Jamie Greene on rigging Harper using Toon Boom Harmony

Curious about the work that goes into a character rig on modern productions? Jamie Greene is a professional rigging artist who describes his day-to-day work as “solving art jigsaw puzzles for a living.” Jamie has worked with a long list of studios which includes Boulder Media, A Productions, Cartoon Saloon and JAM Media. 

In his spare time, Jamie created a character rig based on a design by his colleague Rowan Sefton. Jamie frequently used the character, Harper, to test new rigging techniques in Toon Boom Harmony. We invited Jamie onto our livestream to discuss the iterative process that went into building Harper as well as his career as a rigging artist more broadly.

This article, which you can read below, is an excerpt adapted from our full livestream conversation with Jamie Greene. The full Rig Show & Tell session is available on Toon Boom Animation’s YouTube channel.

So how would you describe your role as a rigging artist? And what does a typical day look like in that role?

Jamie: I’ve always seen it as the bridge between animation and design. It’s one of these things where it’s a little bit of a mystery what happens in between that part. But there’s a lot of times where the design includes certain elements that might actually hinder artists. 

What does day-to-day look like? It’s mostly just getting down into the node view. It’s one of these kinds of jobs where you might have this assignment for five days to a couple of weeks, at times. So you’re really working step by step, checking in, making sure that you’re happy with it. You’re hoping everything works out by the end of the two weeks. 

That’s very much the day-to-day of rigging, when you’re on the floor. If you’re working as a lead, it’s mostly putting out fires, finding patches, doing the meetings. And technical support, depending on the production. Sometimes there might even be pipeline crew or technical director, but a lot of the time that responsibility would fall to rigging. It’s our bread and butter to know the software very well. 

Would you say that what a rigging artist does is similar from studio to studio, or do you find that the expectations can be different on a variety of productions?

Jamie: It is similar studio to studio. The first time you’ve moved studio, it’s jarring. Everything’s a little uncanny. There might be slightly different expectations. The rigging also tends to change. I have the very fortunate experience of that the first company I worked for spread me out on five different shows. 

With the first company, I got to learn five different styles and a lot of the variance between. So when I moved to my next show, and they wanted something very different, or something unique to the challenges of their design, you’re a little bit more prepared for it. But without having that experience, it can be a little bit jarring from what I’ve heard. 

But for the most part, it’s a really nice industry. Everyone’s supportive. But they are very different from the studio. A lot of the time, it’s a mishmash of contract workers with staff in the studio. So you could go to one place, have a great time, go back, and it’s a different room. But to be honest, I haven’t had a bad experience in any of the studios I have worked at. 

If you are in your first studio, and you’re thinking about moving to the next one, I wouldn’t be worried. It’s all good.

The character that I wanted to ask you about this livestream was the Harper rig you posted a demo of on LinkedIn. What can you tell us about her?

Jamie: Probably too much! Harper was originally made for a story I had in my head, and she ended up becoming an experimental rig. So if I ever had any ideas in production that I couldn’t really do during company time, or just wouldn’t be responsible to do, I would apply those changes to her. 

I think I’ve rigged Harper’s arms five or six different ways, her are legs about the same. The character has changed so much over the course of it, with techniques I wanted to show studios. So it was weird to finally finish the rig. She’s turned out great! I’m very happy with her.

What do you find the most interesting or challenging about the Harper’s rig design?

Jamie: Well, I had an idea what I wanted the design to be for the longest time. So I spent so long trying to figure it out that I came up with the solutions in my head for a lot of the rigging problems. Had a few years to think about it.

I would say one of the more challenging aspects was probably the hair. Her hair was just so bulky. There was so much going on at the time that I was worried about how I was actually going to be able to handle it. I came up with [a solution] for the benefit of this character. And that happened a little bit through discovery with rigging and experimenting.

The slippers were also a little bit difficult in themselves. But to be honest, I think that partly my own draftsmanship with feet contributed to that problem. 

In terms of rigging, there were a lot of times where I went into something not knowing if it was going to work necessarily, like the rubber hose in the envelope arm. That only happened because I saw a post from a gentleman who said that they didn’t think that it was possible to do that. I had some theories, and two or three different ways to do it. 

There were a lot of things that I have tried on Harper that didn’t work. I’d spend a couple of hours with my fingers crossed, just hoping it all came together and I didn’t have to go back and redesign or address flaws that were appearing.

You’ve shared other rigs that you’ve built in your spare time in the past, including an unofficial rig of Rick from Rick and Morty. But how does Harper differ from the Rick rig that you built?

Jamie: So in the case of Harper, she was like my guinea pig. Any experiments I wanted to try on a rig, it was Harper. The truth is rigging is actually quite fun. There are a lot of times where you are just curious about a certain problem, as I was mentioning, that you couldn’t do on a production. 

Rick was more of a demonstration of strong fundamentals. If you went through the Harper video, it doesn’t really go into her fundamentals. I still use Rick to demonstrate that in the secondary video on my website. He actually is still a bit of an experiment. And there are a lot of unpublished rigs that I tend to  play around with.

There was a game called Hollow Knight. It was a game that I was a really, really big fan of. There’s this character called Nightmare King Grimm. He’s meant to have a different palette going on. And he’s one of these kinds of characters that I was going to work on in my spare time. It was like, “How do you handle this guy’s jacket? There’s so many things going on.”

There’s a lot of other elements about him. The head is actually quite simple. The legs aren’t really challenging at all. But capes are always one of these things that comes up that I have a nice solution for on a production. 

But I was looking at this guy while I was playing the game. And I was like, “If he was a rotation, he’d be a nightmare.” No pun intended. But even getting the reference to do a rotation for him was quite hard. I had to make it up myself. I’m not sure if the rotation is actually in this guy. That was quite challenging in itself. 

What do you like to listen to while you’re building character rigs?

Jamie: Well, I think the trick is to diversify it. Don’t always listen to the same thing. Music is the dominant one. If you’re in any animation groups, there’s asking for recommendations for podcasts. 

I like stand-up comedy because you can tune in and out. I’ve got John Mulaney as my go-to guy. And Norm Macdonald, who I think is the best Canadian comedian. It’s an untapped resource among animators. So it’s brilliant in that sense. 

The annoying one, actually, is audiobooks. Because that actually requires more concentration than you can afford. There’s been a few books I’ve tried to listen to while I’ve been rigging. And what ends up happening is, after the chapter ends, I have to go on Wikipedia and read what I just listened to just to figure out what I’ve missed. That key incident might just be one or two lines, and then the rest is just reacting to it. You’re like “Wait, what happened?” So you have to go back. And you also don’t want to listen to anything too interesting, because it interrupts the workflow.

We were talking earlier about how you’d been exploring different versions of Harmony, and how it impacted what you could do with the rigs. Has your approach to rigging changed throughout your career? 

Jamie: Yeah. I’ve been writing since 2017, maybe 2016. And it was one of these things where it evolved a lot. The first two years, there was so much to learn, so much to get my head around. And then after about two years as I was like “Okay, I think I know it all. There’s a few things I don’t know here and there, but I think I know most of it.”

And then it was like “Oh, I don’t know about this. Let’s let’s see how deep this rabbit hole is. Oh my God, I don’t know anything!” There’s so much to learn that, as you’re going on in a career, you’ll think it’s leveling off, and then you’ll discover there’s so much more. The conclusion I’ve reached at this point is to just keep it simple. Make it simple for the animators to do their best work. Don’t try to do the work for them.

Before, I used to focus a lot on precision. Now a lot of it is precision and speed, trying to get both of them in the rig. But a lot of it also will depend on the budget for the show and the ambition for the show. So you have to factor all that in.

And there’s no point in trying to show off the best rig in the world if the animators don’t understand how it works. I remember a friend of mine was working with a company where they were doing some service work. And a rig was sent over and it had all these bells and whistles and did all these very fancy things. But they had to send it back and get in touch with them for three days because they couldn’t figure it out. 

I always think it’s interesting when you have a studio that makes a rig and they give it to another studio, and it works in Studio A. And then Studio B gets a hold of it and just say, “What is this?”

Jamie Greene: As a rigger, any time you start a new show, the animators are generally like, “Hey, can you just make the rig that I used to work with?” You’re like, “Well, I didn’t used to work with that rig. I don’t know that rig. So no.”

How do you stay motivated to work on projects in your spare time?

Jamie: It’s nice for me, because I still have the artistic itch for it after work. I still love to draw, because it’s not something I’m doing all the time. But I still like to rig in my spare time as well. Your heart can break for a show. Or your heart can fill for a show. But you want to keep a little bit of the heart for your own project as well. 

So it’s about having boundaries on both sides of the fence. Because sometimes you can give too much of yourself to the project you’re working on. And then in the evening, you’ve totally burned yourself out.

And scheduling. I remember it from my own personal project, I had to set up just for Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, you know? The other thing is scale. If you have this grand idea in your head, is it realistically something that you can achieve by yourself? It’s annoying to commit to an idea that might take you twenty years when you have all these other ideas floating around. 

What skills do you think are important for artists who are interested in pursuing character writing as a career?

Jamie: It definitely helps to have some animation skills under your belt. Really having an understanding of how the animator is going to work, and the practices and frustrations that they deal with. Having that perspective is really, really beneficial. 

I always see it as a game. It’s a puzzle. It’s a jigsaw. And it offers so much variety and it can really make your brain go into overdrive to get around problems. And if you think of it like that, it’s a lot more enjoyable. Anytime I taught a junior who was into rigging, that’s the perspective I really want them to have. 

It’s very addictive. And I think if you don’t see that appeal in the first three months, it’s probably not for you. That’s the honest truth. I know a lot of people in the industry, the artistic itch is what they want scratched. Whereas for rigging, I find it’s a much more creative role. But it will not scratch that itch. And if that’s important to you, in your profession, rigging is not going to be for you. 

One of the things that ended up getting me into rigging was that there was a girl I went to college with. I wouldn’t say I even knew her very well. But she was one of these people who did it all. She just had a natural flair for all aspects of animation. She was great. We were all genuinely getting curious: what is she going to go into? 

I overheard her saying this to another friend, “I want to be a compositor.” And we were all like, “Wow, I thought she was going to be an art director or an animator.” 

And she said something that I just thought was so wise. She said, “I want to keep drawing for me.”

The amount of people I know in the industry who don’t draw outside of work, because they hate it, or it just feels like work now… It’s not fun for them anymore. That just made so much sense to me. So I still draw for myself. It’s just for me. And it’s great to have that, to be able to be in the animation industry, to still work creatively, to get to do these puzzles for a living, but still have art for me. I do love that.

• Interested in seeing more of Jamie Greene’s work? Be sure to visit his rigging portfolio.
• Ready to start rigging your next character? Artists can download a free 21-day trial of Toon Boom Harmony.

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