I have been researching the role of assistant animator and clean up artist as it’s something I am strongly leaning on to start my career. I have briefly covered the role for a student film abroad, but at the time I wasn’t fully aware of how dynamic the role was going to be or what it fully required.
Assistant animators take the animator’s drawings, make each frame precisely on model and apply the final ‘line’ that will be seen on screen. This is known as clean up. They will often have to fill in frames that the animator did not need to produce. To do this they follow the animators ‘charting’ – visual instructions left for the assistant animator as to where missing drawings should come in the timeline. This is known as in-betweening. They might also lip sync, which means drawing the mouth in a way that lines up with the speech.
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This role is normally advertised under few different names depending on the country or studio one would end up working for. In bigger studios there might be an animator assigned to just clean up the roughs and bringing everything on model and the job is later passed to another artist in the Ink and Paint department, where the final lines will be applied, as well as colour. In smaller studio, an assistant animator will probably cover all of these role, as the amount of animation to clean would be much smaller.
To better understand what the role is about and what kind of skills are necessary, I have approached and interviewed Kimi Kurbanova. Kimi is an animator who has worked on various project for Cartoon Saloon and Studio Meala, mainly as a clean up artist.
What is the difference between the role of a clean up artist vs the one of an assistant animator when working for a big (in terms of number of employees) studio?
From my experience of working in both a big studio, as well as smaller indie studios, these titles are interchangeable. As a clean up artist, I cleaned up on-model drawings, and inbetweened the animation based on the animator’s timing charts and notes. Clean up and Assistant Animation go hand in hand here. Having said that, this of course differs from studio to studio. But in any case, it helps to have solid draftsmanship for both roles.
What would be the weekly tasks of a clean up artist? Do you find the weekly quota changes massively from project to project? Or studio to studio?
Each Clean Up department has their own structure of working, but this is what a week would consist of for me:
Typically, a Lead or an experienced Clean Up Artist would be assigned to draw Spot Keys – these are the foundational, storytelling beats of the shot. These drawings require a good eye, as the drawings have to be perfectly on model. They serve as a guide for the next artist, who will be drawing the rest of the Keys, Breakdowns and Inbetweens. Consistency is important with each step.
Once the Spot Keys are approved, the next step is to draw the Keys and Breakdowns. This task may be assigned to the person who drew the Spot Keys, but could also be assigned to someone else.
When Keys and Breakdowns are completed, a Lead or Supervisor will have a look at these and either give feedback notes or give you the go ahead to move onto finishing the Inbetweens. When the entire shot is complete, it is checked again by the Supervisor for approval and is then ready to be reviewed by the Director.
Depending on the project’s style, there might be an “Additional Cleanup” step where colour separations are added for the Ink and Paint and the Compositing department. As an example, this could be cheek blushes, eyeshadow, highlights and such.
In the studio I worked at, the weekly quota was counted based on the amount of seconds of fully cleaned animation that the Director approved.
From my experience, the quota tends to stay the same on a project, but of course circumstances may change, meaning the quota can be lowered or increased – depending on the output of the team.
3 – Was there any sort of advice you wish you’d been given prior to entering the industry?
Before entering the industry, I wish I had a better understanding of everybody’s roles within a studio. It of course varies for each studio, but a general idea of who I should be liaising with throughout the day would have saved me from wasting other people’s time.
For example, it took me a while to realise that I should be communicating with my Leads more to show them my work in progress, instead of always going to my Supervisor. And that I should be keeping in touch with my Production Assistants and Coordinators more regarding deadlines and if I’m struggling with shots.
4- How was your experience trying to get your first job in animation after graduation? Is there anything you did that you think helped you secure that first (or even later) job (s)? (Skills, networking, your personality etc..)
It took me a while until I found my first in-house studio job, almost 2 years to be precise. I had been doing a bit of freelance up until that point but not really earning a stable income.
I believe what helped me get my first job was the fact that I was readily available for a project that was urgently seeking animators. It also helped that I already lived in the same city as the studio and had a showreel showcasing some basic animation skills and a CV that showed I had been actively involving myself in other projects. It’s so cliche to answer these questions with “right place, right time” when getting a job, but for me it really was the case!
Another animator/ clean up artist I follow, Marc Hendry, has recently published a video thoroughly explaining the clean up process:
He explains how in the production of Cartoon Saloon’s My Father’s Dragon, his role as a clean up artists would involve cleaning up about 10 drawings a day. This is obviously very specific to a certain studio workflow and the fact that he was working a feature production with a longer timeframe. He says his role is not just about adding cleaner lines, but also redifinng the drawings and most importantly, maintain the volumes of the characters.
Cartoon Saloon’s pipeline is quite unique, so he would receive a couple of cleaned frames to refer to. He would later proceed to clean up the key frames (unless this was already done by a clean up supervisor), and later move on to break downs and finally, the rest of the inbetweens. This ensures that there’s more consistency with the character as normally key frames would be quite different from each other. In this way, is harder to make mistakes with volume changes. After the clean up of a scene is complete, he would later do a fix pass to check for any possible mistakes.
In the video he also talks about a stage between the roughs and the clean up. Depending on the style of the animator assigned to a certain shot, the animation might need an extra level of information before the cleaners lines are applied. This is because the notion of “rough” is different to every animators (some have cleaner style than others). Animators such as Glen Keane are more focuse on the performance rather than keeping a character on model from the very beginning. This means that extra work is necessary for the assistant animator or clean up artist to add what is needed to make the character on model before proceeding to the proper ink stage.
To be suitable for this role one must have a good overall craftmanskills, a solid understanding of animation principles, be familiar with timing charts and excellent communication skills. As mentioned, I have had a bit of practise working for other animators and I have quite enjoyed the task, so I would definitely like to apply for this role in the future. I wouldn’t mind starting out as an animator but I’m aware how competitive the industry is and where my skills are at the moement, so I think the assistant animator position would be more suitable for me.