Making 'Dogstar' with Roseline Lau

9 January 2008

Organisation

‘Dogstar’ is an exciting new animated series from local production company Animationworks, the 26 epsiode show took almost three years to make and employed over 120 people between its Melbourne and Perth studios.

For FTI graduate Roseline Lau the show was her first major empoyment as an animator after graduating from the animation training program and participating in developmental schemes at the FTI Aniamtion Centre.

Rosie’s currently working in Hobart at Blue Rocket Studios on the girls animated series ‘Pixel Pinkie’. As ‘Dogstar’ hits Australian TV screens she reflected on the experience of making the show.

What kind of things did you do between graduation and beginning to work on ‘Dogstar’?

I wrote and made my own short film “Spooky Doll Kids” with support from the FTI Animation Centre. I did a lot of traditional animation for a couple of independent Screenwest funded short films and traditional animated loops for the Big Day Out.

What was your first day in the Animationworks studio like? Were you nervous?

I was lucky and got to start a month before everyone else in the scene planning department with Ian Tregonning who I’ve worked with before. Apart from us, there was only one Editor and various Producers in their own rooms across the hall. So the familiarity of working with Ian, and the rest of the building being quiet with a library feel, it made the first week easy and non-intimidating for me.

*Do you have a favourite character in the show? *

Dino. He’s so dumbly innocent and harmless despite wanting the approval of his evil father.

So what’s a day in the workplace like?

Since we’re two hours behind Melbourne, some of us check the online server first thing to see what shots have been passed/sent back by the Director Aaron Davies (who is in Melbourne) that morning.

Most of the time I’d jump straight into animating or setting up whatever shot I was up to from the day before. Sometimes the other guys have brought in art books, so we’d be comparing/showing each other the books, and listening to animation stories from the more experienced senior animators.

We’d have a Coffee run at 10.30am since we were working on Mt Lawley’s cafe strip, It’s pretty hard to not go out and get a fresh coffee everyday.

Then it’s heads down, animating ‘til 1pm. Lunch is always at the same time for 45 min. Now and then we might have a conference call from Melbourne with Aaron, when starting a new episode. When there’s a complicated action shot, occasionally I’d get a request to call and speak to Aaron directly about it.

Otherwise it’s just animating, chatting now and then to one another about shots, and animation, then animating, animating, animating, to get the shots done on time, til it’s 5pm or 6pm.

What skills are essential to be employed as an animator?

Good TRADITIONAL ANIMATION on one’s showreel! The combination of being able to draw and showing a good sense of weight and timing are the basics, but you’d be surprised at how many people want to be employed as a 2D animator but have neither of those things.

Anyone nowadays can push a symbol or a shape around and call it animation, so if you have two people who have no production experience, the one that can show traditional animation skills will be employed hands down.

Was there anything your training had not prepared you for?

There are two things that make up most of working as an animator that I wasn’t prepared for.

Getting used to animating 8 hours a day. At the start, I felt after 4 hours of sitting down animating, I’ve had enough… and then there’s 4 more hours to go of sitting down staring at the computer screen.

Secondly, there’s the learning how to balance speed with quality to meet the quota as a team every week. In training, students work on their quality, but can be slow and that’s ok. Some students just get things done quickly, with dodgy animation, and it’s ok.

In the workplace, not getting your footage is not ok, and churning out poor animation so that fixups come back is not ok. To keep your job, you have to be fast, plus produce good animation, which can come down to not only knowing how to animate something tricky, but also knowing how to prioritize and juggle the easy and hard shots and not spend too long or too little on the wrong ones.

While your working on large productions do you still get time to develop your own projects?

They do take a back seat while doing the work that pays money. But Tim Merks and I always bounce ideas off one another and we make sure we still sketch and write a lot of ideas down in sketch books we carry round with us.

To find out more about the vocational animation training at FTI click here

To find out about other animation programs FTI has on offer click here.

To read about Stephen Grant’s reflections on working on ‘Dogstar’ click here.

To visit the Dogstar’ website head this way

To read other interviews with filmmakers, click here