Taking Notes – An Interview with Simon Taylor

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Here’s something a little bit different. An interview with Simon Taylor, the animator and director of ‘Taking Pictures’ which I featured a few days ago.

What’s your name and where are you from?

My name is Simon Taylor, I’m originally from Kent but moved nearer to London a few years ago.

What’s your superhero back story?

Christmas Eve 1992 – a nine year old boy sits watching Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers and thinks to himself “that looks fun, let’s do that”. He is swiftly bitten by the radioactive animation bug.

I always enjoyed making films with friends both live action and animated. I carried on making animated shorts throughout school and university, entered a few festivals, and when I finished my degree (Italian and Film Studies, not animation) I did a Masters in Computer Animation. That was followed by Animation Mentor. I got my first animation job working on an animated series called Castle Farm in 2009 and since then I’ve been working steadily – mostly on animated children’s TV series but there’s been some feature work and some commercials along the way.

Currently I’m at Blue Zoo working on Tree Fu Tom.

What was the inspiration for the film?

I’d been looking to do a short animation test of some subtle acting, something different to most of what I had on my reel. After going through the usual routine of looking for audio clips nothing was really exciting me so I decided I’d be more inspired if I made a short rather than just another one-off shot.

The initial inspiration came from the “Before” films by Richard Linklater. Even though “Taking Pictures” turned into its own thing I liked the genuine feel of the relationships in those films and wanted to capture that in animation and not fall into the usual plot and acting cliches.

What was the story process like?

I’d decided to do a “boy meets girl” style story and had an image of the “quick draw” moment in my head which was based on something my girlfriend Kate and I did once while we were passing time in a queue. I really liked that moment and the story grew outwards from there.

I didn’t want dialogue but it was also important to me that there be a narrative reason for there not to be any talking. I didn’t want them to be pantoing when they could just talk. There’s a park near where we live with a river that splits it down the middle so I thought that would work well as a setup. The next thing was to have a reason for them both to be there so I made them both photographers.

I wanted the characters to be different on the surface (both visually and personality-wise) but to bring their respective personality traits out in each other. I also wanted to steer clear of the “manic pixie dream girl” trope where she’d just be the kooky girl bringing him out of his shell. Because the film is really short I didn’t want the big “and they lived happily ever after” ending, I thought it would feel more believable that way and audiences could make their own mind up. There is a photo of them together in the end credits but that’s open to interpretation.

Hopefully at least some of those thoughts came through in the minute and a half they’re actually on screen!

Can you talk about the rigs used in the piece? Only the pigeon was custom-made?

The two main characters are from iAnimate.net from when I studied there for a bit. He is the “Jose” rig and she is a modified version called “Josie”.

The pigeon was rigged by my friend Anton Blake and it was really lovely to animate, I almost want to make another film just about the pigeon! [Ed’s note: That pigeon is great. Really nice design job by Tommy Taylor (no relation to Simon!), with modelling by Darko Mitev and of course rigging by Anton Blake. It’s really good to see custom rigs with the more ‘stock’ iAnimate characters].

I’m by no means a rigger but the other “rig” of sorts was the setup I had for the neck straps on their cameras. Originally they were going to be an nCloth simulation but that became more trouble than it was worth. In the end I just put twenty or so joints in and wrote a simple Python UI to make them easier to select and reset and follow the character’s body around. I had locators parented to the characters in the strap’s default hanging down position so I could quickly reset the strap when needed. Everything was in world space so it wasn’t the most elegant solution but it got the job done!

What’s your animation workflow? 

I nearly always start with video reference. After that I pick out my key poses, check I’ve chosen the best rotation orders for the shot and block them out in stepped mode. Once I’m happy I’ve pushed the key poses as much as possible I’ll add breakdowns, antics and settles and then move to spline and polish it up. I try to get a balance of having enough detail in stepped that I’m in control and not too much that I spend ages cleaning things up.

I didn’t block the neck straps though, they were animated straight ahead once the rest of the shot was finished.

Once you’ve finalled a shot, what’s the next step?

Once the character animation was done I referenced in the most recent version of the environment and made sure all the lighting, shaders etc were all correct. It wasn’t always that simple though as I was rendering and troubleshooting at the same time I was animating so sometimes I’d have to re-render things and have to apply changes throughout the whole film.

Once everything was set though I just rendered out a beauty pass of the character, ambient occlusion, ground shadow, depth and environment and my compositor friend Elaine Thomas made it all look nice. [TECHNICAL DETAIL ALERT] And if anyone’s interested it was rendered in linear colour space instead of sRGB using 32bit EXRs to give the image the most amount of latitude in post.

While the rendering was still going on the sound was done by Jim Fowler once the edit and animation was locked down. The music was written by Lior Trachtman, I hadn’t directed music before so that was fun and she wrote a lovely piece of music that supported the visuals without being too literal to what was going on but still hit occasional accents.

How long did it take?

About a year and a half working in my spare time. I hadn’t expected it to take this long actually but it turned out for the best, I had a bit of a break in the middle and came back to it with a fresh perspective and changed a few bits. The ending for example was a lot longer and didn’t have the pigeon return (they just saw each other and then it cut to black).

Was there anything that you found particularly challenging?

On the animation side it was a fun challenge to try and capture the femininity of the girl’s character without it feeling cliche. Kate acted out a lot for me which really helped with the physicality. I did fall into a trap on one shot where originally, after he drops his camera, she brushed some hair behind her ear and giggled which just undermined her character I thought.

On the technical side the biggest challenge was probably the lighting and skin shaders. Originally I was going to just use Maya’s built in Mental Ray physical sun and sky but when I learnt about the benefits of linear colour that then broke because of how it plays with the camera. I’m not a lighting artist so I imagine this will all sound incredibly basic to someone who does that for a living! In the end I used a directional light for the sun and a blue colour on the camera’s environment.

The characters also have their own three point light setup to give them some more depth. One of the biggest rendering problems was “alien face”. Because the two main characters don’t have a very defined nose if I didn’t get the combination of subsurface scattering on their skin and the lighting quite right they ended up with grey faces and no nose!

What’s next?

I’m happy to have finished the film now so I’m enjoying having more free time. Maybe the next time Kate and I are out and about we’ll do something daft that will inspire something new! I think though that if I do make another short I’d like to do something more collaborative. Elaine’s compositing made such a difference to the look of the film and I wonder what could be achieved with a dedicated modeller, lighter, rigger etc as well. For now though I’m having a rest and making the most of my work at Blue Zoo.

Thanks to Simon for agreeing to the interview!