Animation Article Database

Over at Monstro is a huge list of animation related articles regarding animation principles, acting, character development, demo reels, etc. etc. It's huge and well worth a look.

Thanks Anand for the tip!

51 Great Animation Exercises to Master

There's a great list of animation exercises at animatorisland.com. Very thorough, with a nice progression. And the post starts out with a simple yet very true statement. "Quickest way to improvement? Practice."

Drawniversity

Pretty cool personalized instructions option for drawing, courtesy of Joshua Taback! Head over here for more info.

Stop-Motion Guide

I wanted to assemble some useful links for people who want to start doing stop-motion. I have no idea, so if you have any helpful links or ideas, please post them in the comments section. Thanks!

The only random ones I have so far are:

- Stop-Mo-Tec Armature Kit and 24 Feet of Wire

- Stop Motion Tutorial: Start-up Guide from the 11secondclub blog.

Getting a Visual Effects job - by Scott Squires

If you are looking for a VFX job then you HAVE to read this post by Scott Squires. Stop what you're doing and read it.

Getting a Visual Effects job

Valve's Character Design Guidelines

Very cool PDF, found via @The3DNinja
The color section was especially interesting to me.

Cloverball - and the importance of having fun

After a brief start in 2008 where I blocked out the first 5 shots I have now finally finished this little sequence last week and I had a blast working on it! But there's a little story behind it.

Back when I was teaching at the AAU I had every class start with a bouncing ball assignment for the first week. It was a great way to see how people would react to it (did they feel like they were above it, were they excited, confused, etc.) and seeing the clips gave me a good idea how each person was attacking an assignment.

Would they do just the minimum (or less), would they think they mastered it yet didn't really, was there more to see than the bullet points were asking or did someone go above and beyond?

Since taking up any kind of animation school demands a lot of work and time behind each assignment and exercise, why wouldn't you try to have the most fun possible? That was always my approach, even if I didn't succeed all the time. Some teachers thought I was just an over achiever, which baffled me. I was just having tons of fun and trying to milk the assignment and push myself. But years later I realized that you have to make sure that your students focus on getting the basics done, and done really well, before they go off and take on crazy stuff.

In my first character animation class, taught by the awesome Lisa Mullins, I learned what "animation jerk off" was. It was this clip:

It was a "getting out of a chair" assignment, which was supposed to last 5 seconds max. I will never forget her reaction to that clip. After an initial compliment on how I seemed to have understood the basic principles of animation (to an extent), she proceeded to rip the clip apart and it was the best critique I've ever gotten and a huge eye opener. My clip was just about moving stuff, it was animation for animation's sake, or "animation jerk off", instead of exploring the character, acting choices and breathing life into a computer rig.

She was so right. At the same time it was also extremely rewarding to just let loose and animate the hell out of something. I still indulge in this to this day, but I try to keep the balance in favor of character instead of movement.

But every now and then, I just like to have fun. And this brings me back to the bouncing ball assignment. What I would explain to the students back then was my view on what constitutes an F, a D, a C and a B, which I've tried to illustrate in the clip below:

(click image to play grading video)

This is of course all subjective and feel free to chew me out ("What?! You think this is a F/D/C/B?!")

Unfortunately, I don't remember seeing anybody go for an all out A with the "go big or go home" attitude. Of course, it also all depended on their skill set, school schedule, etc. but still, I missed the "fun" part in most of the clips.

So what's an A in my distorted point of view? It's a clip where you can tell that someone just ran with an assignment. Of course this can lead to questions like "Do you have a problem with women?" when faced with my very first bouncing ball assignment:

 ... and no, I don't have a problem with women, I was just being stupid and added "bouncy" things to the assignment... and I completely understand the question... (hiding in shame...)

Anyway, as posted at the top of this entry, "Cloverball" was my idea of what a bouncing ball assignment could look like. :)

And here are the usual suspects of video formats: youtube, vimeo and quicktime.

Cloverball from Jean-Denis Haas on Vimeo.

A bit more information regarding the planning of this sequence:

The original idea of doing this over the top bouncing ball, as mentioned, came out of the AAU days and it got mixed with the additional knowledge that I gained regarding camera work (thanks to Star Trek) and after having seen Cloverfield (hence the name Cloverball).
But this was all in 2008 (at least that's what the time stamp said on the last file when I opened it), and I can't really remember all the details. I just knew that I wanted to have a fight between two balls, taking place in a city.
This is as far as I got in 2008:

It was a week-end blocking out affair and got reopened last Tuesday, for another 3 day stint. So all in all 5 days, following roughly the main idea outline. As I continued last week, I knew that the red balls should assemble another guy with two legs, and that they would then walk/run towards each other and fight Godzilla style, with the red guy pushing the blue guy into a building as an ending.
That ending felt too open though and I wanted a better ending shot. First I thought about the red guy running/jumping into the blue guy and ending with a wide shot of a big mushroom explosion/cloud shot, but eventually settled on the current last shot.
The blue guy firing lasers and the red guy jumping away plus firing up his defense shield ideas grew pretty much in a straight-ahead fashion. Since I set myself a deadline (Thursday night, so that I could present it on Friday for a talk at the AAU), I didn't sit down to thumbnail or storyboard everything out. But I was really excited about finishing this whole thing, so tons of idea just popped up and I ran with what I liked the most.

The rig that I used was from Mutiny Studios, which you can download here.

The render was a standard software render using the DOF Control script for the depth of field.

Cheers
JD

Dragon’s Flight School

Very cool! Sumida will discuss his collaboration with Simon Otto and other animators at DreamWorks as they developed the real-life references for the flight of dragons in “How to Train Your Dragon”

James Baxter - Notes on Acting for Animation

There's a really great post at Flooby Nooby about Acting for Animation. Make sure to check it out

Composition - Tips From a Skateboard Photographer

I saw this post over at Gizmodo, where photographer Michael Burnett is talking about taking clean, uncluttered pictures of skateboarders, and there's great info that translates nicely into the animation world of clean silhouettes and composition. Check it out!

Evan Richards

Check out evanerichards.com if you haven't already. The posts highlighting the cinematography of certain movies are great!

This is such a crazy image. The Road is a really bleak but great movie and Viggo Mortensen's face is so expressive in this capture. So much history and pain.

Dreamworks Story/Design notes

Head over to purgetheory for more storyboarding notes and examples!

Reel Feedback Review

We're having another Free Reel Review at Lanesplitters in Emeryville!! It's on March 29th from 7-10.

It's a great chance for animation students to get feedback on their demo reels, meet animators and have some pizza! Even if they don't have a reel yet but are working on an animation clip, they can bring it and we'll critique it.

Students can come and meet Lead and Supervising Animators here in the bay area and get advice on how they can break into the industry.

Sounds good to me!

iAnimate Games workshop series

Very cool news!

iAnimate Games workshop series from iAnimate on Vimeo.

youanimator community

Head over to youanimator.com and check out what they're offering! Here some info about it:

What is YouAnimator?
YouAnimator is a place to showcase your demo-reel or short animation! Stop sending your demos to studios to add to their pile of CDs and video tapes. If you are an aspiring animator – eager to be discovered, this is your page. Our goal is to create a central site on which the world’s best character animators can show off their demo reels – and be discovered – may they be in India, Argentina, Norway, Iceland, the US or any place in the world.

What’s YouAnimator’s purpose?
Our purpose is to help you achieve your dreams as an animator actor: to be discovered as a character animator. Here you can create your own portfolio page – and send its URL to friends and collegues and companies. YouAnimator is also a site where you can learn from each other and each other’s work. There is a LEARNING menu button that will take you to the SWEATBOX – page. The Sweatbox is where your work-in-progress can be critiqued by others. And we’ll give you some tools to practice your trade. We’ve uploaded a few animatable character rigs (under DOWNLOAD) that you can use to create short animations with.

They also offer two rigs and multiple sets for download!