Toy Story 3 - Mid-year Animation Field Trip

To whet the taste buds for our animation field trip planned for Thursday...



I like the way Pixar include an animated short film with the feature film.

A comment about the feature film in the comments. Check it out after you see the film.

Michel Gagne

I've been practicing animating in Flash with abstract shapes. Some research on silhouette style animation helped me discover the clip above.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is an independent game being produced by Fuelcell Games and artist Michel Gagné.

Michel Gagne talks about how fluid his hand drawn animation looks when he works at 30fps (games animation frame rate). I thought that may interest games animator's and traditional animators alike.

If you dig a little bit more you can also find the work Gagne did for Brad Bird and Pixar's Ratatouille.

Lino - Stop Mo' Surfari

Two of my favourite things: surfing and animation.



Sometimes I listen to Jack Johnson and look for animation inspiration in 1970's surf movies.

Inspire - How does your showreel compare?

I was at 2nd year Cassie's blog watching Joker and Batman dolls in some awesome stop mo' breakdance battles. Then I saw Bruce Lee fighting Ironman. So I researched the director/animator Patrick Boivin and found his Vimeo channel and 2009 showreel.

Getting a Flash AVI

When animating in Flash it can be sometimes frustrating, sometimes challenging, always interesting to try and export a good quality AVI (video clip).

Exporting an image sequence and then recombining the frames in post production software (VirtualDub, to build the AVI; Premiere or AfterEffects, to add the audio and editing) will produce the best result.

This animation tip may be handy for the second years animating in Flash.

Sometimes AVIs exported from Flash have unwanted junk pixels appear in the render. Exporting an image sequence is a way to beat this problem.

Dragon Lessons are Animation Lessons

Many a time student animators set their aim on the stars to discover the weight of the sky crushes dreams.

In other words, when an animation teacher suggests planning a short animation as a step toward greatness, it is done with concern for the student's well being. That is why in-class exercises are short 60, 120 to 200 frame animation sequences (usually of the bouncing ball variation).

Then when an animator is set loose on their major project in second year, they can have a full appreciation of why the teacher keeps suggesting to keep the story to 1 minute, or less. This hurts, especially for animators who dream of animating a 4 minute music clip*.

"But what kind of story can you animate in less than a minute!?", is the outcry.

DreamWorks made an excellent film this year that we explored on an animation field trip. Here are some animation lessons, disguised as dragon training lessons. They're all less than a minute long. Actually they are only about 30 seconds long including titles and fades.







*The trick for animating a 4 minute music clip is study the song and animate for the verses (same beats) and chorus (repeated over and over). Then loop and edit the 30 seconds of animation together in interesting ways.