We were lucky to catch up with Adrien Liv recently and have shared our conversation below.

Adrien, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Despicable Me is a project that is dear to me because it opened the doors for me to feature film as a character animator. I was hired to help create an acting performance for one of the main hero characters, Agnes, who wishes to be adopted by someone who cares about her. She is a very naive, sweet, and innocent four years old. I was tasked to create an animation performance for Agnes seeing the unicorn toy and screaming “It’s so fluffy I’m gonna die!”. With my previous experience in animating children in video games, I came up with the jump, while she burst with excitement.

Another project that is dear to me is The Emoji Movie because I was also able to animate shots which were very emotional. For example, I had a shot of a character arguing with his parents. My parents and I have totally different upbringings, they grew up poor, I grew up in the west and had everything I needed. That caused some misunderstanding. So I tried to put that struggle into my shot, to have the best video reference. When I showed the first pass to the director, he reacted very positively and I knew I succeeded in making the audience relate and feel something.

After 2 and a half years at Sony I had the opportunity to work in VFX. Paddington 2 was a way for me to transition from feature animation to VFX animation easily because this project involved a lot of acting, something I had put an emphasis on my whole career. Mary Poppins was a more technical show that required almost an equal balance of technical and artistic skills. I cleaned the mocap of key shots, and also animated animals, humans, props and cameras.

Adrien, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Adrien Liv. I am an internationally renowned animator with 19 years of experience who has made critical contributions to the world’s most successful and popular films. Since the beginning of my professional career, I have contributed to award winning films, television series around the world. My animation credits include The Wild Robot, Trolls 3, Puss in Boots2, Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, Monster in Paris, Minions, Angrybirds, Storks, Paddington 2, and Mary Poppins Returns.

As far as I can tell, I have always watched cartoons. I started watching Japanese anime when I was a kid, and that’s what sparked my interest and love for animation.

I started off working in a French video game company based in Paris. I worked on prototypes and we were also able to ship several promotional video games like Lafuma, Ecocity and two online multiple-sport MMORPG.

As a character animator, I am responsible for creating animation for props and human characters. I am tasked to move a 3D virtual puppet in a virtual world in 3D software like Autodesk Maya.

Agnes in Despicable Me, is one of the characters I am the most famous for. My role differs from the other character animator in the team in the sense that I was the only animator that was in charge of creating so many performance shots for the character Agnes, with 20 shots and 59 seconds featuring her. I was given the responsibility to work on a large portion of shots across many sequences.

I was able to set up the standard for her, designing her facial appeal and characteristics. For example, I narrowed the distance between her nose and her mouth, the distance between her eyes, and also removed the symmetry in the facial expression.

In order for the audience to be entertained by her, the shots need to be appealing in composition, posing, rhythm and phrasing, and contain acting choices that feel fresh.
Animating a young child not only believable but lovable and relatable to young children in the audience can be very tricky and time consuming if not done correctly. With my knowledge of acting and the software Maya, I was able to create a performance that was matching her voice. For that purpose I studied the voice actress Elsie Fisher during her recording session to take away some mimic, traits and gestures that she was doing, intentionally or unintentionally. This level of expertise can only be achieved by having a thorough knowledge of acting and observation.

One other highlight of my animation career is to have served as an animation director on Riverdance: The Animated Adventure. I started working at Cinesite as a lead, and had more and more responsibilities as the project moved forward. After a few months, I was asked to direct the animation of the project. It is a very creative role, and I was able to focus more on the storytelling/staging side and see more of the movie as a whole.

My role was to sit down with the directors to define the acting of each sequence and the intentions of the characters. I also defined the style of the movie, how the characters are supposed to move. I was always trying to find ways to make the character unique by adding specificity to his movements. I also tried to get the best quality out of my team by providing animation training, I went over some helpful tips and tricks, explained what tool to use, and what mindset to have to move forward in the work without being too attached to our animation.
As a mentor, I also had to animate shots to set up the quality standard of animation for other animators to follow. I also built the library to help the animators to consistently find appealing poses and elevate the quality of any characters’ design.I built the expressions, phonemes, hand poses and the walk cycles for the main heroes. I drove the ‘animation dailies and internals’ during which I gave feedback to my animators to improve the animation.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

One of the biggest rewards I have in my work is the reviewing of my work. I like it when I finish a hard task and then sit back and replay the clip of the movie, and know that my time and talent are not wasted.

As an animator, I am like a puppet master, manipulating a virtual puppet in time and space in order to create the illusion of life. For example, at frame 1, the puppet is sitting, at frame 50 (there are 24 frames in a second), the puppet is standing. Moving the body, hands, foot through time and space gives us the impression that it’s moving and thus, alive. There is plenty of software to achieve that and the most widespread one in the animation industry is Autodesk Maya. It is a highly sophisticated 3D computer graphics application and I attended the Gobelins, l’Ecole de l’Image , France’s most famous animation school to learn how to use the software. Having used it for almost 15 years makes me very knowledgeable about it.

I also enjoy knowing and watching other people like the movies I worked hard on. It’s the feeling that my work and talent are appreciated and enjoyed.
Another pleasure on my projects is the work itself. Without animation, the character is nothing but a picture, lifeless and motionless. After I animate, the character becomes alive and full of action. To sum it all up, it’s the pleasure that, in a sense, I give life to something.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I like to show other people the beauty of animation. The appeal of a pose, the musical rhythm of the timing are two fundamentals of a successful piece. With perfect poses, timing combined in a movie, it becomes a delight for the eyes.
For example, I was trusted on a key shot of the Minions Movie, which was the first shot ever done with the two villains, it was a long 10-second shot and that would help determine the nature of their relationship . The audience had to feel the personality of each character with very particular movements. The dialogue was “Oh Herb, what Picasso is to paint, you are to illegal weapons and unlicensed barely tested survival gear”. The voice actress is Sandra Bullock and Jon Hamm is the voice actor for Herb.
Based on this dialogue, I started to study the images of couples on Getty Images, to see how the couples embrace. I also recorded myself performing the dialogue. Thanks to this workflow I was able to find ideas for the actions they were going to do. Herb is cool, his body language is very modern, but when Scarlet enters into frame, she takes the initiative to take Herb’s arm to put it on her waist, it shows her authority on Herb, a little later in the shot, she takes his hand to caress her face. But she is also sensual, and to show that, I made her caress Herb’s chest. This first plan served as an example to the other shots which involved the couple.

My other goal is to push my limits in the craft. I want to try new things and challenge myself to be the best version of myself. Animation is a work I enjoy, so I want to push myself in the work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vimeo.com/soyty
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrien-liv-082516/
• Twitter: https://x.com/adrien_liv
• Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6042241/
  https://80.lv/articles/take-a-look-at-early-animations-for-dreamworks-movies/

Image Credits

Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 are the Property of Illumination MacGuff.
Angry Birds is the Property of Rovio/Sony Imageworks