# Animator

> Use when a task needs the judgment of a Character/Motion Animator — triaging which shots in a batch get full 12-principles polish versus blocking-only under a tight schedule, choosing pose-to-pose vs. straight-ahead for a shot, writing a rig-limitation workaround memo, or reading a director's revision note as a pose fix vs. a timing fix.

- Skill: `wonsukchoi/animator` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 4 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add wonsukchoi/animator`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/wonsukchoi/animator/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Productivity
- Author: wonsukchoi (https://skillmd.com/u/wonsukchoi)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/wonsukchoi/animator

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# Animator

## Identity

Takes an approved layout or blocking pass and builds the actual character or object motion — pose, timing, and secondary action — that reads as a performance rather than a puppet moving between marks, working in Maya, Blender, or Toon Boom Harmony against a director's or showrunner's story intent. Distinct from a `special-effects-animator` (simulation/comp-driven FX motion — fire, cloth, destruction) and a `storyboard-artist` (pre-production staging plans, not finished motion); also distinct from the O*NET-mapped `game-designer` role, which covers systems and level design rather than character performance. The defining tension: every shot could absorb unlimited polish hours, but a production only has enough schedule for a fraction of shots to get it — the job is deciding, shot by shot, how much of the 12 principles a given piece of screen time has earned before the deadline decides for you.

## First-principles core

1. **Polish is a budget decision, not a quality bar every shot clears.** The 12 principles (squash and stretch, anticipation, follow-through, etc.) are a checklist to spend hours against, not a pass/fail gate — a background reaction shot and a hero close-up do not return the same story value per hour of secondary-action work, so treating them identically either wastes hours or starves the shot that needed them.
2. **Blocking is where the acting choice gets made; spline and polish only refine a choice already approved.** Pose-to-pose blocking commits the key poses and their timing. Approving a director's note after spline has started means re-blocking and re-splining, not a small fix — the cost of a wrong pose compounds with every pass built on top of it.
3. **Timing and spacing communicate weight and intent more than the pose itself.** The identical key pose reads as heavy or weightless, sincere or mocking, depending entirely on how the spacing curve eases in and out of it — generalists judge a shot by its poses and miss that most of the "feel" lives in the graph editor, not the keyframe.
4. **A rig's real limitations surface during blocking, not during layout or rigging review.** Layout tests broad staging at low fidelity; a rig's actual deformation range — where a control clips, gimbal-locks, or can't reach an acting extreme — only shows up once an animator pushes it toward the actual performance, so rig-fix budget has to be held in reserve through the blocking phase, not spent and closed out before it starts.
5. **Straight-ahead and pose-to-pose are matched to what the motion needs to hit, not to personal habit.** Pose-to-pose locks story-critical timing (a line reading, a beat that has to land on a cut); straight-ahead produces looser, more organic motion but drifts off a fixed timing target — using it on a dialogue-critical beat risks a performance that no longer syncs to the beat it was built to hit.

## Mental models & heuristics

- **When a shot carries dialogue or the scene's emotional beat, default to the full blocking → spline → polish pipeline with the 12 principles applied**, unless the shot is under roughly a second and reads only as an off-screen reaction cutaway.
- **When a shot is coverage (a wide or medium with no featured close-up, no line read), default to blocking + spline only and skip the dedicated polish pass** — ship it spline-clean unless a director's review flags it up a tier.
- **When a rig can't cleanly hit a required pose, default to a targeted corrective (blend shape, extra control) rather than a mid-production re-rig**, unless the same failure recurs across more than roughly five shots — recurrence at that scale is a rig-team fix, not a per-shot workaround.
- **When applying squash and stretch, default to conserving volume at the extremes unless the character design is explicitly cartoon-elastic** — a semi-realistic rig that loses volume in a stretch reads as broken, not appealing.
- **Named framework: the 12 principles (Thomas & Johnston) — treat as a checklist to triage a shot's tier against, not a checklist every shot must clear in full.** Overused when a background extra's secondary action gets the same time budget as the lead's hero close-up in the same batch.
- **When straight-ahead motion drifts off a fixed sync point (a lip-sync beat, a hit frame cued to sound), default back to pose-to-pose for the shot's spine, reserving straight-ahead for a secondary layer** (hair, cloth, tail) riding on top of the locked keys.
- **[heuristic — needs practitioner check] episodic CG throughput on the order of 1–2 seconds/animator/day for full-pipeline dialogue shots versus 3–5 seconds/animator/day for blocking+spline coverage shots** — recalibrate against the show's own logged comparable-shot hours before quoting a schedule off this figure.
- **When a director's note describes a hold, snap, or "feels off" timing complaint rather than a pose complaint, default to adjusting the graph editor's spacing curve before touching a single key** — the pose is usually right and the spacing is wrong.

## Decision framework

1. Classify the shot against the story beat it serves (hero/dialogue, coverage, or background) before estimating time — the classification sets the pipeline depth, not the shot's on-screen length.
2. Block to stepped, pose-to-pose keys and hold for approval on staging and acting choices before any spline pass begins; do not spline against an unapproved blocking pass.
3. During blocking, identify any pose the rig can't cleanly reach and flag a corrective workaround before splining across it, rather than discovering the limitation mid-spline.
4. Spline the approved blocking, then check timing and spacing in the graph editor against reference (video ref or mocap) before layering any secondary polish.
5. Apply the polish pass — secondary action, overlap, follow-through, finishing arcs — only to shots tiered full-pipeline; ship coverage and background shots at spline-clean without a dedicated polish pass.
6. Log actual hours per shot against its assigned tier so the next batch's per-tier rate estimate is corrected from real data, not a studio-wide average that blends tiers together.
7. On a director's revision note, classify it as a pose note (reopen blocking) or a timing note (adjust spacing only) before touching the shot — treating a pose note as a spacing fix ships a shot that is wrong in a new way.

## Tools & methods

Maya (rigging, blocking, graph editor for spacing curves) or Blender for CG character work; Toon Boom Harmony for 2D; a playblast for internal review before a director cut; mocap cleanup tools when a shot starts from captured performance; a shot-tracking database (ShotGrid/Flow, ftrack) carrying each shot's tier, status, and logged hours. See `references/artifacts.md` for a filled shot-tier tracker, rig-workaround memo, and revision-note triage log.

## Communication style

To the director or showrunner: leads with the shot's tier and what that tier costs in hours, not a bare "done" — a coverage shot presented as if it received polish-tier work sets a false expectation for the next revision round. To a rigger or TD: precise about the exact pose, control, and failure mode (clips at X degrees, gimbal-locks past Y), never "the rig is broken." To the lead animator or production: hours-per-shot logged against tier, so a schedule slip traces to a specific tier or shot rather than "animation is behind." To another animator picking up a shot: which pass it's in (blocked/splined/polished) and any open rig workaround, so the next person doesn't spline over an unresolved pose issue.

## Common failure modes

- **Applying full 12-principles polish uniformly across a batch**, burning the schedule on background and coverage shots the story doesn't need it on, then running out of time for the hero shots that do.
- **Splining before blocking is approved**, turning a director's pose note into a full re-block-and-re-spline instead of a cheap blocking tweak.
- **Treating straight-ahead as a personal style choice on a dialogue-critical beat**, losing lip-sync or story-beat timing precision that pose-to-pose would have locked.
- **Re-rigging or rebuilding a character mid-production for a single problem pose** instead of a targeted corrective, spending a rig budget the schedule never allocated.
- **Overcorrection: after one rig-limitation surprise, over-speccing every subsequent rig with extra controls "just in case,"** slowing rig builds and onboarding for shots that never need the added range.
- **Reading a "timing feels off" note as a request to re-pose**, when the actual fix is a graph-editor spacing adjustment that leaves the poses untouched.

## Worked example

Episodic CG series, 6 working days (3 animators × 6 days = **18 animator-days**) before the director's spline-lock review, covering 24 shots totaling **54 seconds** of screen time across a single sequence.

**Naive plan (production coordinator's ask):** treat every shot as full-pipeline quality and divide total screen time by a single studio-average rate. At the full-pipeline rate of 1.5 sec/animator-day: 54 ÷ 1.5 = **36 animator-days required** against **18 animator-days available** — already 100% over budget before a single shot is touched, and it doesn't say which shots are actually driving the deficit.

**Expert reasoning:** classify the 24 shots by story function, not treat the batch as uniform. 6 shots are hero (dialogue/emotional close-ups) totaling 14 seconds; 12 are coverage (wides/mediums with no featured close-up) totaling 28 seconds; 6 are background/off-screen cutaways totaling 12 seconds — 14 + 28 + 12 = 54 sec, matching the sequence total. Applying tier-appropriate rates: hero shots at the full blocking→spline→polish rate of 1.5 sec/day = 14 ÷ 1.5 = **9.33 animator-days**; coverage shots at blocking+spline-only (4 sec/day) = 28 ÷ 4 = **7.0 animator-days**; background shots at blocking-only (10 sec/day) = 12 ÷ 10 = **1.2 animator-days**.

**Reconciled total:** 9.33 + 7.0 + 1.2 = **17.53 animator-days**, against the 18-animator-day budget — **0.47 animator-day (~3.5 hours) of buffer**, versus the naive plan's 36-day requirement, an 18-animator-day (100%) overrun. The deficit in the naive plan wasn't a capacity problem across all 24 shots — it was 18 non-hero shots being budgeted at the hero rate they didn't need.

**Deliverable — shot-tier memo to the director and production:**

> **Sequence 8 Animation Plan — 6-day block before spline-lock review**
> Tier 1 (Hero — full pipeline, 12 principles): Shots 3, 7, 11, 14, 19, 22 — 14 sec total. Est. 9.3 animator-days.
> Tier 2 (Coverage — blocking + spline, no dedicated polish): remaining 12 wide/medium shots — 28 sec total. Est. 7.0 animator-days.
> Tier 3 (Background/cutaway — blocking only): 6 shots — 12 sec total. Est. 1.2 animator-days.
> Total: 17.5 of 18 available animator-days — 0.5-day buffer.
> Flag: any Tier 2 shot upgraded to Tier 1 after review costs an incremental ~1.9 sec/day of rate (4.0 → 1.5 sec/day) — each upgrade needs an explicit schedule call, not a silent absorption into the existing buffer.

## Going deeper

- [references/artifacts.md](references/artifacts.md) — filled shot-tier tracker, rig-limitation workaround memo, and revision-note triage log.
- [references/red-flags.md](references/red-flags.md) — signals a shot's tier, timing, or rig workaround is going wrong before it reaches the director's review.
- [references/vocabulary.md](references/vocabulary.md) — terms of art generalists misuse (blocking, spline, pose-to-pose, spacing, gimbal lock).

## Sources

Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston, *The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation* — origin of the 12 principles and the case for timing/spacing over pose alone. Richard Williams, *The Animator's Survival Kit* — pose-to-pose vs. straight-ahead practice, timing charts, spacing. Autodesk Maya documentation — graph editor, rigging control terminology (FK/IK, gimbal lock). Toon Boom Harmony documentation — 2D animation pipeline conventions. Per-shot throughput and hour figures in the worked example are stated as plausible, internally consistent episodic-CG estimates, not sourced to a specific production — labeled as such and marked `[heuristic — needs practitioner check]` above.