Meet Webster Colcord, the animator and motion-capture artist who relied on a battle-scarred Boxx workstation to bring Ted to life.
A native of Eugene, Oregon, animator Webster Colcord went to work for Vinton Studios right out of high school, cutting his teeth on projects like the Emmy Award-winning A Claymation Christmas Celebration and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. This was followed by years of freelance and studio work that includes countless commercials and Hollywood productions like James and the Giant Peach, Antz , and X-Men: Day of Future Past. Most recently, Webster has earned raves for his outstanding motion-capture work Seth MacFarlane's Ted films. Currently animation supervisor at Atomic Fiction ( Star Trek: Into Darkness, Flight, Cosmos) in Oakland, California, Webster agreed to share his time by taking a few questions.
Growing up in Eugene watching King Kong, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Bakshi's Lord of the Rings (perhaps American Pop as well?) , did you have any aspiration to become a filmmaker, or was it always the quality and creativity of the animation itself that inspired you? As a side note, did you ever see Watership Down? Like Bakshi's rotoscope stuff, the overall look of that animation really blew me away as a kid. A few years back, I found the DVD for my own kids and it scared the hell out of them at first, but they love it now.
I have seen American Pop, but not as a kid. That one wasn't in theaters very long, as I recall. Watership Down scared the hell out of me as well! I wanted to be a cartoonist, comic book artist, and at one time a makeup FX artist. I think it was more the desire to make monsters than to be a total filmmaker, but as I got older, I started understanding the visual storytelling techniques of film and I wanted to try my hand in it.
You were fresh out of high school when you created the audition sculptures for Vinton Studios. Had you been creating sculptures throughout childhood , and had you ever attempted to shoot any stop motion with them?
In my teens I shot a lot of experiments both on film and video. For animation, you really had to use film back in those days. The single-frame recording capabilities of videotape were never very good. So I started with Regular 8mm, then Super 8mm, then 16mm. I tried all kinds of techniques in those early experiments: double-exposure, split-screen with live action, space shots, a little bit of rear projection, replacement animation, foreground miniatures, glass shots...none of it was very good. But yes, a lot of sculptures and little animation puppets - and a lot of pyrotechnics!
Yours is an impressive resume. Was the transition from clay to digital animation difficult, or did it seem like more of a natural progression for you?
It was difficult! I did have some prior experience getting slightly familiar with digital animation. My buddies at Hash Animation in Vancouver, Washington, had given me a copy of their software (Animation Master) to learn on, and I had fooled around a little. At the time I made the transition in 1997, I had my own small animation studio in Portland, Oregon, and I was producing and directing commercials and interstitials. I had worked on a couple of feature projects, but it was quite a shock to suddenly be neck-deep in a big initial CG feature within a large-ish studio. That was Antz, at PDI (newly a part of DreamWorks at the time) and there were all manner of difficulties.
What I discovered was that Hash Animation Master was sort of advanced! At the time, most of our animation at PDI had to be done using a spreadsheet. There wasn't really a graphical manipulator, or poser, until later on. We were using the new SGI 02 machines, which were new and hot at the time, and I was learning Unix. It was really diving into the deep end of the pool!
For about a year, I struggled and then suddenly had an epiphany. It was that even though it was dimensional animation, I was hurting myself animating sorta' straight-ahead like you would do in stop motion. The former cel animators seemed to make the transition easier, and that was because they were working pose-to-pose and locking those key poses down across the animation controls. I was also learning that in CG, your brain is pretty much the only muscle you're using, and you have to be very disciplined in organizing your work to be edited and iterated on later. Before that, I had worked fairly intuitively and loosely in stop motion, where you actually get to use your body in your work. The whole exercise of learning CG made me more disciplined in stop motion as well-more cerebral.
In addition, starting in a very structured studio where everyone was a specialist in their specific departments, where animators only do animation, was sort of coming into CG backwards from how artists learn CG today. Instead of learning CG from the ground up, I learned from a specific discipline and have been working backwards over the years to become a generalist. That has been a really interesting learning process, and I'm still just a remedial modeler!
Image Source: http://www.strangekidsclub.com/2012/06/25/interview-with-webster-colcord/
You had mentioned at one time that after owning your own shop you were tired of working alone in your studio and that you wanted to learn new things and be part of a bigger team. Please explain that need or desire as I think some creators, in regard to the bigger team aspect, might want to go in the opposite direction.
Well, it's a tricky thing. If you tend to be your harshest critic, which many artists are, then you start to become paranoid about being in a vacuum and you doubt the accuracy of your own judgment. And by-and-large, it's easier to learn from others around you than from written documentation-more so because an animator sitting next to you has searched out the
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Meet Webster Colcord, the animator and motion-capture artist who relied on a battle-scarred Boxx workstation to bring Ted to life.
