Last time we had a look at how a character’s body type, personality, emotions and background-story influence posing and how to deal with weight and balance. This week you’ll learn a few guidelines to make your poses clear, readable and more appealing.
Animators from all over the world have long been complaining about the public’s misconception that animation is an easy and effortless process that can be done with the press of a button. Now, the impossible is becoming a little more real: The research department of the Walt Disney Company announced today that they are working on a suite of software which will be “a break-through in how animated features are created”.
Quickest way to improvement? Practice. It’s a simple bit of advice that rings with absolute truth. Articles, tips, mentors, and study will never get you as far as rolling up your sleeves and getting down to work, be it animation or any other skill. Today we’ve compiled a list of exercises, like animation push-ups, that will get your art skills buff and toned.
Last year we ran a series (found here) on ways to relax and keep away stress for animators. In Part 2 of the series we put out a call for YOUR best ideas and how you personally manage to keep cool when things get hectic! Today those ideas are being shared to all.
If you’ve studied or done animation for any length of time you’ve no doubt come across some absolutely fantastic storyboards out there. Single images that tell the story at hand with elegant brilliance yet wonderful simplicity. To create such pre-production masterpieces it takes a lot of skill and a huge amount of hard work and practice, of course, but there IS something you can do right now to make sure your storyboards really pop visually.
Last week we looked at a few ways to take some of the stress out of the very difficult job we have as animators, and today we’ll tackle a couple more! Check out these tips for taking the edge off, animation style.
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Animation is hard. Ask any non-animator and they’ll tell you it must be nice to “make cartoons for a living” while anyone who IS an animator stares, unblinking, with a gaze that could turn someone to stone. The truth is that it IS nice to make cartoons for a living, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Sometimes you can feel overwhelmed or burned out, even mere days (or hours, or moments) after being filled with enthusiasm for a project. What can you do to shake off the hopeless feelings and desire to “take a short break to check Facebook?”
Ideas – every creative has plenty of them constantly, but often when we need them most, we can’t get into the flow. In this article, I will present a method that can help you to get more ideas, more effectively, in less time. You can use it whenever you’re stuck with finding a title, character development, outlining scenes or even to create a complete story from scratch in only a few hours.
As an animator, you can’t get around working with digital video formats, whether it’s during the production process or for the final distribution. Sooner or later, you need to store your moving pictures on a hard drive, DVD, Blu-ray or tape. Also, there is a lot of confusion about what resolution, frame rate and color depth are good to use when setting up your project. This article gives you some thoughts on which form, which file formats and which codecs you could choose for what occasion.
