SynchroLux

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. [...]

That’s the question I was asked by a recently graduated animation student I spoke to at last year’s SIGGRAPH FJORG! event. One of the things I spoke about then was the need to treat the body as a connected whole — when the head moves, for example, the chest and shoulders are going to move, [...]

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 [...]

One of my AM students pointed out that San Jose State University is going to be offering a class in Physics for Animators. In a bit of serendipity, the professor of that class commented on my last post, of Hancock violating Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and provided a link to the program’s website: