How An Animator Made A Challenging Shot Look Easy
Animator Ere Santos has written a Twitter thread in which he recounts a “terrifying request” during the production of Dreamworks Animation’s Spirit Untamed: animate a horse spinning around and trotting backwards, while having a human twirl on the horse’s back.
To add to that pressure, there were four additional characters in the shot, all of whom would be interacting with each other.
(1//10) I've been getting a lot of questions about my process for animating this shot from #spirituntamed. I would say this one definitely made me lose a lot of confidence at first, but gain twice as much in the end.. Here's a thread! pic.twitter.com/zqrNagVKIG
— Ere Santos (@ereoflight) January 16, 2022
After initial hesitation, as well as encouragement from his animation lead, Santos dove into the assignment. On Twitter, Santos details his working process, from creating a checklist of what he wanted to accomplish in the shot to research and shooting reference. From start to finish, the 11-second shot took him around a month to complete.
(7//10) At this point, I would usually film reference, but that turned out not to be very useful for Lucky, the centrepiece of this shot. So I figured I'd just animate Spirit first and since Lucky was on his back, she'd just respond to his movements. pic.twitter.com/xV5Qzy2WJS
— Ere Santos (@ereoflight) January 16, 2022
The resulting shot looks so effortless that it would be easy for a casual viewer to overlook the challenges of creating the animation, and that, writes Santos, was the ultimate goal: “My main goal in this shot was to keep it entertaining from start to finish without being distracting. I didn’t want the audience to see any of my choices, just feel them.”
If you’re wondering what Santos is doing now, he’s working on the Spider-Verse sequel:
This is the shot and the reference I used for the shot I animated from the new #SpiderVerse trailer.
If you've ever heard me speak about acting for animation, you've heard me say, "USE REFERENCE AS REFERENCE". pic.twitter.com/ubD4rqMApW
— Ere Santos (@ereoflight) December 10, 2021
