Mike A. Smith Interview

Animated Archaeologist

Independent Animator, Mike A. Smith lives in the Pacific Northwest where he works as an Archaeologist and makes animated films in his free time...

I was wondering if you could let us know how you first discovered the process of animation?

When I was eight or nine years old, I was in a stop-motion class for kids for a few Saturdays. A friend and I made some monsters out of plasticene and shot outside on 8mm film. We didn't know how to have a real story or fight choreography, so this lumpy hero would just waddle up to the monsters and chop them into bits with a toothpick sword. We borrowed a Super 8 camera and made another of those in my backyard. I kept borrowing and re-borrowing that camera in later years, messing around with some hand-drawn animation, cutouts, and more clay. Those little Super 8 experiments were enough to hook me into the process. Even when it's crude kid stuff, there's a Dr. Frankenstein-like rush when see your own animation first come to life.

Could you provide a brief timeline of your animation career so far.

It takes forever. Each of my student films only took me between two and ten months, which in retrospect seems super fast. "Cooped" took me four and a half years from the first story doodles to a finished film. Part of that was due to the learning curve I went through while making it-- I threw away a lot of early work that didn't cut the mustard, and I even switched from Toon Boom to TVPaint between roughs and cleanup.

I didn't get serious about animation until my late twenties, when I took classes from Rose Bond at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. I turned out four student films and then waded into the freelancing trenches for a couple years, mainly doing small-time commercial stuff. It was fine, but nothing to get too excited about. In 2009, I was pulled back into my old day job as an archaeologist, and eventually I saw that this was a good way to fund my own animation. My paying work didn't exhaust me creatively, so I was happy putting free time into my personal work. My animation career (such as it is) is now that of an indie filmmaker. Portland is a good place for this sort of thing. There's a pretty vibrant animation community here, and I keep involved via the local ASIFA chapter and a monthly work-in-progress meet-up.

Are you using ToonBoom Harmony, TV Paint or some top secret animation software you have created?

TVPaint is my software of choice these days. I'm no good at "tweening" or puppeting or any of the other Flash-type shortcuts, so I basically just use the software as a traditional, frame-by-frame drawing setup. TVPaint is terrific for drawing. "Cooped" also has a couple of After Effects shots, like when the camera trucks back to show the world outside.

How long does it take you to make a film? Are you working on it every day or on weekends?

As an evening-and-weekends filmmaker, my schedule is pretty irregular. I have weeks where I'm able to put in thirty hours, and weeks where I put in zero hours. Having a deadline was a big help in getting "Cooped" finished. I was lucky enough to get a local arts grant, which came with a deadline, so I had to be much more regimented in the last year of production. The last few months got pretty manic.

Can you give a little history about each film?

I'll just run through the shorts you can see online. A couple of my student films aren't online, and probably shouldn't be.

"Hominid" came from an interest in paleoanthropology-- human evolution and our relationship with other primates. I wondered where a hominid ancestor would see himself on the scale between human and animal, where we like to pretend there's this unbridgeable gap. It's drawn in brush and ink, and colored in Photoshop.

Hominid from Mike A. Smith on Vimeo.

"Missionary" is about how colonialism leaves its subject people destablized, at best. I could go on and on about this, but I wanted to see if the basic idea could be carried within a slapstick cartoon. It's all in pencil. The drawings sit in a huge box in the basement.

Missionary from Mike A. Smith on Vimeo.

"Cooped" was inspired by a friend's dog-- a big brown shepherd/lab mix that I used to share a house with. He unknowingly provided all the reference material needed for a sort of Looney Tunes throwback-- what animators used to call a baseboard cartoon, shot mainly from viewpoint of the household pet. It breaks no new ground in terms of story or theme, but it was really fun to draw. "Cooped" was my first personal project drawn on a Cintiq. Everything before had been animated on a makeshift lightbox made from plexiglass, butcher paper, a gooseneck lamp, and a plastic pegbar.

COOPED from Mike A. Smith on Vimeo.

"Flight"-- a segment in an upcoming collaborative short with some other animators-- is based on something Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote about hypothetically falling through the center of the Earth, combined with Roadrunner cartoon physics. The full short, "How I Start to Fly," will be online sometime...? I think it's getting sent out to festivals these days.

A friend's dog, Caillou, who served as the muse for the film, "Cooped".

What advice would you give to 2D animation students about animation? 3D Animation students?

Work rough, and don't be too precious about it. If you like the drawing but it doesn't fit the scene, throw it away. When you've got the movement and timing down, then you can worry about prettying up the individual frames. 

The same premise holds true for 3D animation, I think. For stop-motion animation, I have no idea. Those people are magicians to me.

On a larger note, animation students should know that being in the animation industry and being an animator are two different things. There are a lot of really talented professional animators who spend their energy wrangling clients for non-exciting jobs while their personal projects gather dust. There's nothing wrong with that-- it's how you build a career, I guess-- but it's awfully freeing to keep your income separate from your art. Some of the most imaginative work I've seen has come from students, because they're not stuck in somebody else's financial machine yet. Fund your own animation! Do it on the cheap if you have to. Whatever you do to pay the bills--whether it's animating commercials or serving up lattes-- doesn't change whether you're an animator, if you're making your own work.

(Disclaimer: if you seriously want a professional animation career, you should find a career animator who can give better advice than that.)

Which part of animating do you enjoy the most? Writing the script? Character Designing? Storyboarding? Voice recording? Animating?

Animating, by far. It can put me in a state of flow, where everything feels like it's firing on all cylinders. Story and design and the other steps are much tougher for me. By the time I get a character designed, I'm ankle-deep in bad drawings. With "Cooped" I actually made a couple Sculpey maquettes to help feel out the dimensions of the man and the dog for the animation process.

I'm working on my next film these days, but I'm still bogged down in story limbo. Working out the story is, for me, a long cycle of thinking about it really hard, then not thinking about it at all. You have to fool your own brain into producing story ideas. Going for walks helps.

There are pros and cons to being independent, but I prefer it. Working outside the studio/freelancer system means that I only work on projects that I'm fully invested in, and my animation is my own. 

See more of Mike's work by visiting his website: tenpoundtoons.com

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