Putting Together Stop Motion Animation

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Running Out of Time? Animate the Eyes

The second years are in the final weeks of animation production. Actually they should be in animation post production now. But there is always time for a bit more polish and then a re-render.

At the start of semester the class spent some time looking at eye animation as part of facial animation. We studied blinks and eye darts in relation to a character appearing alive and thinking. We discussed the importance of eye shapes and eye brow shapes as recognisable forms of expression.

Importantly we discussed that audiences look at the eyes of our characters. They look for subtext in the eye animation, emotional triggers in the eye and eyebrow shapes. Audiences look to where characters look, which is important for the animation principle of staging (yes, I had to sneak an animation principle in there).

There is a post over on Pete Emslie's The Cartoon Cave blog that talks about eye direction. It also links to John K's blog post about character design, if anyone is into exploring. I found it via Alonso's Monotreme Dreams blog.

Pete writes, As it happens, I've just lectured about the design and function in drawing eyes as part of my Character Design class at Sheridan this past week, so I'd like to offer my thoughts on that subject in regard to this particular still from the Disney film...

But all that is just 'lkhqgfwqrfgygyiggcgfgkvsd' during the CRUNCH!

Hopefully there is a little voice in the animator's zombified brains tweeting, "Running out of time? Animate the eyes!"

Animating Flight

I was over on my animation teacher's blog, Speaking of Animation and saw that he had made a post about animating flight. Being a DreamWorks animator, Jacob relates his post to animators working on How to Train Your Dragon, but he links to a tutorial by Brendan Body a UK trained animator who worked on Legend of the Guardians. The tutorial by Brendan is an excellent resource for animation study.

Brendan, "I created many of the hero characters' flight cycles which were then used by the rest of the animation team."

Earlier this year I posted a short animating exercise that animators could attempt to see if they could fly. It would probably be worth comparing what you learned there to this latest information.


Enjoy flying with a feature film animator. How to make birds fly good (I love the title).

More Brendan Body tutorials (Cassie will see some clips she referred to in her research about the bouncing ball)

More Jacob Gardner tutorials including animating a dancing character and understanding body language to improve animation.

Cinematic Tension - Alfred Hitchcock

I wonder if this may be applicable somehow to a 200 frame animation sequence?

Or, as Corey might advise us, "Show them the banana peel!"

Jacaranda sky paint and thunder storms

Jacaranda bloom and thunder storms herald the "crunch". The time of year leading up to handing in the final, major project.

Movie Trailer - A Major Project Option

This just in from Alice in 2nd year:

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The second year animators have been planning and animating their major projects for at least 10 weeks. The learning curve is as steep as the Y spline in a ball bounce. Some ideas for grand narratives are trimming down in the quest for good quality animation.

Today the animators researched some of the productions from other animation students (the northern hemisphere students present their work mid year). The results were eye popping and have to be shared. It was an excellent research session.

The clips below come from research done by Al.

When a narrative project is trimmed to the bare essentials it can still make a very satisfying "movie trailer". A movie trailer has the same amount of animation as a standard animation demo reel but carries the extra zing of context. In a movie trailer a character has a reason to run, jump, yawn, laugh, push, kick.

Here are some clips from some French animators. They were students but left school to pusue their project their own way. At school they would have worked in teams to produce the clips that run for under a minute. Check out the links from the clips on Vimeo to the planning blogs and check out the artwork and planning done by each animator.

I wonder, if in 2011, we might make the major projects in teams? See this post on Cartoon Brew.