Q: Who is Chris?
A: Passionate animator, constant learner, big nerd.
Chris Daley is pursuing his calling to become a professional character animator. He fell in love with animation when he finished his first walk cycle as part of a college course over a decade ago, and while life and financial circumstances led him down a career path in user experience (UX), he is taking back the reins and is ready for a new role in his dream career.
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Since the beginning, I have found animating to be a deeply spiritual practice. We start with pixels on a screen: dots of color, much like microscopic cells, lit up and arranged to form larger molecules, or images. These images—and the pixels that comprise them—can move and change, becoming video and animation. As animators, our objective is to “breathe life into the inanimate”, or to move and change images in such a way that the line between the living and the inanimate becomes imperceptible. We have succeeded in this objective when people who engage with our art (whether as viewers of our motion pictures or players of our video games) forget that the characters before them are artificial and instead empathize with their personalities, their struggles, and their goals. To me, the work I do to achieve this feels like a sacred act of creation, as if God has granted me a spark with which to create that fabled “illusion of life”.
Of course, none of this matters if our animations are neither entertaining nor inspiring (after all, some of the very first animations of the modern era were conceived as cartoons). We create believable animation with this intent, and we do not stop learning how to get there. A lifelong pursuit of learning helps us to become better entertainers, artists, actors, and practitioners of anatomy, physiology, physics, psychology, and so on—all the skills needed to thrive in a fruitful journey of character animation. This is my philosophy and my commitment as an animator.
“To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.” – Bill Watterson
