SynchroLux

My first experience in animation was pitching in on some test animation for the comic-book character Nexus. I’d grown up much more a comic book fan than an animation fan — I think I saw one animated film as a kid, and for long stretches my boob-tube hating father kept us without a TV — [...]

There have been some great comments to the last few posts that I wanted to explore further: Is video reference a creative dead end, akin to rotoscoping, and even a form of creative plagiarism? What about lipstick cam footage? (That wasn’t from the comments, but I was thinking about it today.) How does an animator [...]

Here’s animator Jeff Gabor doing some of the best and most extensive video reference for animation I’ve ever seen [Addendum from 3/19 - apparently the folks at Fox asked that this be taken down. Hopefully this screen-grab gives you a little taste.]: Jeff Gabor at work When I first started working in animation in the [...]

The subject of eye movements is doubly important in animation because the physiology and psychology that applies to our character’s eye movements applies equally to what our actual audience is doing when they watch our animation. In other words, understanding eye direction and eye movement tells us not only how to animate our characters, but [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about eyes and eye movements, probably because I’ve done a lot of close-up acting shots on Terra, and some of the characters have HUGE eyes. I’ve found that some of the ‘rules’ and clichés I’ve been taught about how to do eye movements don’t really hold up, or don’t go [...]

I got a lot of requests to see some animation roughs after the posts on Spacing and the Baxter Sinbad tests, so here are a couple from the Sinbad test scene I previously posted:

Clay Kaytis just put up part two of his James Baxter interview podcast, in which James talks about acting in animation, and cites Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as excellent reference. Below is a clip of Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray from The Apartment that James used in a talk on secondary action that James [...]

My posts on shot flow in the piano duel from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? were cross posted on the TAG blog and the comments there give key background on how this sequence originated. First, cartoonist Larry Levine wrote: Chuck Jones originally layed out this scene during the film’s early pre-production & one can only dream [...]