Rango: A Talk by Doug Sutton

A decent seat to the side. Now to conquer the fear of the dark.

On Thursday March 31st we were able to attend another talk by CASO (Computer Animation Studios of Ontario). This time it was by Doug Sutton a technical director for the feature film Rango. This talk was located in the Scotia Bank Theater and yup you guessed it. It was in a theater. The best part about just showing up was receiving a brown bag lunch. Filled with snakes. Kidding it was filled with delicious sandwiches and baked goods. This is how you bribe a student. Food and talk about their profession.

BTW that is the corner of Arthur's head from The Indies Guys podcast. God damn it Arthur.

The theater was a little dark so I was surprised I could get decent photos. Well Doug Sutton appeared and the talk began.

Lot of cool concepts. I really like their "ugly character" style.

He went over the concepts for Rango and described the difficulties of having "ugly characters" to relate with. The solution? make them have cute attributes and character traits. Making a "ugly character" do cute things certainly makes them seem more "real." mobsters running a store for abandoned baby pets...wins my heart any day.

awwwwwwwww yeeeeaaaaaaa. Schoolgirl Mouse. Sorry something is wrong with me.

Going over models, animations and concepts.

I wish math was always like this.

An interesting and effective way of making animal based characters. Math.

Whose eyes are those eyes? Hahahaha...I'm scared now.

He discussed the importance of eyes and how animated/3D/CG eyes always produced the same unrealistic effect. A lot of emotion does begin in the eyes and how eyes are genuinely different with varied layers.

Guy: " ummm anyone going to put out that fire?"

Then started to talk about the cast and animation teams. Some excellent points for aspiring animators. That would be to actually get up from your seat and act out your scene. It may be embarrassing but is highly effective for figuring out which bones and muscles move. Also the cast for Rango acted the scenes together instead of separately which probably gave it more of a "natural" effect.

This tail is the best tail.

Being a technical director he went into great detail about Lighting and the production pipeline and how to make it more effective. The Ideal animation pipeline is linear but there is no ideal pipeline and then discussed how continuity is awesome and how it makes a huge difference in animated films. Then finally talked about the convergence of technologies how they will change in the future. Such as shader unification, file type unification, and renderer unification. Pretty interesting stuff.

Ever feel the urge to jump? Good neither do I.

So that was all there was time for. He headed out with our heads constantly saying "watch Rango NOW!" and full stomachs. I actually debated going to watch Rango right there in the theater. So we left and proceeded down the stairs of Scotia Bank Theater only to ascend the stairs of our profession. Man I say some good things sometimes. I am awesome.