Happy Christmastime!
We’re off for the holiday season, as usual, and will return on January 11th, 2016 with all-new updates and animation goodness! Ferdinand and I both wish you the merriest of holiday seasons and tremendous joy as 2015 draws to a…
Animation Lessons from doing NaNoWriMo
November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. I had the opportunity to participate this year, and complete the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. What common themes can we learn from the challenge to apply…
Giveaway: How to Train Your Dragon 2
It’s giveaway time again, and we’ve got a copy of Dreamwork’s How To Train Your Dragon 2 Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD combo pack!
Stretch Your Creativity
Full disclosure, this post is a shameless self-promotion. Not going to lie. But it’s also (hopefully) useful as well! Today I had the joy of launching my first book, and it just so happens to be on creativity. Though creativity…
Practice or Die
If you leave a bicycle out in the rain and never ride it, it’s going to rust and become near unusable. Guess what? Animation is the same way. While you may not leave your skill set “out in the rain,”…
Film Creation Analysis You Don’t Want to Miss
If you’ve not seen it before, absolutely check out the YouTube channel “Every Frame a Painting.” Tony Zhou breaks down scenes, films, and styles in a way that is extremely approachable and helpful to everyone who works in film and…
What Animation Advice Would You Give Your Younger Self?
Great animation comes from experience. The more you animate, the better you’ll get. Still, there are a lot of helpful things you learn along the way, some of which you discover and immediately think “Why didn’t someone tell me this…
Our Most Popular Posts
We’ve added a new way-station below the site logo in the upper right corner! You’ll now see “Popular Posts” next to the About Us link. There you’ll find a hand-picked selection of some of the greatest hits of Animator Island…
Why Should 2D Animation be Abandoned? (Part 2 – Plus Why Not)
Last time we looked at reasoning animators might consider giving up on 2D/Hand-drawn completely and moving on to the future that is 3D/CGI animation. Today we take a look at a few more of these ideas and conclude with a…
Why Should 2D Animation Be Abandoned? (Part 1)
“2D Animation is dead.” You hear the phrase all the time, in spite of recent 2D releases, the likes of which make it to the top of the Oscar short list. Whether it’s dead or not, today we’re going to…