Animation crash course pdf download

Author : John M. BlenderTM is a free Open Source 3D Creation Suite supporting the entire modeling and animation pipeline — modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking.

The program is free to download and use by anyone for anything. This book introduces the program's Graphical User Interface and shows how to implement tools for modeling and animating characters and creating scenes with the application of color, texture and special lighting effects. Key Features: The book is designed to lead new users into the world of computer graphics using Blender 2. The book presents instruction in a series of short chapters with visual references and practical examples.

Instructions are structured in a building-block fashion using contents in earlier chapters to explain more complex operations in later chapters. It is assumed that the reader has no previous knowledge of the Blender program and treats 2D Animation using the Grease Pencil as a standalone application.

Grease Pencil is a component of the 3D modeling and animation program, Blender. Blender is a free open-source 3D Computer Graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality and computer games.

Lighting for Animation is designed with one goal in mind - to make you a better artist. Over the course of the book, Jasmine Katatikarn and Michael Tanzillo Senior Lighting TDs, Blue Sky Studios will train your eye to analyze your work more critically, and teach you approaches and techniques to improve your craft.

Focusing on the main philosophies and core concepts utilized by industry professionals, this book builds the foundation for a successful career as a lighting artist in visual effects and computer animation. That type of training will teach you how to create an image; this book will teach you the technical skills you need to make that image beautiful.

Key Features Stunning examples from a variety of films serve to inspire and inform your creative choices. Unique approach focuses on using lighting as a storytelling tool, rather than just telling you which buttons to press. Comprehensive companion website contains lighting exercises, assets, challenges, and further resources to help you expand your skillset.

A new edition of Bloop Animation's popular animation guidebook packed with the latest recommendations and insights on how to turn your artistic passion into a professional film career! If you are an aspiring animator considering a career in film production or are curious about what it takes to make animated shorts, this is the book for you!

Animation for Beginners is a comprehensive and modern introduction to the art and business of 3D animation from Bloop Animation founder, filmmaker, graphic novel author, and teacher Morr Meroz.

With this guide, Meroz reveals a behind-the-scenes view of the pre-production, production, and post-production process along with an introduction to the skills you need and the different types of animation across the film industry. Along with these basics, you will learn: The 12 Principles of Animation The 8 Genres of Animated Shorts Writing an Animated Feature Film Career Paths for Animators and Tips on Starting a Career in Animation As a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and an animation professional, Meroz demystifies the business side of filmmaking with real-world advice for creating a compelling demo reel and portfolio site, hunting for a first job, and considering the pros and cons of freelancing versus working full-time.

This is a perfect gift for illustrators, graphic designers, film students, and film industry professionals interested in how to "make it" as animators. Learn the basics of cartoon animation from acclaimed cartoon animator Preston Blair! Join acclaimed cartoon animator Preston Blair as he explains and demonstrates the magic of cartoon animation.

From cartooning basics to more advanced animation techniques, Animation 1 is a welcome introduction for artists ready to bring their drawings to life. Animation 1 allows artists to widen the scope of their abilities, demonstrating how to animate a character, from character development to movement and dialogue.

Animation has been part of television since the start of the medium but it has rarely received unbiased recognition from media scholars. More often, it has been ridiculed for supposedly poor technical quality, accused of trafficking in violence aimed at children, and neglected for indulging in vulgar behavior. These accusations are often made categorically, out of prejudice or ignorance, with little attempt to understand the importance of each program on its own terms.

This book takes a serious look at the whole genre of television animation, from the early themes and practices through the evolution of the art to the present day. Obviously, not all animation can be thought of in this manner, but how subtly or broadly you handle it can have a bearing on an infinite number of situations.

If handled broadly, the animation is stylized, telegraphing the audience - first one thought is read, then the next, then the next, and so on. If handled more subtly, which usually requires the lessfrenetic pacing found in features, it can result in more realistic movement but still give strength and intent to a scene. Attitude Poses Developed from an Outside Source When you are called upon to animate an already-established, distinctive style, as is frequently the case in television commercials, look at the source material and find out how the artist handles various attitudes and postures you may need.

Examine how the artist expresses joy, sorrow, anger, relaxation, dejection; how the figure walks, runs, rests - the characteristic poses that make this artwork unique. Then utilize these as the storytelling drawings or action keys to give your animation accuracy to the original and allow your audience to recognize the original.

Limited Animation Attitude poses can be even more important in TV ca rtoons, since they rarely have the budgets and schedules for niceties like overlap and slow cushions. For me, this is the most comfortable method, beca use I can better explore using the entire body to be expressive. However, there are many staunch supporters of the thumbnail, some world-class animators among them, so who am I to disagree?

If you find them useful, go for it. He should look as if he is in control, not a pile of drawings pushed around by an unseen artist. If he is reacting to stimulus, physical or emotional, he should be animated in a way that tells an audience that it is he who is reacting his particular personality and facial expressions and his ground rules of weight and mass and not another character.

Or hers. If the cha racter is doing something physical, feel out the action for yourself or act it out even! Recall similar incidents you have experienced to that which your characters must undergo. No one will believe in your character unless you do first. And if this character exists, he will have certain properties, physical and emotional, that you will need to convey to an audience.

Any character has to be conceived from the inside out. By understanding who your character is, you will define movements, gestures, and behavior that reflect his outlook. Heck, they darn near invented it! However, these characters become richer when you define for the audience why they have become these archetypes and how they deal with it.

Now all of this may sound lofty for a broad cartoon comedy such as Hercules, but I assure you it is indeed the process the directors and animators went through to realize their characters. What excites him? What makes him mad? What is his driving motivation? How does he look at life? What are his basic attitudes?

How can you expand these basic attitudes to acquire more depth? What makes your particular character tick?

What makes him unique? How do you show him thinking, changing mood? How can you show what he is thinking and feeling through his movements?

How does he compare and contrast with them? What properties of movement make your character unique to the others around him? In Song of the South, Brer Bear is big, heavy, and stupid, and his movements are correspondingly slow and ponderous. Brer Fox is cunning, excitable, talkative- and his movements are quick and slick.

What is his weight and mass, and how does that affect his movement? How physically fit is your character? How weak? Sometimes animators can be trying so hard to express emotions that they can lose the essence of their particular character. Make sure your actions are consistent with his particular viewpoint on life.

When should you break them? In other words, your character may remain consistent through most of the film, but break from his established character traits to express a different or deeper aspect of his personality.

However, to show when Phil was truly hurt and angry, we made the choice to shrink him down into a more contained performance. By portraying him as loud and bombastic most of the time, it made a great contrast to have him quiet and restrained for his deepest emotions.

How does he react as a secondary character when another character is performing or talking? Get off the vertica l when doing humans! By that, I mean there is a tendency when animating humans in a scene together to have al l of them standing up straight like they have poles up their Ho hum In this scene, Mean Lady leans forward, making her more threatening.

Husband throws his chest out and leans forward on the opposite diagonal, making him more defiant. Wife curls around behind Husband, making her appear more fearful. Is he cocky, authoritative, meek, oily, insincere, warm, indignant, recalcitrant, caring, mischievous? Think Zero Mastel in The Producers. Is your character the type to conspire with the audience and look into the camera?

How do you show these attitudes and expressions succinctly? Johnny once asked him how he got his performances and characters to look so realistic. His answer: what the audience sees is completely stylized, edited so that the extraneous movements are not included.

Instead of utilizing poses that are standard animation cliches, what can you do to make poses that are unique to this character? Does it need to be slow, ponderous? Quick and snappy? Is there texture to the variety of timings and moods? Are your expressive poses on screen long enough to communicate to an audience? Are anticipations used effectively to change mood or expression?

Is he under physical strain or unfettered? Can he perform nonchalantly? He may be expressive, and doing all the things he needs to do in the screen time, but will an audience find it interesting? He gets good at it or maybe confused , it gets quicker. Or something can happen to upset the rhythm completely. Or he can start a secondary action looking in the other direction, trying to keep up with somethin g while trying to maintain his estab lished rhythm.

You can juggle timings when a character performs a repetitive function long, short, long, short, short, long, short, long such as typing, dialing a phone, using a ca lcu lator.

Realism The most important attribute your character can possess is that he exists on his own terms: that his actions are a result of his thought processes, and that he has a consistent weight and volume in space and that these things are accepted by an audience without question so that they can concentrate more on his expressions and performance. His lip-sync and accents come from his personality and are believable for his character. It could be nobody else but that character.

A pantomime scene is automatically more difficult than a dialogue scene: A good soundtrack can very often carry lukewarm animation, and still convey humor or emotional content. However, they spent their dollars wisely on great scripts and great voice talent.

Pantomime has no crutches- it is the animator, center stage, alone! Moreover, the types of things included in a good pantomime scene strong attitude poses, good timing, establishing and breaking rhythms, change of attitude are also the same types of things that shou ld be in a good dialogue scene. His postures and movements show how comfortable he is on the animal side- he walks on his knuckles and picks up fruit with his foot, like an ape. When he fights Sabor, his animal instincts show through as quickness and agility - the actions and reactions are those of an animal in conflict.

His casual walk says that nothing fazes him. Daffy has a. His craven movements are contrasted with his overzealous screaming and humiliating attempts to make Bugs a fall guy. A lot of the si ncerity comes from what has just been described. However, the character is not meant to work in a vacuum - he must relate to all the characters with whom he comes in contact.

It is these relationships that often reflect sincerity the most - how your character regards the other characters in the show. See why a history is important? The important thing to remember is that the range of emotions you show must be true to who that character is.

Pocahontas is a free spirit with a love for her people and their regard for nature. The choices you make for the range are all filtered through who that character is. Some of this came out in the storyboarding process; a lot of it came from knowing who the players were and what their desires were. John - Heading toward old age, torn between who he wants to be a fun-loving guy, acting like a kid and who he is forced to be a sober, stuffy, dignified member of society.

His wife Margaret glares him down when he tries to have fun, so his movements are a continual contrast - broad, energetic well, as energetic as he can be given his weight when acting out his fantasies, contrasted with moody resignation when hauled back to reality. Joe - Middle-aged, Joe is the symbol of the Depression.

Rachel - Based on our own daughter albeit when she was quite young. Duke - The embodiment of jazz. Knowing who these characters are, I also knew what they wanted. The visualization of th eir goals became the centerpiece of the show, with all of them ice skatin g at Rockefeller Center, looking their elegant best. Rachel just wants to spend time with her parents.

So her movements are joyous and confident when skating with them. Joe just wants a job, money to live, a clean shirt.

Duke wants to play jazz. His movements while skating and drumming are smooth, effortless, sensual, cool. John wants to be free. Recommended Cartoons:. Acting with posture whirlwind. Jerry and his cousin, defined purely by posture and movement. Dumbo Disney - Emotional content through avoidance of cliche.

Over and over again, in fact, until you have memorized the dialogue perfectly, with all of the accents and nuances intact. Is the dialogue a series of sentences or just one? Do you have to put across a range of emotions, or just a single thought? How do you convey to the audience that your characters are in control of their own thoughts and bodies? This pattern of movement should serve two chief purposes: 1. To express visually the thought behind the spoken words.

It may be helpful to think of phrasing as a musical line there is music to speech patterns with notes that naturally rise and fall.

Many animators find it useful to use a mirror to act out dialogue lines for themselves and then attempt to reproduce their acting in drawings.

Others prefer to invent or recall ways of expressing emotio ns based on experience and intuition. Either way, by phrasing actions around a. By straddling a cut between two scenes with one phrase, it gives the impression that the character exists, regardless of where the camera is situated.

By phrasing the action fluidly, you can express the idea and the reading while reinforcing the story poses:. When timing something like this, the less time spent at the beginning of the move, an d the more toward the end, the better.

This reinforces the pose idea while keeping the character moving. You may find it useful to think of one pattern of movement while a character is seen to be collecting his thoughts and then hit a strong pose when he actually exp resses them. It is this quality of threedimensionality that wi ll ultimately convince your audience that the character is real and tangible. In dialogue scenes, full knowledge of head construction in particular can be used expressively.

Or one a clever fast-talker and the other big and stupid. Or one very femin ine and one very masculine. One nervous and one confident. Find out the particular qualities of each voice you are dealing with and determine ways of showing these differences to the audience. The most important factor in this kind of scene is that nothing should occur at the sam e time.

Each reaction should be delayed well behind whoever is making the major move, and the two reacting to the third character should also react on staggered timings to each other. Note how you can get character value out of subtle reactions of the first two getting peeved at each other until both are upstaged and surprised by the third. This kind of subtle weaving in and out of major and minor thoughts is what gives your scene texture and makes it credible for the audience.

I wanted to give the audience the fun of a great Robin performance in cartoon form. I wanted the Genie to be even wilder- Robin sometimes keeps his arms very close to his body when performing, and he does more with his voice than with his actions - perfect for animators!

It worked, but it was too mannered. It was such a unique lip shape that I started to incorporate it in the next scene.

Hey, presto - all of a sudden, Phil worked. Rover Dangerfield - Without casting aspersions, this is an example of taking the mannerism thing too far.

In practically every scene, they put so much effort into capturing every Rodney nuance, tick, and pop that they lost sight of an overall personality: the. Here are some thoughts - some performance-based, some technical - that might help. If your scene is short, and your movements constrained, you may only have one major accent in it - not several strung together of equal intensity.

Is he concentrating intensely, or is he off-handed about it? Is he enjoying the activity or just going through the motions? Are his movements slick? Make sure to give your audience enough screen time to read your acting.

Instead, use a moving hold or series of tracebacks for the head, during which you move the brows- which leads us to our next point Figure out timings for your actions and poses either in seconds or parts thereof or for the duration of a spoken phrase. Even thinking on twos as a general habit can be limiting if you want your timing to have fluidity and snap. The great Disney animation is always a combination of ones and twos in an acting scene, almost never totally ones or totally twos.

Watch as much as you can in live-action, animation, and life itself to understand the different and unique ways that people and animals express themselves. Log this information mentally or in sketches to utilize later. And at least, if you know the cliches, then you know your starting point if you want to go in a different direction. Optional Exercise: Take this pair of eyes eyes only! Posture is a good place to start for good acting and poses.

Although these simple shapes can be animated fluidly, be aware of at least a simple skeletal structure underneath on which the fleshy bits hang. Hand construction Most cartoon hands tend to be rubbery and doughy, based on a circle for the palm and rubber fingers connected to it. Further definition, however, can be an added bonus.

Facial construction Althou gh the muscles and skin coverings all over the head are fl exible, some parts look better in distortion than others. If you can retain a feelin g of a solid cranium underneath, with more flexible jowls and eye muscles, your animation will be more believable than that which regularly distorts the cranium.

Some cranial distortion is allowable, but it should not be left on screen lon g enough to be perceived as a goony drawing. In most cases, you can still use circular cartoon construction for your rough stages.

If your animation has the right squash and stretch, breaking of joints, overlap, timing, etc. Of course, if you can do it all at once, bearing angular construction in mind as you animate, even better! If it has, try to design your characters to reflect and complement that style i. If lighting plays an important part in the film, will your characters be dimensional enough to show those effects? Is there a medium, large, or minuscule budget on the film? Can you design the characters to reflect that budget i.

Are your characters in physical situations? Natural settings? Do they need to convince an audience that they exist perfectly in three dimensions? How can you use anatomy to define your characters? Can your characters be looser or more graphic with an understanding of a logical anatomy? What facial and clothing details are necessary to define your characters?

Instead of settling on lots of fussy, decorative trappings, try to conceive the characters simply and make the animation work harder to define the physical properties and attitudes. If the characters are a bit more streamlined, the tendency is to make their poses a bit more streamlined as well. An overall approach to angularity, curviness, eye definition, hands, mouth shapes, and consistency of anatomy will help give the film a unified look.

Are there too many colors to read them against the BG? Do the character colors read in a number of situations in the film? Do they need to alter for a particular scene? Very elusive to define but probably the most important subject! Angular shapes are more difficult to look at but are perceived as more sophisticated. Features radiating outward from the nose are usually more appealing than disjointed ones. Also, any amount of pliability in features how soft they appear in facial muscles, hands, clothing, etc.

In Fig. Eyes are slightly crossed for focus and pupils protrude slightly. Cheeks also protrude off of the main circle, and the whole thing is more organically drawn to exaggerate the pliability and fleshiness. The eyebrow is a straight slash bisected by the forehead, the mouth is a smooth but uninteresting curve. The eyebrow, drawn with more flair, has more weight and length beyond the forehead.

The addition of a smile line and a crinkle to the mouth gives more quirky character. Try this with your own characters from different periods and film styles.

Drawing in Animation Finding the poses -What communicates best? What communicates best and is also unexpected? Then elaborate the action with further keys and breakdowns. Of course, some scenes will work better posed-out, and others are better straight-ahead. Go for the feeling first, anatomy second!! This works fo r both cartoony and straight characters although knowledge of their anatomy is essential!

Make your drawings support the idea of the pose- so all elements work organically to portray movement and flexibility. Understand how overlap in your animation will strengthen its communicative power!

This pose concentrates on anatomy first: everything is well-constructed, limbs connect in al l the right places, head structure is solid. Now, the anatomy comes in when the pose is tied down. Everything connects where it should, but the entire figure is drawn to support the idea of the pose, including the overall arc of body and overlapping elements. Everything is in a constant state of motion, and even tiny movements indicating recoil, follow-through, and settling of overlap all contribute to the effect of your character being alive.

Loosening up! In other words, instead of drawing keys disconnected in thou ght that you then attempt to connect:. Generally, the quicker or broader the action, the more extreme the drag. If the direction of thrust is borne in mind when animating, the drag should come naturally. CitoN OF. Try some drag on the entire body, not just parts of it, as in the above sequence, where the head leads, and the body follows through. Drag on facial muscles: If you treat the cranium as relatively solid, and the mouth and jowls as loose and plastic, your face animation should become more fluid without looking unbelievable.

If anything, exaggerate the feeling of looseness by taking the tie-downs even farther than your roughs. These tie-downs flatten the animation- the single line is a tracing, not a line that defines form.

The line weight is perfectly even, and the hair is too repetitive in its separate shapes. These are better: The varied weight of the line gives mass to nose and jowls; tapered eyelashes give personality. A feeling of flesh growing out of flesh is betterdefined lip into jowl, jowl into cranium, etc. Hair is not tied down into regular, even patterns. Shapes are defined for their uniqueness - one round pupil, one elongated pupil, etc. Emphasize them even more, bearing in mind direction of thrust- again, easier to do over light roughs!

A thicker line on the underside of jowls, noses, lower lips, etc. Thicker eyelids and lashes can give character and personality.

The hair in the first series of tie-downs is too similar in repeated shapes to be interesting. The hair in the second series has a more varied - and, thus, interesting- pattern. However, these variations must follow through properly in the animation whenever possible, instead of just boiling around randomly. Another valuable tip for further loosening up is in timing: if your broader actions are on ones even just a short burst of them and you r cushions, moving holds, or tracebacks are left on twos, it gives the work texture in timing- and also means that not everything needs to be put on ones to appear loose!

With the advent of more CG animation, Flash, and pa perless systems, the traditional X-sheet is frequently an afterthought, if it is indeed used at all. In the current scenario, the best I can do is map out for you how a traditional X-sheet works, and hope for the future that it continues to be incorporated into the animation process.

It is normally 6 feet long 96 frames - not an actual foot, but the representation of an actual 12 inches of 35mm film that would measure out to 16 frames. It is su bdivided horizontally, with each horizontal row representing one frame of picture, with darker horizontal lines every 8 frames for easy reference. The X-sheet is subdivided vertically into several th in columns, and they are read right to left, with the right side devoted to camera instructions, the middle for the BG, underlay, overlay, and animation levels, and the far left for the dialogue breakdown, music indications, and directorial and timing information.

Camera Instructions On the right side of the sheet, all of the information needed for fielding, camera movement, and exposures fades, dissolves is exposed. You want the truck-in to cushion out smoothly from your start.

Also, you would like a frame fade-in at the head of the scene, and a frame dissolve to Scene 2 at the end of the scene. The right column of your X-sheet would look like this: -7 The cut points start and end of the scene are marked in red horizontally. The opening field is shown on the sheets and held, with a straight vertical line, to the point where the truck-in starts.

The wiggly line indicates the cushion out, then a constant trucking rate, finished off with the opposite wiggly line to indicate the cushion to a stop for the final fielding, over the desired frame range. The frame dissolve at the end is shown as a fade-out V superimposed over a fade-in V to show the overlap between Scenes 1 and 2.

You should understand when animating that the following scene also requires the same degree of overlap at the head, and that you must provide animation for the entire length of the dissolve in both scenes. However, the usual readability of images through a dissolve is up to the center of the dissolve for the outgoing scene, and from the center of the dissolve for the incoming scene. On the far left side of the X-sheet are the Dialogue and Action indications.

In the dialogue column, the. The Animation Levels Between the left and right sides are the animation columns, read from right to left, with the bottommost level on the right, and the topmost level on the left. On top of that are cast shadows, then the character Finky on top. The sheets are numbered on twos with odd numbers 1, 3, 5, etc. An excellent working method is to number the sheets on twos all the way down, usually in the major character level. This is regardless of whether you will eventually need ones or not.

This way, you can see exactly which frame number corresponds to dialogue, beats, and. There are even more variations and notations to be made on the X-sheet, especially once it is converted to a digital format. Here, panning and trucking increments can be notated, as can exposures for certain levels say, a translucency on the cast shadows and tone mattes , and further stuff too technical for me to understand or mention here.

In any event, you will continue to see references to the humble traditional X-sheet throughout the rest of the chapters. Layout and Staging Ani mators need to have a good working knowledge of the mechanics of film and film com position to understand how these tools of communication can best support their performances and how the performances can be engineered to complement the film ic concepts.

Film Grammar: Types of Shots Establishing Shot - shows the overall setting and perhaps characters involved to define for the audience the place, the time of day, and the atmosphere of the sequence. Medium Shot M. Long Shot L. Close-Up C. Cra ne Shot - shot with shifting composition height of camera, distance from subject matter, turning around a character or stationary object , so called because of the hydraulic crane required to execute such a shot in live-action.

Cutaway - cut to a reaction shot of a second character other than the one performing or speaking. Many aspiring artists and animators have grown up with 3D and computers, and naturally gravitate to this field as their area of interest. Bringing a blend of studio and classroom experience to offer you thorough coverage of the 3D animation industry, this must-have book shows you what it takes to create compelling and realistic 3D imagery.

Serves as the first step to understanding the language of 3D and computer graphics CG Covers 3D animation basics: pre-production, modeling, animation, rendering, and post-production Dissects core 3D concepts including design, film, video, and games Examines what artistic and technical skills are needed to succeed in the industry Offers helpful real-world scenarios and informative interviews with key educators and studio and industry professionals Whether you're considering a career in as a 3D artist or simply wish to expand your understanding of general CG principles, this book will give you a great overview and knowledge of core 3D Animation concepts and the industry.

Drawing and sketching are central to the art of animation and can be crucial tools in designing and developing original stories, characters and layouts. Sketching for Animation offers a wealth of examples, exercises and tips from an army of professional animators to help you develop essential sketching, technical drawing and ideation techniques.

With interviews and in-depth case studies from some of today's leading animators, including Bill Plympton, Glen Keane, Tori Davis and John Canemaker, this is a unique guide to turning your sketchbook - the world's cheapest, most portable pre-visualisation tool - into your own personal animation armory.

Learn the basics of cartoon animation from acclaimed cartoon animator Preston Blair! Join acclaimed cartoon animator Preston Blair as he explains and demonstrates the magic of cartoon animation. From cartooning basics to more advanced animation techniques, Animation 1 is a welcome introduction for artists ready to bring their drawings to life. Animation 1 allows artists to widen the scope of their abilities, demonstrating how to animate a character, from character development to movement and dialogue.

All professional animators know a handful of secrets that give them an edge in a production environment. Learn time and energy-saving techniques tested in real Hollywood productions in this book, jam-packed with screenshots and scene files designed to get you up to speed quickly.

From menus to modeling, lipsync to lighting, How to Cheat in Maya covers all of the methods available in the latest version of Maya. Get up to speed quickly and produce stellar results with these insider workflows. With new, updated cheats for the latest version of Maya, How to Cheat in Maya is an essential guide for amateur and professional 3D animators alike. Fully updated with gold-mine coverage including: expanded sections on production workflow, all new chapters covering rigging cheats and Maya's referencing tools, and brand new project files demonstrating production-proven techniques.

The companion website includes complete scene files for exercises and techniques, extra rigs, Quicktime movies of full projects, and video tutorials. Have you ever wanted to try your hand at cartoony computer animation? Then look no further Cartoon Character Animation with Maya will help you create just that, guiding you through every step of the process including how to incorporate multiple limbs, smears, motion lines and staggers seamlessly into your animation.

From planning to posing to polish, you'll learn how to make the most of breakdowns, take the terror out of tangent types and overcome the oft-feared graph editor. Each chapter includes insight and advice from world-leading character animators, and the companion website, www.

There's also a specially created rig of Mr. Buttons for you to animate with, as well as walk-through videos demonstrating key techniques. Everything you need to help you animate your own cartoony creations! Step by step approach to drawing the human body in a simplified, structural way.

Designed for animators and extremely beneficial for comic artists, illustrators, classical and interpretive artists. Following the exercises can help to greatly improve structural and gestural drawing skills. Action Analysis is one of the fundamental princples of animation that underpins all types of animation: 2d, 3d, computer animation, stop motion, etc.

This is a fundamental skill that all animators need to create polished, believable animation. An example of Action Analysis would be Shrek's swagger in the film, Shrek. The animators clearly understood through action analysis the type of walk achieved by a large and heavy individual the real and then applied their observations to the animated character of an ogre the fantastic.

It is action analysis that enabled the animation team to visually translate a real life situation into an ogre's walk, achieving such fantastic results. Key animation skills are demonstrated with in-depth illustrations, photographs and live action footage filmed with high speed cameras. Detailed Case Studies and practical assignments ground action analysis methodology with real life examples.

Action Analysis for Animators is a essential guide for students, amateurs and professionals. Apply the practices of action analysis to any animaton process.

Follow master animator and Disney legend Andreas Deja as he takes you through the minds and works of these notable animators. An apprentice to the Nine Old Men himself, Deja gives special attention to each animator and provides a thoughtful analysis on their techniques that include figure drawing, acting, story structure, and execution.

Rare sequential drawings from the Disney archives also give you unprecedented access and insight into the most creative minds that changed the course of animation.

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