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  • {digg}
    Senior Animation supervisor
    David Schaub never gives up.
    He finds a way.
    CGSociety Artist Profile - 25 June 2007
    By Barbara Robertson

    Early in the film Surf’s Up, the legendary surfer Z pats young Cody Maverick on his head and counsels, “Never give up. Find a way. Because that’s what surfers do.”

    It is, in fact, exactly what the film’s senior animation supervisor David Schaub has done. Schaub maneuvered himself into a career as an animator at Sony Pictures Imageworks by doing what he most loves to do: animate.
    “I’m always looking for opportunities to animate,” he says.

    In fact, Schaub began tinkering with animation when he was 10 years old. At the time, he was living in Belgium where his father worked for NATO. Other kids played with chemistry sets. He borrowed a neighbor’s 8mm camera, and created stop motion movies with clay and paper cutouts.

    “This was in the late sixties, early seventies,” he says. “Disney’s ‘Aristocats’ was in the theaters, and I was totally inspired by these drawings coming to life. But what really got me going were the 8mm shorts. Disney distributed these three-and-a-half minute black and white reels to the home market. I had a little hand-cranked projector so I projected them on the back of the door, cranked forward and backward, and traced over the drawings. I was completely fascinated.”
    His father, though, convinced him that it was safer to become an engineer than an artist, and, engineering degree in hand, he started his career at Hughes Aircraft in El Segundo, California. He stayed there for nearly 10 years. But he never stopped animating. “I was always dabbling,” he says. “That’s where my heart was.”

    But, when 3D Studio became available, Schaub brought his love of animation to work. “I started doing technical animations to explain the optical mechanisms and components for satellites that we were designing to our customers,” he says. “I’d animate orbital maneuvers of the satellites and visualizations of tricky satellite antenna deployments. Once I started doing that, I simply couldn’t stop. I started looking for a way to do more animation.”

    He found it through a night class at a UCLA extension, and that changed his life. The instructor, who worked at Imageworks, recruited him right out of the class. At the time, Schaub was newly married and had a daughter on the way. “I was 35,” he says. “It was a big moment, but I realized that if I was going to make a career change, I didn’t want to wait too many more years. So, I plunged.”

    He landed in Imageworks’ multimedia department. This was 1995, and the entire Imageworks organization could fit around a large conference table in the TriStar building. There, he worked on previs for several films, effects for television, music videos and ride films, supported Centropolis’s work on ‘Godzilla’, and created butterflies for ‘The Craft’ and for ‘Patch Adams’.

    When Imageworks formed the Digital Character Group to do ‘Stuart Little’, Schaub signed on. “It was our first real character show,” he says. “This was the first time that the animation work would be organized and executed in a single, dedicated department” In the multimedia department, Schaub had done a little of everything from modeling to rendering. With ‘Stuart Little’, he would specialize only in animation for the first time.
    “It can be a hard decision for some people,” he says. “When you specialize, you limit your options. If you choose to focus on animation, then you will certainly get much better as an animator. However, it might be difficult to go back to a smaller studio unless you’ve somehow managed to keep up your modeling, texturing, and rigging chops – as well as keeping up with the latest changes in software and processes. But, I’d wanted to be in animation since I was a kid. It was a no-brainer for me.

    In fact, when animation for ‘Stuart Little’ ended, Schaub kept animating. “Sometimes, one of the frustrations animators have on a big show is that you animate the shots you’ve been cast, and those shots might not be the meaty shots,” he says. “I was hungry to do more.”

    So, he got the source material from the dialog recording sessions of the actors still talking when the microphones were on. Using that dialog, and working during the down time after the show and at night, he animated several gag shots of Stuart and the Stout family in the style of Aardman’s “Creature Comforts.” “It was a surprise to the production, because they had no idea that I was doing this on my own. The studio ended up rendering one of the more “appropriate” gags and included it as one of the extras on the DVD.” Schaub says.
    That was in 1999. He moved up to lead animator for ‘Stuart Little 2’, and won a VES award for best character animation in an animated film. And then he became animation supervisor for ‘The Polar Express’ for which he received a VES nomination. The nomination, for outstanding performance by an animated character in an animated film, was for Steamer, one of two human characters that the crew animated entirely by hand.

    “It’s not any animators’ dream to be handed performances that are done for cleanup, but I learned a lot about human motion and mobility,” he says of his experience on ‘The Polar Express’. As a result of that experience, he believes motion capture is at its best for one-to-one performances. For example: “If you capture a human and apply that motion to a monkey, it will always look like a guy in a monkey suit,” he says.

    In addition to the motion-captured characters in ‘Polar Express’, animators keyframed the animals and the two characters that drive the train. It was the animals in ‘Polar Express’ that led to his work on ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ for which he led teams of animators who created believable, talking beavers, a fox and the wolves, as well as the white deer and the effects work for Mr. Tumnus.

    But it was the gag animations that he did for ‘Stuart Little’ way back in 1999 that convinced ‘Surf’s Up’ directors to hire him for that film. They found the animations in Imageworks’ archives and the sensibility and style was a perfect match for ‘Surf’s Up’. Schaub became senior animation supervisor for a crew that eventually grew to 60 animators.
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  • In ‘Surf’s Up’, we watch the film through the eyes of a documentary crew filming one penguin, teen-ager Cody Maverick, competing in the 10th annual Big Z Memorial Surf-Off. It’s the first feature animation filmed in a documentary – or mockumentary – style; the first feature that allowed animated characters to be self-aware, to come alive in a new way.

    “This is the stuff everyone hungers for,” says Schaub. “Usually, the purpose of animation is to support and embellish what’s in the dialog track through the use of supporting body language. In this film, we sometimes animated in complete contrast to the dialog to get that subtext going in the performance.

    Cody is all pumped up because the movie is about him and you can see it in his relationship with the camera and with the crew behind the camera. The Geek is annoyed that the camera is near him. Reggie, the surf promoter, is all about the camera. He’ll do anything he can to promote himself, but as soon as the camera is off him, he’s a little bastard.”

    To cast the crew, as animators began rolling onto the show, Schaub and a team of four lead animators assigned each crew member the task of animating “walk cycles.” “In addition to the usual walks and runs with attitude variations for each, I had them do paddle cycles on surfboards,” he says. “Walk cycles are notorious for revealing who a character is and how they see themselves in their animated world. And on the flip side, we can learn much about the animators’ strengths and capabilities.”

    To reveal the emotional state of characters, which might or might not match their words, animators used postures, subtle eye shape changes, eye darts, the direction of a gaze, a lift of the brow, a tilt of the head, a breath that they take, and so forth. “Backing off a lower lid by 10% can change the emotional state of the character entirely,” Schaub says.
    Backing off on complex rigs helped the animators experiment with acting ideas. “I think it’s better to animate with a stripped-down puppet that is fast than a slower rig with a lot of cool features,” he says. At first, the Imageworks crew built physically accurate penguins rigged to wobble like real penguins, but that quickly changed. “When we coupled the penguins to the naturalistic human voice tracks, the wobbly penguin behavior looked ridiculous. The two worlds collided badly.” Schaub says. “So we rigged them to move more humanistically.”

    The animators’ challenge was to create performances that felt spontaneous and unrehearsed. “The style could be called caricatured reality,” Schaub says. “It’s real-world dynamics pushed to caricature without breaking the fundamental rules of physics and gravity.”

    Although sometimes the animators crossed the line and ventured into pose-to-pose cartoon physics – for the Pen Gu natives, particularly – physics generally ruled. “The rules in place had to remain consistent,” he says. “We couldn’t change physics to suit a certain animator’s style no matter how interesting that performance might be.”

    The documentary style demanded that reality, but also the waves. Although penguins are on the board in about only 20% of the movie, the shots were key and incredibly difficult. “We couldn’t animate with a procedural surface,” says Schaub. Instead, the riggers created waves in Maya using blend shapes that the layout artist and animators manipulated to create the shape and the action. Then, they constrained the surfboards to the waves and put the penguins on the boards. Six offset nodes with moveable pivots that animators could place anywhere on a surfboard allowed the penguins to swing the boards underfoot realistically.
    At the peak, Schaub had a team of 60 animators on the show, but that didn’t stop him from animating, too. “It’s a big load,” he says, “but if I didn’t animate, if I couldn’t get in there and do this stuff, I’d prefer not to be in the business.”

    Schaub assigned one team exclusively to the surfing sequences, and another three to the rest of the film. “In many cases we had strong ideas about the action and business in the scene, but we often let the animators run with it,” he says. “The shots took shape as they animated them; we let them come up with great gag ideas.”

    As he had done himself back in 1999. When Schaub looks at reels from prospective animators, he searches for the same kind of spirit. “There was a time when an animator could get a job with some good walk cycles and tests, but the bar is so much higher now,” he says. “It’s more about emotion and performance.”

    He doesn’t want to see demo reels with every shot someone has done spread over a reel accompanied by heavy techno music tracks. He’d much rather see a character showing a thought process or see interaction between characters.

    “Focus on delivering an uninterrupted performance,” he advises. “Let the camera roll. Let’s see you perform in front of the camera naked on the stage and do something that provokes an emotional response.”

    Emotion doesn’t necessarily mean tragedy. “We don’t remember the darker pieces as much, no matter how finessed and clever,” he says. “We remember the humorous ones. Not to mention that comedic timing is much harder to execute successfully.”

    He applies that advice even to himself. Although assured of a supervising animator’s roll on the crew for ‘Stuart Little 2’, Schaub joined the ranks of animators at Imageworks who auditioned for a roll in the film. Each prospective crewmember got a button, a matchstick, a thimble and a week to create something with any of those props and the Stuart Little character. “I just had to do it,” says Schaub, “even though the senior supervision assured me that I was inked in as a lead, they said I shouldn’t take a chance on blowing it with a bad audition. It was another opportunity to animate, and I simply couldn’t help myself.

    Some of the more senior animators took offense at the notion of “auditioning” for a spot on the film, claiming that they had been animating for years and shouldn’t have to prove themselves time and again. I saw it as an opportunity to have fun – with a piece that would be completely self-directed! What animator wouldn’t be all over that?”

    He had Stuart do a tap dance using the matchstick as a cane and the thimble as a top hat. At least, it started as a dance. “I kept going,” Schaub says. “I couldn’t help myself.” At the end, Stuart slips, falls and gets the thimble stuck on his head. The match lights. His tail catches on fire and he runs around with his tail on fire as the fire travels like a fuse up to his body and he explodes at the end. “It was a little beyond the call-of-duty, but it is exactly these kinds of opportunities that animators should latch on to and milk for all that they’re worth.”

    So, it’s easy to imagine Schaub’s advice to animators: “The key is to animate, animate, animate. Do what you love and keep doing it and doing it. Make the best of shots you’re given. Even the smallest and most insignificant shot can be turned into something great in it’s own way. Find a way to create your own opportunities. You never know what doors your archive of material will open for you in the future. You just never know.”

    ‘Surf’s Up’
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