Animator Sagan Yee is the moderator for DIG 2012's panel, "Press
‘A’ To Jump," co-presented by TAAFI, the Toronto Animation Arts
Festival International. Sagan will guide the discussion as panel participants explore the importance of animation, design, and
storytelling in game design and development. Below, Sagan shares her own perspective on the panel and on the industry:
The panel we will be holding at DIG,
"Press 'A' to Jump," is somewhat of an encore. It was first presented at TAAFI
(Toronto Animation Arts Festival International), where it was one of two
game-related events in the schedule. Our four panelists- Matt Hammill, Ryan
Creighton, Cathy Feraday-Miller and Jay Edry- and I, myself, mostly got our start on the
animation side before transitioning into interactive media. It is for this reason that I'm very excited
that the panel will play out with a different audience.
My adventures in indie gaming began when
I first moved to Toronto in June of 2011. I had just graduated from Sheridan's
Classical Animation program and had zero solid job prospect. For some
reason, I decided to Google "video games toronto" on a whim. The first
link that came up was an application for a game-making incubator aimed at women
who had never made a game before, and who had very little industry experience. It
was called the Difference Engine Initiative, and it was run by local
organization Hand Eye Society as part of the TIFF Nexus series of creative
jams. I signed up because I had a lot of free time and curiosity, but I had no
idea the extent to which my participation would change my life. Since then, I've
met so many amazing people and been offered so many cool opportunities
(including the chance to moderate a panel at DIG 2012!) that it seems astounding
that only a year ago, I thought I would be working at Subway.
The indie world is an incredibly diverse
habitat for art and animation, which is all the more fascinating considering
that games are a medium in which creativity is often heavily influenced by
economy. In the process of making my first game for DEI, a somber adventure
tale called "Icarus," I discovered many of the subtle, challenging ways that 2D
animation for games can differ from film or television. Many of these
differences were things I had casually observed as a player, but taken for
granted. For one thing, two frames can go a lot farther in games than in
traditional animation. Even in an old-school pixel-art title like Chrono
Trigger, which was and still is considered a blockbuster in terms of production
values, you can usually count the number of frames in any given character
action on one hand. A walk cycle might be four frames, a punch, slightly more
or less. As Douglas Adams might say: That's not the reduction of it, that's the
beauty of it.
Nowadays, games can and do look like
anything their creators might wish; but as our panelists will tell you, whether
your art style is made of polygons or looks like it was hand-drawn with ink and
watercolor paint, special consideration must be given to user input and how the
onscreen visuals are interpreted as part of the "flow" of gameplay.
Our panelists will be addressing these sorts of artistic and technical
challenges, as well as their experiences moving from linear, traditional forms
of animation to the interactive medium. We hope to see you there!
Sagan
Yee is a recent graduate of Sheridan College's Classical Animation
program, where she made a four-minute film in Flash about a
malfunctioning particle accelerator that causes mini black holes to
consume Toronto. Her first introduction to Toronto's indie game
community was as a participant and later co-coordinator of the
Difference Engine Initiative, a woman-focused game-making incubator run
by TIFF.nexus and the Hand Eye Society. Currently, Sagan divides her
working life between the TIFF Film Reference Library, freelancing on
a variety of projects ranging from kid's flash games, t-shirt designs,
and animating on Disney's Motorcity. She spends her free time dabbling,
scheming, and ruminating.
Interested in this panel? Register for DIG here.
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