Frame of Mind: The One Puppet Future

Intro

There comes a time when we dream about the way things are and what they could be like. Recently, I’ve had this kind of dream. I call it the “One Puppet Future”. Now I’ve recently written blogs on this topic, but that was from a behind the scenes perspective. The dream I’m talking about today is more important. It’s not just about technique (though it does include it). It’s about vision. I’ve longed dreamt of a time when I could tell my stories, enjoy the process and live a well balanced life. This vision of my future life is for the first time within my grasp.

The meat and potatoes behind all of this is a simple thought: what if it were possible to get everything that I wanted? The ability to tell any story that I want, in the most fun and exciting way and without killing myself over it? Could such a thing be possible? For the longest time I didn’t believe it. It was just a dream. But the past year of experience I’ve accumulated from animating my shorts and working in Toonboom had led to newfound sense of boldness regarding my work. I want to talk about that today and hopefully the realization of this dream will be the start of a new chapter of my life.

A Look Back

I have talked a lot about the older versions of my puppets on this blog. Perhaps almost too much. The reason for that is because they’ve been so integral to the experience of animating these shorts and in some ways have reflected where I am in that moment of time. To sum up there are 4 versions of my puppets currently (with my modern puppet being completely reclassified).

Version 1 was created when i first started Frame of Mind and was the first real puppet I made in Toonboom. It’s definitely amateur but there were a lot of ideas I had, and a strong desire to get animating. It was a mess. I’ve made many puppets before, but I didn’t really have an idea how much of a headache this puppet would give me. It had IK (inverse-kinematics for the uninitiated) and cut out layers. It had so many layers and it was so time consuming to animate, and restrictive. Re-purposing assets for other things was a nightmare, and it just wasn’t a very work friendly pipeline. It also couldn’t handle being re-purposed and built into other puppets, which is a core part of my series (I haven’t done very many animations with multiple characters because of this one persistent issue). So that’s when I decided to make Version 2.

Version 2 probably wasn’t big enough of an upgrade to count as it’s own version, but it was when I first started experimenting with building secondary puppets. The first time I used this was in the short “House Ni**er Part 1”. The character there was thrown together in a few days and there was a lot of problems. If you re-watch that short, you’ll notice that the puppet doesn’t really move. That’s because it was a nightmare to animate, and I didn’t really need it to do much so it didn’t do anything. It was basically a glorified placeholder and my time would have been better spent making an illustration, but it gave me valuable lessons for Version 3.

Version 3 was the hope for a new future. I took the lessons I learned and updated the puppet so it could handle secondary characters. For once things were looking good, that was until I started animating. This is when the house of cards first started collapsing for me. This puppet was a mess from the get go. Spinned off from my main puppet, version 3 came with issues like: IK animation not working and bugging out, deformers getting misaligned and broken, sloppily put together assets for secondary puppets, layer orders that don’t make sense, colors breaking, the whole she-bang. It was so unwieldy I had to upgrade to version 4 midway through the production of a batch of shorts.

Version 4 was where hope came to die. That’s a bit dramatic, but it took me a while to really get what was going on. In version 4, I fixed a bunch of the problems in V3. I re-made some core assets so that the deformers would work better, I separated deformers from IK, cleaned up the irregularities and hope started to shine through. I had begun creating an army of puppets based off this version (this is when things started imploding). Things were good, until I started further separating the secondary puppets from their ancestor. I began building pre-animated assets for the puppets so animation could go quicker, but I had to do it 3-4 times, across the different families and for 100+ frames. If that’s giving you anxiety, the truth is it was even worse, because these assets had to be updated in the libraries and those needed to be brought in other files to work for future projects. Updates that started off small began to snowball and it all ended up crashing and burning in July of this year when I realized I just couldn’t keep up with what was going on. No one could. It would have to take a team of people to keep things going with the way they were going. I had lost the vision.

All of these plus more would need to get updated. It was nuts.

On top of all the issues I’ve just talked about were so much more: uncertainty over what could be used across files, bloated scenes, time-consuming upgrades, messy node view (a specific view in Toonboom where you can access all of your layers very easily) heavy puppets. When I say it was looking grim, it really was getting bad. I was getting burned out, unhappy and anxious about making shorts. The potential for fun and excitement that jettisoned me into making this series was all but lost at this point.

A Dream of Spring

Before things got to unsustainable levels, around mid-July I asked myself if I could salvage this, would it be worth it, and what would my future look like. My answers were: I couldn’t salvage this, it wouldn’t be worth it to even try salvaging the original puppets I made, and if I kept on this road I would be so burnt out that I would walk away from the project. It’s hard enough making a film, but to have essential components of the production process work against you was a level of adversity I wasn’t ready for.

An image of the old rig.

I began to wonder if there could be a better way? I had time due to a much needed hiatus of production I took from July until now (at the time of this writing August). Do you know that nagging feeling you get when a thought doesn’t leave your brain and it keeps bothering you until you confront it? That’s what was happening to me. I kept asking myself if there was a better way. Than I began telling myself there had to be a better way. Than I started thinking what that better way could be. Than I got excited.

Very shortly after having these thoughts. About a few days, I decided to throw out all of the work that I’ve done for the puppets so far. I did not literally delete the work, but I deleted the thought that I had to stick with what I was making and suffer through more production with assets that weren’t up to snuff. It was a new day, and work began on re-working the puppets from the ground up. This time with all of the knowledge and experience I’ve accumulated, and with a new attitude of never wanting to do big updates like this ever again.

A look ahead

It’s been about a month since I started re-building the puppets and I’m almost done. I haven’t been this excited for the work I’m doing for a looong time. It has been a Herculean task, but the results are already showing. This new puppet is built with universiality in mind. Meaning that animation can be shared across all the puppets where specific deviations aren’t present (for example, a bird and cat character can share body animations, but not whole face animations because those assets are different). This means that 1 puppets animation can be re-used in whole or in part for any other puppet I make. Why animated 5 different run cycles, when I can animate 1?

The new rig. I’m so happy with it.

Another perk is that the puppet profile is way slimmed down. The modifications are setup where FX mods are logically separated and out of the way so animation can happen quicker. The FX mods work across puppets and if there needs to be slight alterations, they can be made without being destructive. Puppets can be modified on the fly and those modifications can be built on for cleaner puppets. The node view I talked about earlier benefits A LOT from this new structure. Getting to the right layers for animation is quick and seamless. The only drawback, if any is that some layers are buried a little so accessing them takes a fraction of a second longer to get to, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to pay for.

The goods don’t stop there though. Since I’ve been working on this update, I’ve also had the time to clean-up the puppets to a degree where I was surprised by how much better they’re looking. When I first made the secondary puppets I had to balance the actual process of putting them together with making the assets, so they looked a little wonky. Now, the animal puppets have been cleaned up and in a lot of ways they even look cooler than my own puppet! There’s a lot of cool tricks in them that give them a sleek and professional look. Since I don’t have to worry about if each one will work, I can put all my energy in making them look good. To compound that, it’s also quicker to make the puppets. When re-assembling the animal characters, I was able to do so in about 30 minutes and have a mostly proper functioning asset.

Snapshot of the cleaner organization. Swapping assets out are a breeze now!

The less time I spend updating these puppets, the more time I can spend making better films. I have only just begun telling what I feel are compelling stories for Frame of Mind. Now that a huge chunk of production time will be gone, a lot of that will go into making the stories better. It doesn’t stop there though. These new puppets also are able to be upgraded in smaller doses without breaking anything else. So if there’s a problem I find when animating, I can do a quick upgrade and move along. No hassle. No more do I need to make whole new versions of puppets just to iron out some issues.

These are only some of the great things about what’s happening now. There isn’t enough time for me to write out every little nuance of how this is going to change things for me, but for the first time since I’ve started this project, I don’t feel any anxiety started new shorts. In fact, there’s a hint of excitement and restlessness because I want to animate something with these new assets really badly!

Outro

I know I’ve been talking about these puppets a lot (both on this website and on social media), and I promise i’ll slow down on this topic very soon. It’s just that I’ve been dreaming about this time for so long it’s almost surreal that it’s finally here. I can put my full energy and reactive abilities in telling stories in the best way that I can instead of fighting with myself and my own assets. Worrying about the scale of a film, whether I should make films with secondary characters or not are a thing of the past. Now it’s about “will this be good and fun to watch?” or “can someone learn from this story?”. I can finally fulfill the promise and potential of this series in a way where I won’t drive myself up a wall, or suffer from burnout.

It’s the start of a new era for me. The Frame of Mind shorts have been very small in scale, but now that the potential for growth is able to be realized, I can start making festival quality shorts and (hopefully) even move beyond that. These are very exciting times for me, because I don’t have to dream about if things could be done better. Not only do I know they can, but they have. I’ve done it! Now it’s time to take the dreams I’ve had help people begin to realize their own.