Yeah, I know... it's a little late... 1 year, 4 months and 22 days late, to be exact. But hey, who could blame me? A lot has happened in the last year that needed my attention, while poor ol' thesis-y here sat on the back burner, like a half-baked piece of humble pie. I guess my reasoning was "Hey, it did it's job! It showcased what I could pull off as an animator, I graduated... hell, I even won an award with it! What's the point, then?" . And for a long time, yeah, that was my excuse. Despite some coercive nagging from friends, colleagues, and especially my dear ol' Ma, I stubbornly stood my ground and refused to budge. But over time, I really began to feel guilty about it. This short wasn't a one-man show, a lot of great people helped me get it as far as it did. I mean, just look at the credits!
JoshTomar and Chris Zito did some really excellent voice work for the film. Andy Scherman provided wonderful music accompaniment and sang the credits song. My girlfriend Shannon did the color styling and colored every single background (except one, which my friend Cory did the flat colors for). Many wonderful underclassmen, first and second year students, took time out of their busy schedules to help color a lot of these shots for me when I was scrambling for time. Even fellow thesis students gave a hand with coloring shots too, despite their own deadlines they had to meet. Not to mention countless students, teachers, classmates, friends, and family members who gave me a lot of support throughout my final year of school. And I wanted to be a selfish, lazy so-and-so and stow this thing away in a digital trunk to never be seen again. It was unfair to them. So I finally broke out the ol' thesis folder (which I fortunately did not delete), took out the shots that needed to be finished and started finishing them.
But before I go any further with the "finishing the unfinished thesis" part of the story, let me go back and talk about the genesis of the film:
I started thinking of ideas for my thesis back near the end of my third year. The first thing that popped into my head was using these two characters for something, but I held myself back. "No, no, I've drawn these characters a million times before over the past three years... I want to do something different for a change. Something original". So I thought of a bunch of different ideas that I wanted to do. One was animating to a piece of classical music like in Fantasia, another was resurrecting an unfinished film from my second year, and one was just a little too gruesome, even for me... but after every idea, I would always ended up falling back to these characters. Out of desperation, and time, I decided to use them anyway. But what could they do? What should the story be? Would it work? The one good thing I had on my side was that I knew who these characters were completely. They had been cemented in my mind for a long time by that point, and I knew what they could and couldn't do. In a way, I let the characters dictate and tell me what they ought to be doing, rather than forcing something upon them.
At the time, I had just chosen Howard Beckerman as my thesis advisor, because we had a pretty good relationship up to that point (and still do!), and I felt we understood each other on the same level. He came up to me on the last day of class and asked me something:
"So, how do you feel about thesis preparations for next year?"
"Anxious." "Good! Good! That's a good sign!"
"Why's that? What's so good about being anxious?" "That means you're seriously thinking about it! You're nervous and scared because you know this is important, and you care about getting things done and doing a good job on it! If you didn't care, you wouldn't be anxious!"
Reassured by Howard, I left for the summer and focused on my film. Thinking of the story, throwing around relative gags or lines, laying out shots and boarding, all the while throwing things back and forth with Howard for advice and clarification. In many ways, Howard was the perfect guinea pig for my film. If Howard could understand it and follow the story, then everyone else who'd see it would be able to as well. Howard kept me on the right track.
By the time classes started again, I had everything planned out and was ready to start production. And at exactly the right time, the trailer for the new Winnie the Pooh film just came out on Youtube. It was that final inspirational push that got the creative juices flowing again.
But there was a big hiccup. I originally started animating the film traditionally on paper. But by the time Christmas break came around, I only got a little over a dozen shots completed. One day near the end of the break, I was spending hours on one small shot and not getting anywhere. Then as a test, I animated that shot in Flash in about 20 minutes. I realized at that point that I wouldn't get the film done if I kept animating on paper, so I switched to Flash, only because it was quicker to clean up, color and composite, rather than have to scan every drawing in. So I went back, scrapped everything I did up to that point and started over.
So I only had a couple months to animate, clean up and color my whole film, and it definitely shows, especially in the clean up, which I had only about two and a half weeks to do. I was originally going for that sketchy 60's Disney Xerox style, but in the end it just looks like a scribbly mess. I feel that I had some decent animation throughout, but my rushed clean up sort of butchered it. And to top it off, it made the coloring a heck of a lot harder to do. A lot of broken lines, gaps in the artwork... it was a pain. Luckily I had a few really patient underclassmen helping me color those shots while I rushed to get others cleaned up.
And like the rest of my other thesis classmates, the end got really really hectic. The final deadline loomed and we were all rushing to get everything put together in time for the April 15th deadline (coincidentally, on Tax Day). Since the sound editing labs were booked full by the film department students, I did all my sound editing using Adobe Soundbooth (a horrible program) in the back room of the animation studio the night before the due date. Knowing that I wouldn't be able to get the film 100% complete by the deadline, I submitted a rough-cut of my film, which was complete except for about 10 shots that were left in the rough animation stage. After the Dusty screening, a lot of people came up and complimented the rough animation parts, because they thought it was interesting to see the rough stages of animation before it's polished, so it wasn't too bad. Overall, the film went over decently at the screening. The laughs came where I wanted them, and I was content with that. The biggest one came with Howard Beckerman's caricature on the brochure. Of course most of the audience was made up of SVA students, so it's not that surprising.
After that, I just packed the film and all the related files in my computer and left it to gather digital dust, which is where it stayed until a few weeks ago, and eventually now!
I believe I've improved a lot as an animator since then, so it's kinda hard to look at this now with a straight face, but I'm mostly satisfied with the results. I learned a great lesson from this film, which is to not bite off more than I could chew. Having fluid animation, full color and a film as long as this (clocking nearly at 6 minutes) definitely took a lot out of me. That's why since then I've kept things as minimal as possible, like with NEST and my upcoming short which I'm currently storyboarding. As long as something is kept on simple terms and executed as such, you can always add more on top of it later on. It's best to work with bare bones and build everything on top of it once you got the structure down, like an armature for a sculpture.
I want to thank everybody who helped me make the short, those who supported me throughout the production of it, and to all the people who begged/nagged/stuck a gun to my head to finally finish the thing. It wouldn't be here without you!
Apparently it's "Trailer Week" on here, because here's another trailer for something I had a part of:
This is a book trailer for an interactive children's book by Jan Thomas. After NEST was put up and shared all over the web, Jan contacted me and asked if I could help create a trailer for her. And it was a heck lot of fun to do!
The animation was puppeted (with a few hand-drawn bits) in Flash using pieces of Jan's illustrations and compiled together with titles and images in AfterEffects. Jan gave me a lot of creative leeway when it came to the little bits the characters did throughout the trailer as well as the overall timing, which was really great! Overall, it was one of the most straight-forward and happiest job experiences I've ever had, and I'm very proud of how it all turned out.
Make sure to pick up a copy when it comes out later next month, either as a hard copy or an eBook for Kindles n' such through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes or whichever bookstore you prefer and visit frequently!
Here's the sneak peek trailer for something I did a little animation on (Everything in the trailer and about 95% of the final short was animated by Josh Palmer, who is an insanely incredible animator). It's sure to be the beginning of something really fantastic, and I hope we have the chance to make more of 'em!
I'll post more about it when Episode #1 comes out, which should be really soon!
Like many appreciative and supportive (albeit naggy) parents/guardians of someone who dabbles in the visual arts, I have been pressured to nearly wit's end about writing a children's book since I barely picked up a pencil. It's not that I don't WANT to make a children's book, it's just that having somebody constantly telling you that you should because it would A) be cute, B) make a lot of money, and most infuriatingly C) that it would be SO easy to do, makes me less inclined to do so each time they bring it up. It's even worse when they try to bring in "family connections" to help you publish the thing, even if they may not even have the slightest idea of what they're doing.
But in all honesty, I have thought about writing a children's book for some time, and when freelance work dies a bit, I think I'll give it a go. I've actually already written one some time ago and kept it in my vaults until whenever I decide to dig it up again. It's about a tiger who wakes up for breakfast with a seemingly unending appetite. I, at least, think that the idea is solid enough for a book. But I've had one big issue; designing the tiger.
I had to figure out who the tiger was and, more importantly, what he looked like. Was he an adult tiger? A cub? An adult tiger that acts like an immature cub? Should he have a long slender body, or a short stout one? How realistic/stylized should I be? I spent some time studying tigers, as well as fictional tigers from comics and movies, both for inspiration and to help me avoid designing something that already exists! If it's too realistic, it'll look like Shere Kahn. If it's too graphic, it'll look like Hobbes. There seemed to be a fine line there, at least for me.
But after a lot of scribbling and rough designing (while I will scan and post at a later date), I eventually ended up with this:
While the look of the tiger was pretty much in place, the one thing that really helped me cement the design was to try animating him. By doing so, not only did I phone in on the design a bit more, but I got to understand a bit more on who the character was and how far I could push the design. So I did a rough test of him taking a big tiger bite out of a peanut butter sandwich:
Yummy!
Now that I'm a bit more confident with the look of the tiger, I can start planning out the layout of the book, and how I will go about getting it made. I've heard some good things about sites like Lulu, and I know a few authors, so maybe they can give me a few tips. But it never hurts to ask around, so if anyone knows more about making and self-publishing a children's book, feel free to drop me a line!
I'll post more about this as I go later on. Take care!
Like my friend Shelley Low (who I interviewed last September), I met Giorgio during my freshman year at SVA in 2007. Over the following four years, I got to know Giorgio and see his work progress and grow exponentially, culminating to his 2010 thesis film, Short Winded (a short excerpt appears below). His film was a highlight of that year's animation screening for me. Great animation, creative designs, incredible backgrounds... all done by him singlehandedly! His film was nominated for Best Film at that year's Dusty Awards.
A few weeks back, I met up with Giorgio and talked about his experiences so far and what his plans are for the future:
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MR: At what point did you say "I
wanted to become an animator" and how old were you at the time?
GR: I've asked this question myself to
a lot of friends and they've all given me more or less this same
answer. While it's hard to say exactly when it happened, I was one of
those kids was drawing since the age of 2 or 3, who sees a Disney
movie and thinks, "I want to make cartoons like they do", and
it doesn't really hit you that you want to do it for a living at the
time. But I would say I always wanted to do it, though I didn't know
it for a fact until my late teens. But I've always had an inclination
towards this profession.
MR: So you had an affinity for it early
on, but you hadn’t considered it until later on, until high school
that "I want to do this, I want to be an animator"?
GR: Exactly. I hadn't really considered
it as a viable option until then. It seemed like it could only be a
hobby and nothing more, at the time.
MR: Was there any specific movie that
just made you click in your head that you wanted to do this?
GR: I have very fond memories of
Aladdin and The Lion King. Those two are the main inspiration that
eventually pushed me to want to be an animator.
MR: You’re from Italy.. and you’re
seeing these films in Italian. And I know about Bruno Bozzetto, but
is animation really a big market or does it have any sort of
prominence in Italy?
GR: For the most part, it's all
imported Japanese shows or American shows. But having said that, I've
recently discovered of an Italian studio that actually produces some
Italian cartoon that are being aired in the state like Winx Club.
That show's been in Italy for a number of years now. There's a little
bit of a movie industry there, though it's not as mainstream as
Hollywood is here US. At some point in time, the movie industry in
Italy, which was really strong in the 60s and 70s, just became much
weaker than used to be.
MR: Have you been looking at any
Italian filmmaking and animation?
GR: There aren't many recent films that
pop out at me from Italy's modern film industry. They made a feature
film about 10 years ago, which translated into English, was called The Seagull and the Cat, which is based on a Chilean
novel of how a cat tries to teach this seagull how to fly. And it's
actually a really nicely animated feature film with a really cool
story.
MR: As far as art is concerned, was
your family supportive of your decision? Did they embrace it or try
to guide you into something else?
GR: My Dad was expecting me to get into
architecture or nanotechnology. So you can imagine how well that
conversation went [laugh]. But eventually, they were very supportive
of my decision, and they did not hinder me from doing it, even if
they might've been skeptical at times. And now my younger brother is
also pursuing animation.
MR: Was he inspired by you?
GR: I wouldn’t say he was inspired by
me, he always had the same general interests as I did. But I think
seeing me go for it made him understand it was possible for him to go
for it as well. Now he's studying CG animation at Ringling.
MR: Is Ringling in-
GR: It’s in Florida, and it's one of
those schools were they take the students and put them in big
companies right out of school. You could almost say it's the CalArts
of CG animation.
MR: What made you decide to come to the
US for college? Did you apply to any other schools? And was coming to
the States a really really big jump for you?
GR: Well, it wasn't that bad since I
lived here from the age of 6 to 10. Then I left to go back to Italy
and came back for the 7th grade in to live DC, and have been here in
the US since then. By this point, I've lived just as much in DC as in
New York City.
MR: Why SVA? Did you look around for
any other schools, or did you apply for any other schools? And what
appealed to you specifically about SVA?
GR: SVA was close to DC, where my
family was staying at the time so it was a convenient location. But,
the last time I had lived in New York I was 10 years old, so I was
way too young to begin too appreciate the environment the city can
have, like the artistic culture, and the fashion styles and all those
things. In retrospect I'm glad I chose SVA, because I got to
experience the City in that sense. It has a lot going for it in the
artistic scene, but being in an East coast city, animation-wise, it's
different from what people tend to do over in the west coast.
MR: And did you ever think of going to
the west coast?
GR: The west coast has a different
style of animation, but I think it's just as appealing. I would love
to go see what it's like there.
MR: So did you apply to other school
besides SVA?
GR: Besides SVA? I applied to the
Academy of Art University, which should be west coast… and I think
I applied to RISD, and I got waitlisted there. In the meantime I got
accepted at SVA, so I went straight for that, it was one of my top
choices.
MR: Did you get accepted at any other
schools?
GR: I got accepted into the Academy of
Art, and for RISD I got waitlisted, but I can't remember past that.
MR: I see. So looking at it on a scale,
you thought "I can go to school in New York City, that’s the
thing for me."
GR: You know, it is. I've actually
visited RISD too, and it's like a small town kind of environment and
it's very suburban. Most of the students, to get around, they ride
bikes. I had a friend there who I visited often, and after seeing the
difference, I am so glad I went with SVA. Because living with all
these people in a building, all together, in a crammed space… and
then going to the studio – getting to know them better - helps
build a big sense of camaraderie for me and I like that a lot.
MR: And you hit it off with people
immediately?
GR: Yeah, right away. Since Orientation, I've been meeting people that I'm still very tight friends with
today. And then I also met people like you there, and people that had
been there years before me... everyone was just very friendly.
One of many backgrounds Giorgio painted for his thesis film, Short Winded.
MR: Who were your teachers? Did you get
a lot out of them? What did they teach you?
GR: I had Doug Crane for first year,
and I'm so glad I had Doug Crane. I had no idea who he was when he
was assigned to me, because I didn't get to choose my teachers for
first year, but... Doug Crane is really just one of those teachers
that knows what he's talking about. He's been there, in the industry
for a long time. He worked on He-Man and Raggedy Ann and Andy. He
just knows all these little tricks... he is basically very old school
but that was the great part about his teaching method: he wouldn't
teach you how to animate how they would today, but how they used to
animate. So you got to go from this basic sense of how to do things
and, during my second year, I had a more modern teacher, Celia
Bullwinkel, who introduced me to Flash and started getting into that.
So now you get these two very contrasting approaches to animation.
MR: It’s a good foundation. Because
everything’s analog. You learn everything the hard way first, and
it gets easier as you go.
GR: Exactly, exactly. And I think it
makes it easier than someone just handing you a program saying "Here's Macromedia Flash. Lear it and animation at the same time" and it's very counter intuitive. Whereas you can learn animation -you
know how to use your right hand, or left hand if you're left-handed -
and you just draw. Then, here's the program, apply what you learn by
drawing and use it on this program. It's just more intuitive.
MR: And how was Celia’s second year?
GR: Celia's second year was great. We
did a lot of acting exercises. One of my favorite ones that I did,
was the sneezing exercise. You know it's little things like that. You
think, "you know it's just a sneeze". But when you start getting
into all the little details and nitpicking all the muscles that might
move, the twitches of the body… the sneeze is a very complicated
motion and it can vary a lot.
MR: What I liked about her assignments
is that it was something either quirky or fun. One of them was a fat
person sitting on a chair, and you would learn about weight and how
to anticipate. And the fishing pole assignment.
GR: She does do a lot of those. I
didn't get those two, because teachers seem to add stuff to their
curriculum so I didn't get those. But, yeah, she did do a lot of
thing that, at least on a subconscious level, would force you to use
weight and form and incorporate that into your work. I'm guessing for
third year you also had Howard [Beckerman].
MR: Yeah, I had Howard.
GR: So did I. He was great to have for
third year. He had all these acting exercises and he was very…
intricate about going about them.
MR: And what did you think you got out
of Howard specifically?
GR: Howard is great, he is a very
easygoing guy, but he's very strict and he knows what he wants you to
get out of his animation exercises. He knows when the acting is good.
Whether you're a good or a bad animator doesn’t necessarily mean
you're good at making your character act the way he should be. And I
was a pretty decent animator by that point, but my acting for my
characters was not up to par. Howard's class changed that and made me
see how much further I could push a character to express things or
how to pantomime things.
MR: Any other favorite teachers or
classes you think you got a lot out of?
GR: Don Poynter's Layout and Background
class was very good. Just learning about colors and composition…
that was so important.
MR: And now 4th year comes,
and you’re up to your thesis year. How did you come up with the
concept for your thesis film.
GR: My thesis film, which was Short
Winded, is about this little wind sprite getting chased around the
forest by a monster. The way I came up with it is that, earlier that
summer, I had found out about a little French animation school called
Gobelins. And their students make all these amazing quality little
animated shorts, usually not lasting more than a minute, as you know.
I had seen my first one that summer, which was Fenrir. And anyone
who's seen Fenrir will ask me "Did you base your film off of that
film?" And I would say yes, because I totally did. I was so blown
away by how beautiful Fenrir was that I wanted to do something along
those lines. Something kind of Tom and Jerry-esque, without too much
of a character plot, not too deep, not too overwhelmingly emotionally
involving… but something fun and light-hearted. You know,
fast-paced, but light-hearted.
MR: I remember seeing it back when you
were working on it, and you were doing everything. You did the
backgrounds, the animation, everything. You had a lot on your plate.
And it was about 4 minutes long… is it that long?
GR: It is that long, maybe a little bit
past that now, because I added a little bit to the ending.
MR: How turbulent was your thesis year?
[laughs] Were you killing yourself right at the beginning?
Were you
going through a lot of hurdles or was it pretty straightforward all
the way through?
GR: It was a bumpy ride, but in the
sense that there were times you felt like you were going uphill and
other times where it felt like it was just smooth sailing all the way
through, until you hit another bump and then you're again going
uphill. I think the biggest problem for me was in the way beginning,
and I gave myself time to buffer for this. And that was that I did
not know how to paint in Photoshop.
MR: And who taught you?
GR: I taught myself.
MR: Really?
GR: The first background I did for the
movie, which is also one of my favorite ones, took me three days to
do. But it took me three days because I was learning to experiment
with the program. After that I learned to work out and spit out
background within a day's time. And I would get at least one done a
day until I was done with all the backgrounds.
Another background from Giorgio's thesis film, Short Winded.
MR: And was the animation all on paper?
GR: No, I went completely digital. I
used Flash. I wanted to do it with paper, but I knew that if I had
gone traditional-
MR: You would never have finished.
GR: Yeah, because I planned for the
fact that I didn't have time to scan papers and to composite them.
By
going completely digital, at least, I could guarantee that I could
get that consistent that I was going for.
MR: After finishing you film, ranking
up to your peers, your film went over pretty well?
GR: Yeah it did actually, it was
nominated for Best Film.
MR: Looking back did you feel that SVA
was overall a good experience? And what did you think you got the
most out of those 4 years?
GR: Well definitely a lot of regrets,
but also no regrets at the same time. The management of the
department was a common concern of the students, and even of the
faculty, as it's not run too well. But on the same count, so many of
the students there are great friends and they're great contacts,
they've given me jobs and tips, and the teachers keep in touch too.
After getting the chance to meet all those people, I wouldn't give it
up for anything, even if I had the chance to go back and change it.
MR: And that’s what you think you got
the most out of it, the people?
GR: The people was the best thing, you
can learn animation if you put your mind to it on your own time. Just
buy the Animator's Survival Kit, spend tike practicing every day on
your own time and learn it yourself, but you can't buy a book and
meet all these great people. It's something that comes with the
experience of being in that kind of environment.
a short excerpt from Giorgio's thesis film, Short Winded
MR: What do you enjoy doing when you’re
not working? Do you like to draw or do you only draw when you’re
working?
GR: After I spend an entire day
working, it's really hard to go back to the computer and force
yourself to draw for pleasure. You just want to go like "eh, I
just want to watch TV for a bit", and you just watch TV [laugh].
But I do enjoy drawing, it's still fun, as it should be.
MR: How much outside drawing do you do?
GR: Not enough, that's always the
answer [laughs].
MR: Have you thought of doing any work,
like a personal short or work for your reel?
GR: Oh all the time. I always get some
ideas I wan to do for some short. Recently, I was thinking that I
would like to combine my interest for animation with my interest for
video games, and I was thinking about programming a game. I want to
learn C++, so I could eventually make some 2D side-scrolling
old-school game.
MR: And this would be a game you would
download on a game website, or something that would blow up to full
proportion?
GR: Ideally I'd love for anything to
grow to full proportion and be able to sell it, but you've got to
start out small, especially when you're like me and you don't know
any coding at all. You've got to look life in the eye and be real
about it and understand that you're not going to make that huge game
in the first shot. I'm going to go small with the first couple. If
it's going somewhere from there and I'm having fun with it, from
there I can always move on to something more serious.
MR: Do you do anything besides drawing,
like sculpting or painting?
GR: Sculpting and painting, no. My main
interest has only been drawing, and I couldn't turn my back on it for
anything else. I would consider it counter productive to take up
another interest, at which I'm not skilled to boot, in exchange for
time I could be using to get better at those few skills that I'm
really interested in.
MR: Do you prefer drawing on paper, or
do you prefer digitally or either?
GR: I probably like drawing on paper
best. It's more natural and the feel is nice to the hand. It's
harder. On a computer you can erase, no matter how bad the mistake
is. If you're using a pencil on paper, you can't completely erase the
pencil line all the time. For painting and coloring, I would go
digital all the way.
MR: Do you use Flash, or Photoshop-
GR: Yeah, Flash and Photoshop are the
main ones. Photoshop mainly for painting since it can at least meld
colors. Though I would like to try SAI some time soon.
MR: Have you tried other programs like
TV Paint or Toon Boom?
GR: I tried Toon Boom very briefly. I
want to get more into it, but I can't get my hands on an 'Animate'
copy. The basic version doesn't have all the features I would like to
use to actually be able to begin exploiting the program. I like that
it takes the key components of Flash and it actually improves them
for animation, whereas Flash seems to be moving away from that trend.
A digital piece by Giorgio Renna.
MR: What are some people or movies,
that your work is either based or inspired from?
In The Lion King, the scene where Simba
loses his father is very powerful. It's one of those scenes that is
just burned into your brain, where I can still close my eyes and see
it happening. As far as names go, he's not really related to my
business, but Shigeru Miyamoto, the Producer from Nintendo.
MR: What inspires you about him? His
style, his creative approach...?
GR: Yeah his approach to creating games
and characters and starts with a simple idea. : let's take an Italian
plumber, make him move from left to right, and if he reaches the flag
pole enough times, he saves the princess. In terms of storytelling
it's simple but it's still a narrative. As you move from left to
right you create your own story as you go along. It's a very
interesting way to tell a story interactively. Even with such a basic
structure, the fact that the story can be, not just entertaining, but
also enthralling, to me is very surprising. Playing "Super Mario World" and watching the ending credits I almost remember crying because I
was so moved by the overall game experience, by the story. Not only
did I just see the story, I was a part of it. It involves you and it
moves you.
MR: Speaking of video games, have you heard about Wreck-it
Ralph?
GR: I have, I have! I’m very excited
about that movie, maybe even more so than Brave. Even though Brave
looks gorgeous, the potential behind Wreck-It Ralph is amazing.
MR: Yeah, it will be mixing animation
and video games. As far as an audience goes, not everyone is into
video games. So to that point, they say it’s not very universal. On
the other side, die-hard video game fans are kind of jumping saying... whenever anyone tries to do anything parodying or based on a video
game, it never turns out exactly right. So from your perspective, how
do you feel? Do you feel like you’re in the middle, are you gung-ho
about it, do you have any reserves about it?
GR: Oh, I'm gung-ho all the way, but in
respect to how people feel about video game movies, that it's a very
narrow sector culturally-wise, could be said about any movie. There's
things like Ratatouille, that's very cooking-specific. I don't cook. My cooking skills are basically limited to using a toaster. And
Ratatouille was still a touching movie. It's not the subject matter
that matters; it's the characters within that subject that make the
movie good and the story. I don't think that having video games as a
subject matter makes it a weaker film.
MR: When you sit down and you animate,
what do you enjoy animating most?
GR: Definitely character. I don't like
animating effects very much as they can be tedious and difficult to
do. But during a very extreme movement for a character that involves
a lot of twisting and turning. If it's a very extreme action and
complex motion you can get away with morphing the character a lot
more. That makes drawing it more fun and organic.
MR: Do you prefer comedy, heart-felt or
will you enjoy any kind of-
GR: I would say a little bit of
everything. I can't do just all-out comedy or all-out heartfelt. I
would get bored. A little bit of both I think is the best recipe.
Giorgio's animation for 11 Second Club (April 2011)
MR: Where do you see yourself in the
next 5 years, what would you like to do?
GR: I see myself still doing what I'm
doing now, still doing animation. I would like to be somewhere in the
west coast, working there.
MR: Do you think that you’d like to
make the jump out there soon?
GR: Maybe after seeing how things go, I
would like to go within the next couple of years.
MR: If there’s a dream job, what is
it that you would like to aim for?
GR: My current goal, would be to be
able to one day work for Dinsey or Pixar. Even if should ever get to
that point, I wouldn't want to stick around there forever. I would
want to move on to something different. I get bored easily.
MR: Would you only stick to animation:
would you do storyboarding or cg or do you have anything in mind and
you want to keep to that?
GR: I don't mind doing anything as long
as it relates to animation. I just have a very complicated love-hate
relationship with drawing backgrounds. But I am learning how to do CG
as we speak.
MR: You’re learning what, Maya?
GR: Yeah learning Maya. Learning the
nuances of animation in CG, as opposed to traditional, is a little
different. I learned it back in college. Now I think I'm more
comfortable that I can start doing some more decent animations with
it.
MR: What are your feelings on CG?
GR: CG is just as good of a form of
animation as any other, but I secretly resent it for injuring the 2D
industry, in the sense that we're not seeing as many 2D movies. I
guess I more so resent the corporate aspect of animation for thinking
that 2D is not a profitable means of animation. But -
MR: There’s a sentiment that seems to
say that 2D is only for kids.
GR: Exactly. But asides from that, CG
is just as good as 2D. You can do things differently but they can
have the same effect. Sometimes they can have a better effect. It's
just another art form.
