How often do you think about the audience when you’re animating? A lot, hopefully. But when you’re thinking about the audience, do you think about were, exactly, they’ll be looking, from moment to moment, when they watch your scene? On any given frame, can you draw a small circle somewhere on the screen, and confidently […]
I’ve been teaching the Animation Mentor Animals & Creatures Class 2 this term, and in particular we’re focused on animating flight (and flying dragons!). Of course, if you’re going to animate a believable fantasy creature, you need to understand real flying animals, like birds and bats, and I’m going to summarize some ideas and then […]
The on-line character animation school, AnimationMentor.com, celebrates its fifth birthday tomorrow. How the years have flown by! I’ve been a mentor for 70% of that time, and I’m certain I’ve learned and grown at least as much as my students have. It’s been a privilege to be part of the school, and to see so […]
I recently saw an animation student’s summary of the Principles of Animation from The Illusion of Life. Here’s the one for secondary action: Secondary actions are almost like follow through and overlapping actions. This is a common misconception that a lot of people make. But it’s incorrect. Take a look back at The Illusion […]
Amidst a long-overdue vacation to the east coast, some freelance work, and an exhausting trek down to Comicon, I’ve managed to do a little personal animation. My Animation Mentor students usually ask about my workflow and methods, which I have a hard time explaining, so I thought I’d show the result, and then a progressive […]
Today let’s step away from the technical aspects of character animation, and focus on the forest and not the trees. Try taking a completely non-technical approach in the early stages of your shots. I’m recommending you get yourself firmly into right-brain mode, block out your internal critic, and just animate from the gut. Animate unconsciously. […]
Anyone out there who’s curious about how the Animation Mentor ‘eCritiques‘ work, I just did one for the May winner over at the 11 Second Club. Brazilian Ivan Oviedo did a great, hilarious hand-drawn scene to win the closest 11 Second Club competition ever. I got a little carried away, and did about three sessions […]
I’ve suggested a couple of times that CG animators often don’t use enough blinks and interesting blink patterns to show what their characters are thinking and feeling, and in my last post I put up a live-action clip showing how much a good human actor can do with blinks and half blinks and eye flutters. […]
This will be a shorter post than that on Vanilla Blinks, not because there’s less to say, but because there’s too much. As we saw, there’s a lot of quantifiable information about the generic, spontaneous blinks that we do all the time. Imagine how much could be written about variations on standard blinks! But instead […]