one of those things that's terribly misunderstood because it's the quickest way to tell someone that you haven't thought it through because it's too much or too little or too varied. I think using Seed Random, you know that one? Where you basically tell it a random seed to use, and then Wiggle ... Here's where people get [00:43:30] stuck with Wiggle. They'll want a camera to look hand held. So they'll put it on the position of the camera. But if you're holding a camera, you don't move in the z axis. You're standing there and you wobble from side to side and maybe up and down a little bit.

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	So the quick way around that is if you put a Wiggle on the position of a camera, all of a sudden you're going to be moving in and out and everyone's going to know, okay, that's a digital camera, because cameras don't do that. But [00:44:00] if you put a wiggle on say the orientation of the camera, then it's very subtle. Then all of a sudden you are someone who's trying to keep a camera locked on somebody. It's the little things like that that end up being, I use every day, is getting a camera to have a sympathetic and nice movement. Camera animation, I think, is probably the hardest thing to do in After Effects, but the biggest pay off if you get it right.

Morgan Williams:	Right, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Roberts:	So stuff like Wiggle [00:44:30] ... I know it sounds like such an obvious one, but ... I would say, get it right. Figure out how to make that Wiggle work because it's probably the most handy thing if you use it properly.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, for sure.

Mike Roberts:	What's in my toolbox? Grain. I put Grain on almost everything. For no other reason than sort of banding, which color banding will send it back. The color correction place will send the show back for banding. [00:45:00] Things like working in 16 bit is really smart, especially with where computers are at right now. There's almost no point in work with 8 bit. But yeah, I love Trap Code. I do so much stuff with Particulars, is invaluable, I couldn't work without that. Duik, obviously. Duik is great because they give you, nowadays, he's got almost every script you use built in, you just push a button, which is super handy. He's a maniac, I don't know what he's [00:45:30] doing.

Morgan Williams:	Have you see what's coming on Duik 15? It's just-

Mike Roberts:	Yeah, it was on the data.

Morgan Williams:	Oh my word.

Mike Roberts:	I gave him like so much money. I was like, "I got to pay this guy."

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, I did too. I felt exactly the same way. Please, please take my money.

Mike Roberts:	But yeah, if you have Duik, I feel like all your expressions are covered.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, right.

Mike Roberts:	I'm trying to think of these little nuggets that make my life easier. But I think it's that. Things like don't get too caught up in things like vignettes until you know [00:46:00] how to not make them band or not make them obvious.

Morgan Williams:	They're great [crosstalk 00:46:04]

Mike Roberts:	Yeah, I think, you know what it is? Here's the main thing that I think if someone asks what I try to do in After Effects is make it look analog. So like every single thing I do it looks as real as possible. And obviously, I'm saying that like there's no way to mix real stock footage into this kind of stuff, but I try to think like how would optical printing work with this? How would this look? A good example I see a lot is blend states. So if you have multiplier [00:46:30] add or screen, I feel like what a lot of people get wrong, especially when they're starting out is things like Additive Effects. So you'll get a fire layer and you'll put it on at 100% and then turn it to add instead of, say, screen. And then it destroys pixels. So you have these big, giant areas of white and nobody wants to see that. And that's where people can get a lot of mileage out of screen or turning the opacity down.

Morgan Williams:	Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Roberts:	One thing I, this is a [00:47:00] top tip because I do it for everything, to the point where my team laughs at me, whenever we're done, I get the glow effect, you know, stylized glow. I just turn it up to 1000. No, sorry, the size, not the intensity.

Morgan Williams:	Oh, sure.

Mike Roberts:	But what it does is it smooths out all the pixels in your whole thing and keeps things alive so you end up getting this airy feeling to everything. So everything looks like maybe there's a little light kind of blooming into [00:47:30] it.

Morgan Williams:	Oh, nice. I'm going to have to try that one.

Mike Roberts:	Essentially what you want to do is you want to get it to a point where if you turned it on and off, you'd go, what is it doing? Because when I say that, you'll get yourself in trouble if you just turn glow on, makes everything looks like shit. But if you turn it on and then crank the radius, I guess, to 500 even or 1000, depending, what it does is it brings the blacks up a little bit, and pushes the colors all close together, so you get this kind of free color correction pass, which [00:48:00] is really nice.

Morgan Williams:	Interesting. Oh, that's a great tip. I love that one. 

Mike Roberts:	But that's me looking for analog, you know?

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, right. Absolutely. That's great. So when you're looking at new, young, character animators coming into your studio, what's the biggest mistake or bad habit you see again and again?

Mike Roberts:	Probably with digital, it's letting the computer do the work. Anytime I see that, you sort of like lose a point. [00:48:30] People who usually stand out are the ones who know about paths of actions and what the difference between too much and too little. Like an over performance is as bad as an under performance. A little bit of rock and roll is nice, but some things are too shaky, too janky, it just doesn't work. But [00:49:00] the main thing is someone who has a focus on something. So, if I see somebody who's got a little bit of every little program and then hasn't, say, nailed character animation, I almost don't know what to do with that person.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right.

Mike Roberts:	Whereas, if they have really tight ... Here's the perfect example; if someone had nice character animation and then terrible camera, I'd be like, "Well, I don't know what to do with you." But if they focus on character animation, [00:49:30] okay, that's a person who can come on the team and be an awesome part of the team and they know how to character animate. Or their compositing's really tight. Okay, I can work with that. It's that kind of a thing. To me, and this is where I might sound like a snob, but to me a lot of the time it comes down to drawing because I feel like people who draw have been spending their whole lives thinking about this stuff.

Morgan Williams:	Uh-huh, right.

Mike Roberts:	Because your whole life drawing is key posing, you know? You have to draw a guy or a girl or a thing or an animal that is doing [00:50:00] something that you have to get from that one drawing. So he's reaching for a drink. You're drawing that your whole life. Then all of a sudden, you kind of understand key poses.

Morgan Williams:	Sure, right.

Mike Roberts:	So that's a lot of the time, you can tell where people who can draw end up having a real leg up.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, that's interesting. Do you find it hard to find good ... Well, maybe I should ask a two part question. Is it hard to find good character animators in general? And then [00:50:30] maybe the subset to that it is, is it hard to find After Effects character animators?

Mike Roberts:	Yeah, I think it's kind of like yes, and then times one and a half. So it's definitely hard to find good character animators. It's a skill that's hard to learn and I think the industry and the schooling can make you lazy about that. They don't focus on how important performance is and nailing those characters is, because you kind of almost have to do it instinctively. Or you'd get to that level. You know [00:51:00] that whole joke about 10,000 hours thing? Where to get good at it ... You want to feel like that person has done the 10,000 hours on something like performance. I love teaching people and giving people a shot, you just want to make sure that the roots are there.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right.

Mike Roberts:	So here's the thing; if you are an After Effects guru, you're going to be great for coding and compositing, but if you're a character animation guru, I can show you After Effects.

Morgan Williams:	Yeah. And [00:51:30] so how do you know, when you're looking at someone's portfolio or their demo reel, what are you looking for that tells you, "Ah-ha, here's somebody that I can work with, I can develop their-"

Mike Roberts:	Well someone who has some character animation on their reel. And I don't even care what it is. It can be After Effects or it can be hand drawn. But then maybe they have a shot or two that they've taken a puppet that they've found on the internet and animated that. Starting with a rig is great. Or make [00:52:00] a little scene from a film and focus on the performance. And I know that that's sort of everyone, I think a lot of people do that, but what you want to do ... How do I say it? How to package yourself is to tell the person who's looking at it what you do. So the mistake I see all the time is someone's like, "Okay, here's my reel. I did a little lighting, a little character, a little rigging, a little of this." I'm like, "Well, what are you?"

Morgan Williams:	Right.

Mike Roberts:	Because when I went to Sheridan, the focus was 'make your film.' No teams. And the reason they did that is because [00:52:30] you get in real trouble with a team of five and four people are doing one thing and another person is doing the heavy lifting. So I feel like you need to package yourself as a character animator, if that's the job you want. You make sure that you have a couple different styles. 3D, sure, that's going to get you a big job, but make sure you haven't forgotten about 2D, even if it's cut out. It just seems like, especially entry level positions, if you can nail character animation in After [00:53:00] Effects, then all of a sudden you're someone who can work with essentially a compromised tool set. With respect, After Effects is kind of ... We're asking it do things it never wanted to do.

Morgan Williams:	Right, you're right. 

Mike Roberts:	Because, you know, you'll go to a company and you'll work on, say Archer or something, and those guys will all have these crazy rigs and you're just basically moving sliders around.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah. Back in the [00:53:30] day, when you were coming up and learning, was there something you wish somebody had told you? Was there something you wish somebody had pulled you aside and said, "Here's the great secret that will solve all your problems." Is there anything like that you think that you would tell a young character animator just getting started?

Mike Roberts:	I think the main thing is to focus on the thing that's going [00:54:00] to make you stand out. And the only reason to do that is because you need to stand out. I feel like I always had a bit of leg up because no matter what, I knew that I could draw something that would make certain people go, "Oh, he's a good drawer." And all that did was make people click. It was a thing. It was like a foot in the door. 

So I worked with a documentary filmmaker and he would always mention that I could draw and I could never figure out why, but I think it was the thing that separated [00:54:30] me from someone else. It was like saying, "He can sing." It's like a thing that you can point to. So whether it's drawing or performance or packaging, and by packaging I mean polishing a composite or something like that, or someone who's an amazing rigger. Make some crazy rig that'll blow someone's mind. And put it out on the internet; give it away. It's funny because nowadays I see people [00:55:00] pushing like, "Don't work for free. Don't do anything for free. Don't work for free." And it's really good advice if you're established. But it's terrible advice if you're not. Because I don't know anyone who didn't start by doing a favor for someone. 

Morgan Williams:	Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Roberts:	And you have to be very careful about what you do for free, and essentially, if you saw how much the grant I go was compared to how much I spent to make Rumble Seed, I made that for free.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah, for [00:55:30] sure.

Mike Roberts:	So I think that's a really important starting out lesson is make the thing or do the thing that makes people go, "Oh, I've got to hire that guy." 

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah. That's great.

Mike Roberts:	Like I saw a reel for a Cal Arts guy who, he was really good. His path of action was amazing. He clearly knew all the stuff; design, character, it was all great. He ended up watching Trip Tank and I think was offended by the content, so he said no thanks. But it was one of those, "This is all great, let's do this." [00:56:00] And then he watched the show and it maybe had too many dick jokes or something.

Morgan Williams:	That's too bad.

Mike Roberts:	Yeah. But he nailed it because he had a couple of character pieces and some design. And the character pieces were impeccable and the design was there. So it was like, okay, he could definitely do two things.

Morgan Williams:	Right, yeah.

Mike Roberts:	Because essentially if you're not going to be the best in the world, you've got to do more than one thing.

Morgan Williams:	Right, right. Or you have to be the very best at the one thing that you do.

Mike Roberts:	Yeah. There's a guy [00:56:30] I know who works for Blue Sky and he essentially animates the characters in 2D, then shows that the 3D guys and says, "Do it like this." 

Morgan Williams:	Wow.

Mike Roberts:	It's such an amazing ... And when you watch those Blue Sky films, they are so well animated with the squash and the stretch and the movement that they get out of these characters is like ... I would say that's their killer app. If you watch Madagascar, not Madagascar, the birds, Rio. If you watch Rio 2, [00:57:00] the stuff that they're making those puppets do is insane.

Morgan Williams:	Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Roberts:	Whatever you think about the film, but the classical, the characters, is so good. And he's essentially one of the best 2D animators working. And he'd be a nightmare in a lot of studios because of that. But because he's the best in the world, it doesn't matter. You know what I mean? [inaudible 00:57:22] do his thing and everyone's like holy ... He's a master. He's an absolute master. He's making [inaudible 00:57:28].

Morgan Williams:	Yeah, oh [00:57:30] that's interesting. I had no idea that that animation was being driven by a 2D animator, that's amazing. That's really cool.

Mike Roberts:	And he was always the best guy in my class, you know?

Morgan Williams:	Right. Oh, that's super cool. Are you guys working on anything at Shadow Machine that you can talk about? Are you working on anything new and fun?

Mike Roberts:	Right now we're doing Trip Tank, which is the ... It was eight seasons last year on Comedy Central, now we've got 20 [00:58:00] coming up in the fall, I think. And that is like an anthology, so it's like 50 sketches. I think we have 80, or maybe it was a 150 sketches, for all I know. And our team's responsible for the interstitials which kind of glue the sketch together. So it's a couple of guys answering the phones apparently at Trip Tank. And then I've got a couple of my sort of pet projects that they kindly let me include, which is [00:58:30] Animal Hitman. It's about a guy who gets rid of your unwanted animals. That's what I'm specifically working on. Oh, and I just finished directing two episodes of Bojack Horseman, which was super great; great show, very proud of that one. And that comes out in July, they just announced it, on Netflix. And I also did the title sequence for season one and as a kind of thank [00:59:00] you, they gave me a couple episodes to direct of season two, which is great.

Morgan Williams:	Fantastic, that's great. Wonderful. Well great, this has just been fantastic, Mike. Really some amazing golden nuggets of knowledge that you've dropped on our students. I really, really appreciate you taking the time. No, there was pure gold, really, all the way through. That was fantastic. So I really appreciate you taking the time talking to us and wish you all the best with your [00:59:30] future endeavors.

Mike Roberts:	Yeah, of course, thanks so much for listening.

Morgan Williams:	One of the things that's so impressive about Mike's work is that he's really a complete filmmaker. He understands the big picture, but he also understands the minutia and the little details and all the little components that make an animated production tick. He's also technically very, very skill, as you could hear from some of the great types and tricks he was offering in terms of using After Effects. [01:00:00] Also nice that he, like me, is sort of an enthusiastic user of After Effects. He kind of has echoed many of my feelings about why After Effects is such a good choice for doing this kind of work. 

I think Mike's very background is very interesting as well, and you can see that that background informs the work he does. And I loved that he emphasized the importance of performance in doing character animation work. Mike's website [01:00:30] is michaeljohnroberts.com and you can also find Shadow Machine at shadowmachine.com