On Sat, 22 Apr 1995, Joe Smith asked an animator at Reboot: > What do you do on a typical day at work? Well, Different people do different things. Myself, I will be one of the animators, so basically, we bring together the objects, characters, and sets that have already been built and animate them. Besides the animators, there are also two modelers who are responsible for building any new objects or sets for a particular show. I'll take you through a typical show production: The script has already been made and approved, and the dialogue recorded by the time we set to work. It is all laid down in a storyboard that exists on (digital) tape. Someone assigns each scene/shot to an animator. The scenes are divided up pretty evenly, although some are assigned depending on the animator's strengths in particular areas of animation. (ie- complicated fight scene goes to one of the senior animators) Once you have your scene assigned to you (you usually get a few different scenes at once, but I'll just say one), you get the dialogue recorded from the storyboard tape into a digital file. You run this through a program that preps it for the lip-syncing program, called Grin. Then you can load up the sound file and bring in the head of whichever character is talking. Eg-one of my scenes-Megabyte says, "No, No! I was there! ...MOUSE!". So I bring in Megabyte's head and it gets preview rendered real time in a little window. I type in what he says, and the program attempts to set the phonemes of each sound in the dialogue. Then you manually line up each phoneme to its place on the wave representation of the dialogue. The phonemes can be edited for realism because the program doesn't account for different sounds looking different in different situations. Then you put on the facial expression in Grin. While this sounds complicated, it is amazingly interactive and you get to see real time results in the rendered window. You press play, and it shows you what it looks like. While the conception that this is "Automatic Lip Sync" is wrong, in the fact that you manually sync each sound, the process is so interactive, it is fast and can be even fun. Ok. Now you load up Softimage and load in the characters, the set, and any objects the scene involves. You bring in your Grin head and stick it on the neck of the character. Then you can animate the scene. At any point, you can run off a preview to see what it looks like so far. Each suite has a digital TV, as does the main edit suite, where Ian Pearson is (usually). Each suite also has a phone. So you phone up Ian and say you got a test to run. He gets ready and then records your preview on to the storyboard. Then he gives you advice on what to do. (ie- change the camera angle, change the motion, make MB slam his fist on the controls, change your Grin). Because he oversees the whole production, and he puts each scene down on top of the storyboard, he can see the whole show progress. He makes the decisions about continuity, and gives advice on each shot. It says hes the "Executive Creative Consultant" in the credits. That's for sure. Anyway... So you get your scene finished and preview it for a final approval. Then you render it, and it goes into the hands of the editors who do the compositing and put the final shots on the final master. The sound effects and music are done afterward by a sound company. Basic day: On my work experience I would arrive about when everone else did, 10:00am. The hours are long. I left at around 8:00pm and most of the animators were still there. Each animator is expected to do 30 seconds of animation each week. You can come in whenever you want as long as you get your scenes finished. Many of the animators end up finishing things on the weekend. Despite the brutal hours, the atmosphere is far from intense. You would have to see it to belive it. It is probably the complete opposite of what you expect. It is anything but a typical "office". There is a kitchen where you can get Snapple or Coke or a sandwich (all free). Dinner is also catered in each night, and everyone sits around and watches TV. (There is also an unofficial break at 7:30 to watch Simpson reruns on TV). Everyone has a stereo or discman beside their station, and a pile of CDs. Everyone also has cards, pogs, bumper stickers, etc stuck all over their monitors. Action figures, comic books, and magazines are all over the place.(Diversions while waiting for renders/previews) I understand productivity has been lost to the occasional nerf war. One time the suite I was in crashed and it took them hours to get it back up. So we went out for lunch, went to the arcade, went to a comic book store, and then I went home while the others went to a movie. Its an actually fun job (if you don't mind the long hours), and nobody's a "starving artist". Hope thats enough info. :)