For director Mike Roth and animation director Garrett Ray, getting the most from your 2D animation means you can’t limit yourself to what the rigs are capable of – you have to force them to get the result you’re after.
One is a SCAD short film about the history of the Philippines.The other is the latest series from Warner Bros.
Animation about the challenging domestic life of Batman.These 2D animated projects – and – differ in a number of ways, from length and tone to subject and art style.But what unites them is their shared method of “breaking” the rig. “The show was first going to be primarily hand-drawn, but rigging the characters came out of necessity because they are so hard to draw and can easily go off model,” shared Mike Roth, director of DC and Warner Bros.
Animation’s , now out on Prime Video.The new kids’ series explores the lives of Bruce Wayne/Batman, Damian Wayne/Little Batman, and Alfred Pennyworth, alongside a few new guests at Wayne Manor, as they all experience life as a superhero family.“They’ve got these exaggerated features and spindly limbs.
We initially just wanted to use a small bit of Harmony as an assist, but quickly kept asking to use more of it so that our animators could focus on the acting and everything else that goes into the shot and spend less time worrying about Bruce’s very awkward chin size.” He continues, “But we didn’t want the rig for our characters to be so rigid.So much of what a rig shows is on the X and Y axis.But our world is also on that Z axis.
And we didn’t want to lose the zaniness of these characters because they’re locked into puppeting.” Which meant “breaking” the rig.“The trick is, you can't limit your animation to what the rigs are capable of,” explains Garrett Ray, animation director of the short film, made by Ray (getting his M.F.A.Animation at Savannah College of Art and Design) and SCAD students Anya Perez (B.F.A.
animation, director), Aaron Raven Campilan (M.F.A.animation, background lead), and Gab Talan (B.F.A.animation, production manager).
Before , which premiered at SCAD AnimationFest in September, Ray worked on , , and with Frank Summers, animator and rigger on .Over the years the two animators have exchanged many notes on manipulating rigs. “Naturally, you have to make the rigs work for the animation you want to do, which is why you rough it out with something hand-drawn first,” continues Ray.“Too many people think that, because they use rigs, they don't need to rough it out, but that's how things get very stiff and mechanical and flat.
Plan it out with the roughs first and then use that to guide how you rig.Don’t be limited by the basic drawing swaps that the rig comes with.Break the rig and force it to do what you need it to do.
I intentionally built the rigs in a way that they can be deformed.Because just rotating characters on projects like these isn't going to work.” Rigging in animation is the process of creating a digital skeleton (known as a “rig”) inside a model so that it can be manipulated by an animator to move and perform like a puppet.2D rigging gives flat illustrations bones and pivot points to animate them without redrawing.
In the past, these rigging points were limited, making characters look like paper puppets moving primarily at their elbows and knees.But times are changing. “Adobe Animate kicked us animators off with creating character rigs that were symbol-based, and then Toon Boom Harmony released some better tools that allowed us to make more elaborate puppets, or character rigs,” explains Jenna Zona, SCAD Animation Professor and award-winning animator who has worked at Floyd County Productions, Tiny Monsters Studios, Bento Box Entertainment, and others.“Specifically, these rigging tools called ‘Deformers’ were released, which now allows us to manipulate the drawing in a more nuanced way.
That kicked us off to create more elaborate rigs that can get more subtle acting and can get us faster in-betweens, those transition points between the key frames.” Harmony’s ability to mix traditional hand-drawn animation techniques with puppeting on a rig was what first drew Ray’s friend Summers to the software while working on , and what led to his experience with the software’s “Master Controller,” which generates custom on-screen manipulators, or widgets, that can be programmed to affect one or several elements, like character movements, in a scene when manipulated.They are created and configured entirely through the scripting interface of Harmony, so a library of key poses can be saved into one tool.“I'm a really a traditional animator at heart,” notes Summers.
“That's what I love to do.But the rigging and puppeting stuff scratches a different creative itch.It’s a problem to solve.
And animators love solving problems.Garrett and I would exchange notes back and forth about this stuff and I became like a sponge.So, when it came to working on , where they needed us to combine special poses with rigging, I was excited to get started.
Rigging something as small as a mouth can be pretty complex.Mouth shapes can be made of five or even 10 layers of animation that are all being moved around, and they're independent of each other.And the rigging department and the designers will build all of the mouth rigs into the Master Controller, so you can recall all of those movements with just a switch.
And that's a huge time saver.” And that’s an invaluable feature, especially on 2D animated projects that include a hefty amount of action, be it crime-fighting in a flowing cape (that’s also rigged) on the streets of Gotham or spilling blood with a rigged sword in forests of bamboo.“The fighting style in our film, a traditional southern Philippines combat technique, is called Kali, or Escrima,” explains ’s director Perez.“It’s a martial art so it’s very precise and fluid, like a dance.” Ray adds, “We have characters spinning and turning in space.
And we needed the rig to help us and not limit us.Even on a short film production, action like that is tedious.” And, like , was a project initially planned to be all hand-drawn animation.Implementing the rigs was a last-minute decision and Harmony’s tools allowed the team to keep up the quality of their hand-drawn art, no matter how many frames of animation they needed to work through. “I'm surprised it worked so well,” says Perez. As was Roth when it came to the final results for . “It all works seamlessly together,” says Roth.
“Using these tools that ‘break’ the rig allowed us to have continuity in character designs and movements while working with remote teams, some even overseas.We spent less time critiquing animators on chin length and more time on compositions, backgrounds and scene building, which is a huge part of this show.It was an eye-opening experience in a lot of ways and it did feel like we were trailblazing.” But considering how effective the method is, few productions are willing to implement the “breaking the rig” method or, as Summers like to say, “pushing the rig.” “I think people are cautious because they think it's expensive to set up or takes too long to set up,” says Zona, who is writing a book on this very topic called , scheduled to release in 2026.
“There are a lot of points to it, and it does require a character set up artist and animators that know how to use it and understand strong key poses and breakdowns.Without that, you don’t get good arcs, and you get tweeny looking animation.But my students can do this set up in a couple of weeks.
Even less than that.Harmony is still the top dog on this right now but Adobe Animate and TVPaint are coming out with tools to help with this as well.I do see studios starting to move in this direction.” She adds, “I think it's more about hyping people up to just get into it and have fun with it.
Artists love a challenge.You give us a tool and we're going to do something else with it.Look at what we did with Photoshop.” Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime.
She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment.Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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