The Power of Limits

In this scene, carefully choosing my perspective and distance
 allowed me to use particle generators for the "seagulls," which
saved incredible amounts of time and money.

3D animation has given us nearly unlimited potential in terms of what we can visualize.  The sky is the limit.  But the human mind craves to face and overcome boundaries.  Boundaries brew creativity.  Limits are powerful allies in animation.  Rather than viewing limits as deficiencies, let your limits drive the creativity.  For example, if character animation is not your strong suit, try utilizing any real world situation that might obscure the character in an animation (i.e. glass, walkways, distance, point-of-view, etc).  A few months ago, I was approached with the challenge of animating a security terminal for new fingerprint analysis hardware.  Character animation being incredibly time consuming for me, I took up the challenge by allowing my limitations to drive my approach and decided animating from someone's point-of-view might be the fastest, highest quality method to visualize the scene.  With timely use of camera motion and simple film-making tricks, I could produce an engaging animation of the technology in a quarter the time it would have taken to utilize character animation.

As a corollary, I often think of how limitations in film-making brought about the innovations in special effects we had in Star Wars, E.T, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It helps me to approach much of my animation from a cinematic or simulating perspective.  In this way, I see myself as a film producer rather than as an animator (depending on the project, I may also serve as the script writer and director).  In my experience, an animator does not always know or understand the whole story they are visualizing - they don't have "ownership" over the "whole."  Whereas, as a producer, you're in charge of every aspect of the whole because you have to make the director's vision come alive - if they say, "I want to see this," you have to figure out how you're going to make it happen with the time and money budget you face, while remaining protective of the story you're trying to tell.  Remember, communicating the desired message should be the objective of any video production, not showing off.  You have to protect the core message when navigating limitations.  This way of approaching a project can be very liberating and empowering.