A Perpetual Battle
While I'm very proud of having been part of The Simpsons for so many years, I missed the finesse of full animation, on which all of my early training had focused. Many of my ambivalent feelings about the animation business spring from a Sophie's Choice between:
A) the project with plenty of time, money and resources to execute beautifully a narrow range of tired old material...or...
B) the project with almost no time and money to execute fresh and exciting material.

Given this awful choice, I've reluctantly chosen the latter, and found myself in television (i.e. The Simpsons), more often than not with material superior to anything I'd encountered in feature animation. Then, however, I was tied to a schedule that allowed us only to fill a few boxes with drawings and detailed instructions before we had to send it overseas.

Fortunately, with The Iron Giant, Warner Bros. has offered me my first opportunity to do something in feature animation outside of "the familiar tale set to Broadway music" formula, but with a budget sufficient to execute it here, in this country, under one roof and in full animation. Still, our parameters are tight. With a production schedule a year shorter and a budget less than half the size of our friends at either of the two D's (Disney and DreamWorks), our margin for error is minuscule. However, we are determined to tell our story as effectively as we can.

Adobe's After Effects is becoming a key tool for a variety of stages in animation production. It is now used as the main storyboarding software on The Iron Giant.."

Enter the New Technology
One of our most useful tools has been the use of After Effects, an off-the-shelf software technology by Adobe. My first exposure to this technology was several years ago, when I was up North visiting a friend of mine, Matthew Robbins, who, when not writing or directing feature films often directs commercials for Industrial Light & Magic.

He asked me if I wanted to "see something cool" and proceeded to show me a "moving storyboard" that had been executed just the night before by I.L.M. effects supervisor John Knoll, co-author of Adobe Photoshop. Using only the pre-existing storyboard drawings Matthew had been faxed by the ad agency, a Macintosh computer and the program he'd co-created, Knoll had added tremendous dimension and motion to the sketches, quickly transforming them into real movie shots.

Tree limbs swayed in the wind as leaves blew through the air. Camera moves turned flat drawings into dimensional multi-plane shots. I was hooked. I began to imagine how I could use this fabulous technology in animation and now, with The Iron Giant, I've finally gotten the chance.

Using camera moves on pose test reels is certainly nothing new, (we even used them on The Simpsons to try to get our timing down before we shipped the shows overseas), however, they have significant limitations; the artwork is semi-transparent, and has to be carefully registered on animation paper.

Traditionally in feature animation, camera moves were developed much later in the process, most often after animation was complete, and if the idea of the shot wasn't solid, much more time and money had been wasted.

What is unique about After Effects, and another comparable program Macromedia's Director (which we actually began with before switching to After-Effects full-time), is the speed and flexibility of the program. One can simulate complex camera moves with remarkable accuracy, using simple, unregistered artwork that is opaque like finished animation.