Unique Acting Choices

Found another great blog, by Avner at Avenriginal.

What he says "A few years back I was fortunate enough to attend an animation masterclass by Andrew Gordon of Pixar. As part of the masterclass he was kind enough to take a look at some of my old animation tests and gave me some useful feedback on my work.
One of the main points he made (among many others) was about unique acting choices.Whenever we create performances and bring characters to life, we must be very specific and try to avoid the cliche. We need to know why the character is doing what he/ she is doing, or where she/ he come from, what’s their status, where are they going to etc, etc."

He has up there,  Unique Acting Choices Part one, Part two and Part three
I also like his post on The Power of Posing 

Miyazaki, with powerful words.

Found on Don Bluth's Animation Forum.

I love the bit when Miyazaki is asked "is it that they have the feeling and can't draw it? or they just don't get the feeling?" and he replies "that in both cases they are inadequate"

Learning the Concept of Spacing

 Spacing is the hardest thing in the world to learn and put into a scene. With a scene with dialogue you need to emphasise to "favour" parts of the scene with emotions, timing and poses and this is all Spacing.You can also understand some of the importance of it if you look at your video reference, why are you putting more emphasis into part of it into instead of another part, why does that pose, that gesture feel more natural to you then another that you have recorded yourself doing. Animation is not the process of doing it is the process of feeling and asking why? why push key frame on frame 36? why get out my comfort zone and actually try to process what's actually going around me (actions/gestures, emotions) as I get up to when I go to bed? Clue: its about becoming a better animator. 

One of my old teachers, Ian Lacey has put on his blog Animation Garden, about learning the concept of Spacing.


Overcoming hurdles for teaching and learning Spacing - Part1 and Part 2

Revisiting Spungella

If you haven't already been over to Jean-Denis Haas blog, Spungella your missing out on something great... If you have already got it in your bookmarks, have you looked at these posts?


What should I Animate? part one and part 2
And I can animate, now what? part 1 and part 2

Body Language in Animation.

I found a really nice page on Body Language in Animations. You can find it here.

Kenny Roy, 24 hours

Kenny Roy has on his site 24 hours of video tutorials free to view and download, If you haven't seen any of them yet go and have a look at the Marathon page

animation exercise ...do not take lightly

Animation is a art form with the freedom of bringing anything that you could wish to the life, unfortunately like anything you need to keep up the exercise or you don't get the results that you were hoping for.
Mini challenges... Through the 11 second club