SynchroLux

In the last post, I broke down the primarily live-action shots in Who Framed Roger Rabbit that lead into the the piano duel between Daffy and Donald. Those shots demonstrated straight-forward film-making and clear shot flow, at least among the shots where human actors were the focus. Here I’ll break down the subsequent animated portion [...]

I remember seeing Who Framed Roger Rabbit and being excited by the Daffy/Donald piano duel. It was just about my favorite part of the movie. I was also as frustrated by the sequence as I was excited. Here it is: [ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page [...]

While we’re on the subject of James Baxter (and if you’re not listening to Clay Kaytis’s first podcast with James, go do it now), I found a beat up old video tape with some early animation tests for Sinbad – Legend of the Seven Seas that James did. He did a test each for Sinbad, [...]

Continuing on the subject of spacing . . . I was lucky to come into animation when features were drawn, and to work my way up step by step. I got to spend a lot of time absorbing the importance of arcs and spacing before I had to struggle with larger issues like performance. On [...]

There are some terms that I find students struggle with, some of which come from traditional animation but tend to get mangled on the CG side of the fence. First, let’s start with one that isn’t a word: animations. I can’t tell you how much this grates on the ears of anyone who comes from [...]

You said Story, right? You hear this rhetorical question all the time — what are the three most important things in an animated film? Story, story, story, goes the standard answer. But I don’t think that’s true. Story doesn’t matter if you don’t have something else, something the audience doesn’t have to actually watch the [...]

The ASIFA-Hollywood Annie Awards are going on as I write this (yeah, I missed it this year for the first time in a long time), and I’ve been struck by the lack of consensus among the various film organizations that give awards for animated features and short films. This is especially true in the short [...]

Jim Hull noted a fascinating article from the Harvard Business School website about the way people can be creatively shut down by those trying the aid them with ‘helpful’ suggestions. Jim’s take is that this can make animation dailies counterproductive. As a mentor and as someone who believes in actively collaborative environments, I worry that [...]

Thomas’s and Johnston’s landmark book on Disney animation, The Illusion of Life, features a chapter on the 12 “Principles of Animation.” This chapter has become the touchstone for understanding animation technique ever since, and no one studies character animation without these 12 principles coming up again and again. Many animators look at these principles as [...]

After operating under the radar for a little while, SynchroLux has been ‘discovered’ thanks to Cartoon Brew. Take a look at my site statistics for the last 7 days: