Computer Animators In The Film Industry Must Understand Character Animation

These days, it is rare for a film not to have any sort of computer animation or graphics included in it at some point. In fact, James Cameron just created an entire movie that used more computer animation than any other adult film ever had in "Avatar". The fact that Mr. Cameron had a small army of computer animators working on the film to give it the wonderfully polished look that drew in so many fans that it broke all the box office records currently set to date seems to be an incredibly wise investment, on his part. These computer animators, however, need to have some basic fundamental knowledge of computer animation that they learned in college.

One of the fundamentals to know is how to create animation. If one has no imagination, no creativity, there can be no imagined world in which blue-green tribes of people live and die, alongside a host of exotic creatures that would give a dinosaur a run for its meal. While creativity cannot be taught in school, letting one's imagination run wild can lead to a wildly popular film that sweeps the box office and makes millions of dollars in a single day. That is a great pay day for a creative mind.

Character animation is another thing that computer animators need to know and understand in order to be successful in this field. This is the actual creating of the character in which the character is created on the computer, along with its personality and everything that makes that character all that it is.

For example, in the film series, "Lord of the Rings" Gollum was a character that was played by an actor, but he was completely created in a computer lab, using the actor's body as a jumping off point. The resulting miserable looking character looks nothing like the actor who played him, but because the computer animators knew exactly what they needed to achieve with his character, they knew exactly how to create him, along with the various other creatures, like the winged beasts and belrock that were creatures of Mr. J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination. It was amazing to see the evilness of the living flame of the belrock that was on screen, and it was flawless how the animation made him so terrifying.

Programming animation software is also a fundamental aspect that computer animators need in their repertoire. This is how new affects are created, because someone thinks of a sequence of events that has not happened before and they build a program to create it.

In the same trilogy "Lord of the Rings" the battle between the Horsemen and the Oliphants was one of these creations because there is no such creature as an Oliphant in this world. There would also be no way for animal trainers to try and train an elephant to act and react the way that the Oliphants did in the film, whether they were stomping on the horsemen or being shot at by archers. There would also be no way to fit a riding regimen of 30 men on the back of an elephant and try to shoot the scene that way. It essentially made the filming process that much easier for the director.