Inspiration for animation fans, students and professionals
Training
Animation Mentor Launches Creature Course
Jan 12th
Today Animation Mentor launched their new Animal and Creature Master Class.
This helps address an important gap in Animation Mentor’s current curriculum – and was considered a top priority for many animation houses.
Animating creatures and fantasy animals against moving plates of live action footage makes up the meat and potatoes work of many visual effects studios.
The two classes, each of twelve weeks, allow students to work with three new fully-scalable and customizable rigs: cat, dragon and ogre.
Both new classes are aimed at industry-level animators, so unless you are already an Animation Mentor alumni, you will need to submit your animation demo reel in order to qualify for the course.
The rigs and the curriculum looks great from what I’ve seen, and it’s clear they’ve had cooperation from a lot of the major visual effects studios such as Industrial Light and Magic, Tippett Studios and Sony Pictures Imageworks.
For more information, check out the Animation Mentor Animals and Creatures Master Class website.
Two biggest mistakes made by animated filmmakers
Sep 30th
Short films based on story and artwork
Last weekend I went to the Sydney International Animation Festival and did one of my favorite things:
I sat in the dark and watched animated short films.
For hours and hours and hours.
I have to say – a lot of them were good. A few of them were outstanding.
For the record, my top picks were The Man in the Blue Gordini, The Art of Drowning, Le Petit Dragon, Orgesticulanismus and The Lost Thing, but enough about the good films.
Let’s talk about the crummy ones.
The terrible ones.
The painfully slow and woeful ones.
The common theme to the ones the audience disliked the most could all be summarised by the animators making one of two crucial errors.
And the worst of the worst made both mistakes!
1. The film looks ugly
If you’re working on an animated short – you don’t have to be able to draw like Michaelangelo, but it is your responsibility to make the film look as good as it can be.
That’s not to say that it can’t be intentionally ugly or crude on purpose for dramatic effect, but I would caution going out of your way to do it.
If you want to do animation in the rudimentary style of South Park: that’s fine, but at least those guys are telling a story.
If it’s ugly on purpose though, you’d better not make rookie mistake number two, which is:
2. The film doesn’t tell a story
You must have a point of view and you must be prepared to communicate it as clearly as you can.
Can you make a non-narrative film? Sure.
A poetic meditation on a single leaf falling from an oak tree? Absolutely!
But it had better be one stunning, incredibly rendered, beautiful tree.
I know artists want to break boundaries and challenge audiences, but for the sake of your viewers, please do what you can to inject as much beauty and clarity as you possibly can.
Avoid those two mistakes (especially in combination), and I promise you: your audience will thank you.
You might even get a standing ovation at your next screening.
Related posts
Get your film in front of an audience
Color Theory by Mark Kennedy
Sep 14th
Mark Kennedy from the Temple of the Seven Golden Camels blog has a brilliant series of posts on color theory.
I didn’t come to animation from a fine arts background, so these articles do a great job of summarizing important color theory ideas like tone and value.
So far, Mark has posts on:
Things I didn’t know about color
I’m not sure how many articles he has planned for the series, but this is definitely a great place to start to improve your art, your storyboards and your animation.
Two types of creative time
Sep 13th
How much time do you have left until your next deadline?
Careful! There are two answers to that question.
Creative work takes two different types of time.
There is the time in hours it takes to produce and polish the work. I guess you could call that “clock time”.
But there is also the time in days, weeks and months you need to generate ideas – or “calendar time”.
Maybe it’s different for you, but I can’t cram creativity into the last minute. I can’t rely on setting my watch and expect the muse to show up.
Which means you have to leave plenty of calendar time for ideas to grow.
My approach?
Spread out the early phases of a creative project over as long a period of calendar time as possible.
Doing even small amounts of work on a personal project regularly spread over a week or two is always preferably to doing the same number of hours in a continuous block.
Solutions to difficult problems are often born in the spaces between the times when you’re “working”.
In the shower. Just after waking up. On the bus. During a meal.
It’s no coincidence that people talk about “sleeping on a problem”. Give your subconscious a chance to help you out.
But once you know what you’re doing, and you’re into the details of the work: go for it.
At this point, there is no substitute for “clock time” on task.
Log out of email and switch off your phone – because now all you really need to focus on is getting the work done. And this is the kind of work measured in hours, not days.
Give yourself plenty of both kinds of time and best of luck meeting your next deadline.
Related posts
Connecting with your animation network
Four Goals of Animation School
May 25th
Regardless of whether you’re going to the best animation school in the world, or your local art and design college, there are four main things you need to get out of your animation education.
And the great news is: none of these things cost money!
Just lots of focus, attention and hard work.
1. You need good grades.
If you are at school, you need good grades. This point is so obvious, I almost left it out, but it’s worth explaining.
Unless you have years of industry experience, the best way future employers will be able to predict if you can handle deadlines and delivery quality artwork is by looking at your grades.
Simple as that.
Like them or hate them: grades tell people how well you were able to manage your time, and juggle commitments to reach a successful outcome.
So what defines “good”?
I would suggest a B average as a minimum standard. In American colleges that translates to a 3.0 GPA or above.
If you’re not meeting that standard, almost everything else in this post is secondary to getting to a point where you can product quality work, on time and show that you’re on top of your technique.
2. You need to experiment.
This might seem to contradict my first point, but when you’re learning animation (or anything for that matter) you must be prepared to break what you think works in order to get better.
No-one improves their golf handicap without first “unlearning” the mistakes in their golf swing. And yes: your performance will suffer in the short term.
But when you are a student, this is EXACTLY the time to do as much experimentation with your artistic process before you get locked in to doing things in a set way.
There is no better time that when you’re studying to take some risks and really change your workflow.
You never know. You might discover a way of working that triples your productivity.
3. You need a showreel.
“It’s not what you know, it’s what you can show.”
Not every piece of work you do at school is going to end up on your animation reel. That’s okay.
Your portfolio should only contain work that you honestly believe showcases your best art.
Having said that – if you’re doing assignments for college: why not approach them with the attitude that they may end up on your reel in the future.
It will help clarify the decisions in planning your animation when you begin with the end in mind.
4. You need to make friends.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
The friends you make at animation school will form the start of your professional network that will ensure you have the best chance of securing jobs in the future.
Do whatever you can to build and maintain your relationships with your classmates. You never know when someone you went to school with will be in a position to offer you a job on a project.
This is especially true in an industry as small as animation.
Best of luck in your studies, and I hope to see your work on the big screen soon!
Related posts
Better to give critiques than receive
May 2nd
If you work in any of the creative fields, you know that getting good, honest critiques of your art is incredibly important.
Having someone look at your animation and give comments is essential to making your work as good as it can be. Even if that person is a non-expert.
However, I think it’s even more important to give critiques. Not just receive them.
Your ability to improve is directly proportional to the quantity and quality of the critiques you give to others.
Looking at other peoples’ cartoons improves your eye. It helps you see with greater accuracy and subtlety.
When you are very specific about pointing out where your friend’s animation can improve, you will be surprised that when you look back at your own work you might see similar examples of the same error cropping up.
You can only animate what you observe. You can only fix mistakes in your own work that you can readily spot in others.
So take every opportunity to hone your observation skills by looking at as much student and work-in-progress animation as you can and being specific with you recommendations.
Online animation webinars
Apr 28th
If you’re looking for a great source of online animation webinars, then you definitely need to check out this series of Animation Mentor webinars.
There are some brilliant titles in the series, plus a bunch of incredible and legendary animators including Eric Goldberg, Shawn Kelly, Bobby “Boom” Beck, Carlos Baena and one of my own mentors: Kenny Roy.
They have lots of advice on animation training, getting into the industry and what to put in your demo reels so that studios will take notice.
