I Don’t Have Time For Your Blog

So first I have to tell you what I do for a living.

I make puppets.

But not puppets like Bert and Ernie. I make digital puppets. They only exist inside the computer. They are often called “character rigs”.

Some of them are fairly easy. Where I work, we’ve made a lot of puppets of people. So we’ve got that people thing down pretty well at this point. And we’ve made lots of puppets of animals. Sometimes the animals stand up like people, and sometimes they’re on all fours, but either way we’ve made a bunch of them and we’re pretty good at it.

But then sometimes you see one you’ve never done before, and you start to get excited about it because there’s going to be some fun challenges to solve to make that character move.

And then there are the ones where you put up the picture and everyone just goes pale with fear. And after about ten seconds of silence someone in back says, “Well, good luck with that.”

We had one of those recently and the guys who were working on it went and talked to the animator and they threw around some ideas and got something hacked together and gave it to the animator to test.

And the animator came back with this cool friggin’ test with all this stuff going on that just means you have to figure out how to get this guy on screen, I mean, it doesn’t matter if it’s going to take you a year and a half, you just have to make it work, because everybody has to see how cool this looks even though it’s just a little test you did on a hacked up character rig.

Those are the sorts of things that make me want to work in animation — when you’ve got something to put on screen that’s just going to look amazing.