Get Ready For Our May 7th Class

Kayla by Josh Sobel, animated by Joris Van Laar

Our May classroom starts next week on Monday 7th May.  It's not too late to book a place; all you need to do to start a conversation is head over to our main site and fill in a form.

Below is a brief list of stuff to get you under way. You don't have to do all of it, but tick off a few of the things on this list and you will be a making a great start on your animation career.

First, here is a short reading list to get you started. We've narrowed it down to just two key books that we recommend for all our students.

How to Block out and Plan Creature Animation

This short video ten minute explains how to block out and plan an animal or creature animation shot.  What do animators mean by "blocking"? We mean the process of establishing the main key poses in a shot, using stepped curves (i.e., single poses without any smooth transitions), so that we can test whether or not the shot will work. Having a good, organised workflow is an essential part of the animator's toolkit. Long before you start making key poses in Maya, you want to plan the shot out in your head, on video, with thumbnail sketches and/or storyboards.

Framestore: Live-Action Reference & Animation

Ross Burgess and Oz Gani acting out some dinosaur action

Framestore are a London based animation and VFX company that keeps raising the bar for animal and creature animation.

Paddington 2, was animated at Framestore, and they out-did their own work on Paddington 1 in terms of the quality and believability of the animated performance.

Last week two senior Framestore animators (and the head of talent development) visited my classroom at Escape Studios, to check out our students' work and give us some insights into the Framestore animation workflow.

Joan Ashworth at London Animation Club 2 May

Joan Ashworth, filmmaker and former head of Animation at Royal College of Art, will show examples from her career in filmmaking and commercials at the London Animation Club on 2nd May.

Joan's work includes BBC Idents, the opening titles for Tim Burton's Batman 1, and her own films, including the multi-award winning How Mermaids Breed, The Web and Mushroom Thief.  She is currently in production of a creative documentary about the artist and campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst and she will show clips and experiments from this work in progress.

How to Animate a "Two Shot"

Squirrels by Henry Fenwick - it's all about eye contact

Animating two characters acting is, obviously, more complex than animating one.

One of the most common mistakes made by junior animators when they animate two characters interacting is to forget that the audience can only look at one thing at a time.

The basic rule is when animating two characters is to keep it simple, and try to avoid having too much happening at once.

How to Create a Face Camera in Maya

We recommend always creating a Face Camera when you animate characters in Maya. The reason for this is that you don't want to keep having to zoom in on your character in the viewport to find the facial controls. Constant zooming in and out will slow down your workflow and, worse of all, encourages the animator to neglect the facial expressions altogether. Good facial expressions are crucial to making good animation, because it's how we know what the character is thinking and feeling. And without an emotional underpinning, your audience won't connect to your animation.

Locksmith Animation Opens in Primrose Hill

Sarah Smith, Elizabeth Murdoch, Julie Lockhart

Good news for the London animation industry; the long awaited Locksmith animation studio, first announced back in 2014,  has opened its new premises in Primrose Hill, housing up to 70 artists.

Locksmith is backed by London VFX house Double Negative, and also supported by entrepreneur Elizabeth Murdoch.

Ross Anderson Pulls a Rabbit out of a Hat

Canadian author and animation historian Ross Anderson is putting the finishing touches on his forthcoming book - Pulling a Rabbit Out of a Hat - The Story Behind the Making of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. 

Ross's book aims to be the definitive story of the ground-breaking film which I, along with with many others, was lucky enough to have worked on back in the late 1980s.

Almost everyone who worked on the film now knows Ross - his many recent visits to London included trips to the pubs where we used to drink after hours, and Ross interviewed many, many people who worked on the film to tell the story as accurately as possible.

Graduation Day 4 September 2018

Graduation Day 2017

Graduation Day is coming. Our newest MA animation graduates will attend graduation day at Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe, on Tuesday 4th September at 2.30pm.

On that day, Bucks will welcome all the online MA graduates to come and celebrate their achievement.

Of course, the event is something of a formality - no-one actually has to turn up, but we hope that many of our online animation students will come and celebrate their achievement - graduating as Masters of Arts on the world's first online MA in Animation.

Where are the Games Jobs?

Check out the excellent Gamesmith Dev Map of games development studios (and therefore games jobs) around the world. It's a great starting point for anyone looking to apply for work as an animator in the rapidly expanding games industry.

Blue Zoo Summer Internships Now Open

Applications for Blue Zoo's summer internships are now open. These 6-8 week paid placements in animation, storyboarding and visual development are described by Blue Zoo as "like a real job but without the demands & expectations, allowing participants to develop and learn how a big animation studio works and real projects are run".

Thumbnailing Baloo by Frank Thomas

Continuing this weeks' theme on the making of animation thumbnails, in the video above I show how Frank Thomas thumbnailed a shot from The Jungle Book, way back in the 1960s. Frank Thomas was one of the greatest Disney animators, one of Disney's so-called "Nine Old Men" (the studio's animation elite), and the system of using thumbnail sketches to plan your animation hasn't changed a lot since then.  The trick is to create a plan for your animation so that, long before you start creating poses in Maya, you already have the shot figured out in your head.

Thumbnailing Boog from "Open Season"

Learning to thumbnail animation is one of the hardest skills for junior animators to master, especially if they are not comfortable with drawing. But being able to do rough thumbnail sketches is an important part of the animator's toolkit, and in the video above I demonstrate how I approached thumbnailing a shot I animated on "Open Season". The trick is to create a plan for your animation so that, long before you start creating poses in Maya, you already have the shot figured out in your head.

Weight Lift by Olavo Lins

One of the hardest things to achieve in 3D animation is the creation a sense of weight.  Weight is hard to simulate because our characters are just pixels - they have no intrinsic weight, so we have to create it from nothing. This means understanding how our bodies move, how the physics works, and knowing where the weight is at any given point during any given action. It's also important to create a sense of fun and entertainment around the shot, so that it isn't just a technical exercise. In this weight lift exercise above, Animation Apprentice student Olavo Lins shows how it's done.  Congratulations to Olavo on an excellent piece of work.

Why Animators Should Always Take Two Steps

One of the most common mistakes by junior animators is to animate a character taking just one step.

The reason this doesn't work only becomes clear if you try doing it. Take a single step and...guess what...you'll take a second step.

The fact is that everyone takes two steps.  Life is like a dance, we are constantly using our bodies in a one-two one-two motion. It's tempting to animate a character taking a single step because it seems to make sense. After all, so much of what we do with our bodies is automatic; done without thinking. But, if you try taking a single step, you'll quickly realise why you need a second catch-up step to maintain your balance.

The reason this matters is because, as animators, we need to make our work feel lifelike and believable. If we don't get it right, it feels weird, and the audience will notice.

Why Eye Direction Matters

Characters must look at one another

One of the most common mistakes made by junior animators (and sometimes senior ones) is to animate characters who aren't really looking at each other.

Eye direction is a tricky thing to get right, but it's vital that your characters need to engage with one another - and this means looking in the right direction, at the other character's eyes.

Free Rigging webinar Tonight at 7pm

Mike Davies - the man who rigged Smaug

Rigging Supremo Mike Davies, veteran rigger whose film credits include The Hobbit and The Minions, is hosting a free webinar on the art of rigging tonight, Thursday 8 March at 7pm.

If you're interested in learning rigging, be sure to sign up for this free webinar hosted by London's Escape Studios.

If you'd like to register (it is completely free), follow the link here to sign up.

How to Animate a Blink

Everybody blinks, a lot. But since we do it without noticing, we're not really aware of it. One of the most common mistakes made by junior animators is to forget to add blinks to their characters.

Everything Comes From The Core

Everything comes from the core

For animators, everything comes from the core. When you create motion, it should always come from the core of the character's body, usually the hips, often known as the Root Control, or COG (centre of gravity control).

When a character turns their head, you might not think this motion comes from their core, but in fact it does, and you need to make sure that the action is motivated from the character's core, else the motion will feel robotic. 

The Making of Paddington Two

One of the best animation talks at the recent VFX festival in London  was the presentation by Framestore on the making of Paddington 2.

Lead animator Liam Russell presented breakdowns of several key sequences in the film, including the excellent prison sequence, and the hyper-kinetic train sequence at the end of the movie.

He also gave some great tips on what kind of animation demo reels Framestore looks for - scroll down to the bottom to find his personal take on this always-important subject.

Why Animators Need to Show Their Work

One of the hardest skills for animation students to learn is how give and receive criticism.  We all tend to be shy about our work (especially when we are learning something new) and, when our work is criticised, that criticism can feel very personal.