Scott Clark is educated as an animator and illustrator from Rhode Island School of Design and has since been working for Pixar in the US. Here he has been working on a number of their big productions such as ‘Toy Story 2’, ‘A Bug''s Life’ an the new ‘Cars’. Apart from working as an animator, he also works as a director. Besides his job at Pixar, he teaches computer animation at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, California, and at The Animation Workshop.
Interview with Scott ClarkJob Title: Supervising Animator, Pixar
Years in Field: 9 years
Were you always interested in animation?
I've been drawing since I was about five. I grew up drawing cartoons and watching Bugs Bunny on Saturday mornings. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, the movies that inspired me were the mythic fairy tales of our times, like Star Wars.
So I left Kentucky and went to Rhode Island School of Design, where I studied illustration and animation. I learned about drawing and painting, design and cartooning—I was trying to figure it all out. When I graduated in 1996, computer animation wasn't as big as it is today, but Toy Story came out my senior year.
Through luck and talent, I ended up at Pixar as the first intern hired while Toy Story was still in the theaters. I completed my senior year knowing I had a job to come back to in California, which is really rare for an art student.
What do you most enjoy about animation?I really enjoy my coworkers. They have the same interests I do, and they're at least as talented, if not more talented, than I am. As animators, we have to be collaborative. It's hard for an artist's ego to get in the way when you're collaborating like that.
How does the collaboration work?
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The bulk of my career as an artist is producing footage. I get a scene and it's my job to animate the scene, to bring it to life, to convince the audience that the character exists as a living, breathing entity. It's kind of an invisible craft.
Animation isn't new. We're just using a new medium. It's different from 2D animation, though we still use similar design elements as in drawing caricature. But at Pixar, we caricature these things with 3D models. It's like being an actor or puppeteer. In my department we animate humans; we don't animate the wrinkles on the shirt, or the hair on the monster, or what water does. We're all animating the same character, and we have to collaborate to ensure the acting remains consistent.
As a supervising animator, my job is to help the director and work with the other departments: story, layout, set direction, lighting. There are all these pieces of the production pipeline, and I'm constantly in contact with the people who are before us and the people down the line.
All the elements look believable, but it's completely a simulation in the computer. The lighting is an illusion, based the rules of how light bounces and reacts. All the models are 3D; they're virtual reality models.
What's most challenging about animation?
Entertaining the audience, while giving them something new or surprising instead of the easy solution. We have to do something new—to make the characters more believable by giving them human flaws. You want to come up with something real, something truthful. It's believable when you're not doing it perfectly; you're doing it the way a person would do it.
The best art is not predictable. It has surprises in it. The spine might be a familiar story, but layered on it are all these surprises that give the audience more than they expect. When you get into the performance you've got to layer in subtext and complexities that communicate to the audience, like when the character is smiling, but they're actually sad.
We're working in slow motion, 24 frames a second, beat by beat, pose by pose, to create this performance that's very considered, but it goes by in seconds. It should feel like it's happening for the first time. It's the same thing an improv actor does. It's an introverted form of acting; we're hiding behind the bug or monster. Which is why I like animation. I'm interested in caricaturing things, because caricature often shows more truth than if you're trying to be realistic.
What skills are most important?
One of the skills people don't realize is important is acting ability, being able to put yourself into another character. If you haven't tried taking an acting or improv class, give it a go.
A sense of design is also important. You aren't animating a hologram; you're animating one camera angle, projected on a flat screen. It's the same thing as a play where the actors are on a proscenium, presenting themselves to the audience.
I tell students to take life-drawing classes, animation classes. It helps to have a good sense of humor, a good sense of story. Animation is a very specific and odd craft. You're combining a lot of different elements into this one art.
Any closing thoughts?
Animation isn't a stable field. It's been around for less than 100 years. There have been peaks and lows. Once, animation wasn't successful as a business. Now 2D animation is dead, and 3D animation is popular. You have to love this craft; you have to have faith to make it in this fickle and weird industry.
