Marten Coombe
“John used to say it takes ten good years to make an animator. Although you can learn the art of how to draw like an animator, the hardest thing is learning how to think like an animator. You have to know how to translate real motion into cartoon motion in this game. And he was right, it does takes about five years get the basic skills and another five years to polish them.”
“I honestly think it takes the better part of a decade to become a decent animator. It takes years of experience to learn how to direct a sequence and be able to keep the character true. Not only does the animator need to be able to draw twelve drawings a second, but they have to make it the sequence believable. Its fine to be able to draw something once, but it’s another thing entirely to draw something a hundred times with the same mass…and for it to remain the same character!”
“Having learnt the basics from John, I thought of joining Hanna Barbera or Disney in Sydney. Back then, the test for a job at Disney was to turn around five feet of quality animation in 24 hours. I was lucky enough to get Goofy as my test!”
“They had an interesting way of working. We had to deliver 22 feet a week and everything over 25 feet you made bonus. For most of us we could manage around 30 feet of traditional animation a week, but we had this one crazy guy who did 120 feet a week! He earned an amazing amount of money at this rate, but all of his sequences never made much sense. They were always having to fix his work. We used to call his animations ‘crazy eyes’ because he would always do one eye twice as big as the other..even for normal scenes!”
“Disney was crazy fun. They had 50-100 animators in ‘bull-pens’. You can imagine, with hundred people all in open plan offices you could hear everything. You can imagine how many conversations would go on in a day. To get any sort of privacy we would wear ear muffs that construction workers wear… you know the ones they wear with their safety helmet. Just imagine all of these people coming to work at Disney wearing construction ear muffs! Everyone was a crazy as a cut snake there. It really was one of the funnest times of my career.”
“Later in my career, a friend of mine came to me with this idea for a kids puzzle book he wanted to call the Merlin Mystery. Well, it became mega famous for us worldwide. We developed this amazing puzzle that no-one ever cracked. The prize for cracking the puzzle was $125,000 plus this beautiful wand made from ancient gold, threaded with Brazilian crystals that were set into silver. I designed it and had a specialist silversmith create the thing. We even had it on display in the Bank of England for a time.”
“Working on the Merlin Mystery with Warner Books, forced me to join the digital world of illustration. I had never done anything like this before and the Merlin Mystery opened the door for me. And that’s how I got into working as a 3D animator for the next few years.”
“From there, I went to see George Port who was one of the original founders of WETA. George was working as onset supervisor for Pacific Renaissance doing the TV shows Hercules, Xena the Warrior Princes, Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of all Trades. At this time, Harrison Ellenshaw was the VFX supervisor at Universal in LA and was giving most of the difficult stuff to Flat Earth Productions. However, George really wanted to do most of the VFX work here.”
“And that’s where I come in as the VFX coordinator. We had around 30 artists across four shows with 100 shots a week to deliver. For the big episodes, we had to deliver around 400 shots per commercial hour, so we were pretty busy most of the time. I did a load of VFX design and direction on both Hercules and Xena, which was a real baptism of fire for me.”
“Nowadays, I am working with VFX/post house Sauce, doing heaps of TVCs and long form work. Over the last six years have have worked as the animation director, VFX supervisor, account manager, producer, concept artists and matte painter! I have such an incredibly varied role which really works for me, because of my bizarre career. This industry can give you such an amazing ride. But to really enjoyed it, you have to be totally flexible.”