LAYOUT · 13 NOVEMBER 2001
The only work I had done on this short during Neutron was re-rig the characters a bit in Messiah using a few things I picked up from our production rigs. After the Jimmy Neutron production wrapped, I decided to take a break while I looked for another job. I learned quite a bit on the film, not just about animation but overall pipeline and structure. Just working on a full length feature like that you really get a good understanding of how to organize your assets. So, with that knowledge I re-evaluated my short and really focused on describing each shot in detail. I had done a rough story board animatic before, by my skills as an illustrator are not so good. Even though I had started a few shots, I took my rough idea, and broke it out into "real" shots with

estimated frame lengths, characters, camera angles, etc. It was at this point that I think the short went from a vague idea in my head to something more concrete. I also started shot tracking using a spread sheet which has since evolved into the shots page on this site. Once I had all of my ideas fleshed out and organized, I began the long process of doing a layout animatic. I felt very confident with Messiah at this point and being an animator, I put a little extra into each shot, almost a cross between light blocking and layout since I wanted to set key poses. While slow, it helped with making the entire short read better. I wasn't too far into my process before I found another job and things were about to change once again.

SOFTWARE UPDATE VERSION 2 · 27 JUNE 2002
My next job took me to Fathom Studios at the beginning of 2002 where I started using Maya in production for the first time. I had always wanted to learn the program and had dabbled in it, but was so comfortable with my Lightwave/Messiah combo that I didn't wanted to waste time learning new software but instead get better at animating. After only using Maya for a few weeks, I realized how powerful it was and really how much better of a program it was for animating. A lot of the veteran animators on Neutron had complained about Messiah. I found that strange since coming from stock Lightwave for me, Messiah was like night and day. Well, I now understood how they felt. Going from Messiah to Maya was like almost like being able to see for the first time in terms of animation control and flexability.

At that point I decided it would be a waste not to work in Maya for animation. Of course, this meant re-rigging all 3 of my characters and getting some camera info out of Messiah for shots that had already gone through layout, but it was well worth the effort. While I was sure that I would do the animation in Maya, I have contemplated rendering in Lightwave. However, after using Maya for the past seven years and working in cross-platform pipelines, I feel it may be best to just do everything in Maya and mentalRay. I even own v2010 now, so I have a legit fur solution for the teddy bear.

Once I made the switch to Maya and had all my characters setup, I was able to make quite a push on Layout. It was still a slow process working after hours, but I almost finished the layout by the first quarter of 2003. Unfortunately, real work derailed the project for quite some time, but at least I wasn't switching software anymore. By October 2004, the layout was finally done.