SynchroLux

One of the most common errors I see in student films, and sometimes in professional work, is a lack of attention to the flow of the viewer’s point of focus within a shot and, especially, across cuts. I use the term ‘shot flow’ to describe the way the viewer’s eye flows from point-of-interest to point-of-interest [...]

A student who’s been working on his short film for a long 7 months recently asked how one manages to keep a fresh perspective. Animators frequently reach a stage of creative fatigue and begin to question their judgment. It can happen over months on a short, and it can happen over days on a difficult [...]

Paraphrasing some questions from Alonso, one of my former AM students: So what do you do when you’re working on a film that “has shallow storytelling and empty, superficial characters.” Do you make up your own backstory trying to fill in the blanks the director/writer left? How do you get inside your character’s head so [...]

Back around 1990, when I first got seriously interested in animation (this is before I began taking classes at the union or even thinking about working in the industry), I sought out books on the subject. There are a ton of animation books around now, but not so many then. The Illusion of Life was [...]

The above quote is from one of the best storytellers working today, Ira Glass. Virtually all of his career has been in radio, which might be ironic since this is a blog devoted to animation and visual storytelling, but then I like to drive home the point that storytelling is storytelling. Ira Glass (and his [...]

In the comments on the Stranger Than Fiction post, one of my former AM students, DJ, asked some good questions about making a short film: DJ: I think one of the problems I had (with doing a short film in classes 5 and 6 on AM), was that I was worried too much about time [...]

I’ll be getting a new batch of Animation Mentor victims students in class 6 in a few days. They’ll have spent the last 12 weeks in class 5, fleshing out a short film idea and blocking it out in animatic form. In my class, their final AM class, they’re supposed to animate the whole thing. [...]

Hey, finally some new animation! This is a fairly vanilla dog gallop: [ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]