Animation Mentor:
What inspired you to become an animator?

Jalil Sadool:
I remember making my first comic at the age of 7 and asking my mom how to translate the word “kill” from French to English. Now that I think about it, that comic was pretty violent for a seven year old. I was probably influenced by the huge amount of Japanese TV shows that were extremely popular during those days. I’ve always loved drawing but never knew that animation was even a possibility. I grew up wanting to become an illustrator even if my parents thought that you can’t quite make a living out of comic books. I would fill up plenty of sketchbooks with monsters and aliens and would spend hours of the day writing stories about them. I think I was around 15 when my perception of animation changed. I was watching the Disney Channel and a Lion King special with Andreas Deja came up. He was explaining how he drew Scar and how many drawings were needed for just a few seconds of animation. I knew that there were people that did that kind of work but this was the first time I was able to put a face to one of them. I guess in my mind, animators were creatures that lived far away and unseen by us mere humans. I remember being amazed by the way he held his pencil and how fast he drew. There was so much confidence in the way he drew his lines. It was at that point that I realized I wanted to see my drawings come to life too.

Jalil Sadool:
In art school, I dreamt of becoming a character animator and working for one of the big animation companies, but never had I imagined how much time and energy would be required when working in the animation industry. I enjoy drawing and used to draw a lot but nowadays I don’t find the time to do as much of it as I’d like. Prior to the introduction of computers as an animation tool, creating a frame of animation required much more attention than it does nowadays. The animator would have to labor on each and every frame to get to the final result. There was no quick way (playblast) for the animator to see their progress in motion. Sometimes, the process of shooting a scene would take days. The animator would have to do extensive work in planning their shot, knowing every frame that made that shot and planning in such a way as to minimize shooting time. That painstaking process would unconsciously train the brain to precisely understand spacing, timing and posing. Today, with the help of the computer, things are made just a bit easier and each frame is taken for granted. The animator finds it easier to get to a final result and trial and error becomes his best friend. At this point the animator stops knowing exactly what he wants and depends largely on the software, which usually results in a barely acceptable final piece of animation. If I had to do anything differently on my journey to becoming an animator, I would definitely be focusing more time into drawing and 2D animation. The few years that I spent with 2D animation have really helped my work, and I believe that if I had done more, I would be even further ahead in my learning process.

Jalil Sadool:
I had a lot of fun animating on The Water Horse. We were required to animate a dinosaur-like creature named Crusoe from its infant stages to adulthood. It was a character that had no speech but it had so much personality that it was a blast coming up with its body language and facial expressions. I mostly worked on the puppy phase and the sequences where Crusoe meets Churchill the dog. Figuring out how far we could push the creature’s actions and how cartoony we were allowed to make him was not an easy task, but I think things turned out pretty well in the end. I remember animating a screaming shot of Crusoe at the beginning of the project; the director asked me to tone the scream down considerably because Crusoe needed to feel real and less pushed, but by the end of the show I kept hearing: “Make it bigger, make it even bigger, and push it more!” You can’t stop from looking back and laughing at those moments. Most of my Crusoe references were seals and dogs. I would spend hours watching seals’ locomotion and dogs’ facial expressions, especially eyebrows, and tried to mix them into a fictional but believable animal.

Jalil Sadool:
My first animation job was at Rhythm and Hues on The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I joined their apprenticeship program which was a first for the company as well. The one month program was designed to train 12 beginning animators on the company’s own proprietary software and offer them a job at the end if their work was to the company’s standard. We were to learn their software during the first two weeks, and then animate two characters from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe during the final two weeks. I still remember the day when our supervisors walked in and introduced us to Aslan. We were to animate the lion walking up a few steps while interacting with a second creature called the Ankle Slicer. My only prior experience with computer animation was with the Generi Rig (aka the blue guy), so you can imagine my horror when I realized I was supposed to animate a realistic quadruped. But with patience and hard work, things turned out well and I officially joined Rhythm and Hues as an animator at the end of the program. Later, we heard that the supervisors burst out laughing in the hallway after having given us the Aslan rig to work with. They knew how hard those characters were to animate but they wanted to teach us that sometimes in this industry, it’s sink or swim. I have to say that I was lucky to have been part of it and work with some of the best in the industry at such an early stage in my career.

Jalil Sadool:
I have a few mentors that come to mind because at different stages of my career/life, I needed guidance in different areas. If I had to pick just one, I would say the most important mentor to me would be my college professor Mike Genz. When I was a freshman in college, he had just finished animation work at Disney and joined my school as our animation professor. I was just one among so many other students trying to pick his brain and gather as much info about the animation world as possible. The stories about his days at Disney just made every student thirsty for more animation. I remember his amazing lectures about acting and locomotion, especially the one where he drew Zeus from the Disney feature Hercules. He was explaining squash and stretch and used Zeus as an example, and after making this fantastic drawing, he scratched it because there was not enough squash in the eyebrows. The whole class gasped!!! I got to know him better during my junior and senior years and his advice and confidence in me are what kept me going during those rainy days. I will never forget the day he told me that unless I focused on one thing, I'd end up with nothing. Thanks Mike.

Jalil Sadool:
It's been really exciting. I'm rediscovering what it takes to make it into this industry and the excitement of developing your own ideas. The quality of students’ work lately has been top notch and it's just amazing to see the fast progress students have been making through Animation Mentor. Now I sound like I'm making a sales pitch but it's so true; I wish I had that kind of training back when I was in school.

Jalil Sadool:
Oh I'm loving the Live Q&As, that’s when it really feels like a school. It’s so great to actually be able to explain things and have your students actually interact online in a group while you’re doing so. You get a better idea of what they actually want from you and vice versa.