The animators survival kit pdf download

Animation 1 allows artists to widen the scope of their abilities, demonstrating how to animate a character, from character development to movement and dialogue. Pull Enhance your 2D skillset to the benefit of your own 3D animations to develop characters that are technically and artistically dynamic and engaging.

With side by side comparisons of 2D and 3D character design, improve your character animation and master traditional principles and processes including weight and balance, timing and walks. Includes practical, hands-on examples, now fully updated to include 3ds Max, Maya and Blender tutorials. Master the fundamental techniques with the companion website which includes short demonstrations, 2D and 3D exercises and 20 fully rigged character models.

Want to create studio-quality work and get noticed? Just coming off Flash and looking for a Toon Boom intro? Are you a traditional pencil-and-paper animator? From scene setup to the final render, learn how to navigate the Toon Boom interface to create animation that can be published on a variety of platforms and formats. The main text focuses onfeatures that are common across all three programs while "Advanced Techniques" boxes throughout the book elaborate on Pro and Harmony features, appealing to all levels of experience with any of the three main Toon Boom products.

Skip to content. The Animator s Survival Kit. Animation Mini Dialogue Acting and Directing. Author : Richard E. Animation Mini Flexibility and Weight.

Animation Mini Walks. Animation Mini Walks Book Review:. Animation Mini Runs Jumps and Skips. Animator s Surviva Ebook Epub. Author : R. Tony White s Animator s Notebook. Game Anim. Game Anim Book Review:. How to Make Animated Films.

This Mini focuses on Directing, Dialogue and Acting. As a director, whatever your idea is, you want to put it over, so the main thing with directing is to be clear - very clear. The Director's job is to hold everything together so that the animator can give the performance. Richard Williams shows how that performance can be achieved with flexibility and contrast. With Acting and Dialogue, the temptation is to try to do everything at once - Williams' advice: do one thing at a time.

This Mini focuses on Flexibility and Weight. How do we loosen things up and get snap and vitality into our performance at the same time as keeping the figure stable and solid? The answer: successive breaking of joints to give flexibility. In this mini, Williams stresses the importance of knowing where the weight is on every drawing.

He demonstrates that the best way to show weight is to be aware of it, conscious of it, and think about it all the time - knowing where the weight is coming from, where it's traveling over and where it's transferring to.

This Mini focuses on Walks. Walks are full of personality. Walks reveal the character, they tell the story of the person. In this Mini Richard Williams provides the building blocks of how to construct walks, using stick figures to make it easy to learn, copy and understand.

The process will encourage you to invent and entertain. This knowledge frees you to do your own expression, It takes time. There's a tale about a decrepit old Zen master wrestler. Oh please teach me the ninety-nine tricks. The young man becomes a famous wrestler and one day takes his master into a room, locks the door and challenges him. This book is the ninety-nine tricks. The hundredth trick is called talent. The goal here is to master the mechanics in order to do new things.

I's not a language of tongue. So everything know about animation that can put into words, scribbles and drawings is here in this book. Animation is usually a group effort, and one has the stimulus of constant interaction, both competitive and co-operative, with the cut and thrust, highs and lows, political factions of complaint and inspiration, all the tensions and anxieties, rewards and excitement of group production. It's always shocking to find you're not as advanced or skilled as you thought you were, and since it's about the hard- est thing to do with no rewards other than the thing itself - it's no wonder few do it or stick at it.

But the fact remains that there is no replacement for the hard work of solid life drawing. You have to try for the whole thing, you know, got to know the figure.

The ability to draw and be able to turn things and the ability, the knowledge that enables you to caricature and to exaggerate in the right direction and emphasise the difference between things is what you're doing all the time. You need that figure-drawing back- ground in order to sharpen. It gives you a jumping-off point. It gives you a contrast. You just do it and do it You're an actor without arms and legs. There's the myth that you are either a born draftsman or not.

But it can be done at any time. Just do it. Here are three pleces of drawing advice that were given to me — and which stuck. Finally an advertising friend of my mother's saw my drawings and rang up the Disney PR department, and they took me into the Studio for two days; they were very kind to me and even did a press story on me.

After my trip I went straight to art school and received the second piece of advice, from a great teacher and superb draftsman, Eric Freifield, then teaching at the Ontario College of Art. And not surprisingly my interest in animation vanished for years. Alter that lived in Spain for a couple of years doing paintings like these until a totally unexpected affliction by the animation bug got me.

How did he ever know? He must have smelt it as there was no sign of it in my animation. However, since animators have to enclose their shapes, there is a ten- dency to end up just drawing outlines like colouring-book figures. In other words, animators don't usually draw from the inside-out, like a sculptor does. Sculpture had been my weakest subject - although I'd done a lot of life drawing and had a grounding in basic anatomy. John Watkiss - then a twenty-three-year-old, self-taught, brilliant draftsman and anatomist - held his own life drawing classes In London.

Recently he was one of the principle designers of Disney's Tarzan. You missed a stage! He was right. Nothing new. Ignore style. Just concen- trate on the drawing and style will just occur. Why fight it? I'll never make it!

Go the other route. And I'm glad did. My goodness, I've enjoyed that a lot more than I would have enjoyed just animating scenes all my life. Tex had a twenty-year run with his wildly funny approach to the medium, but he foun impossible to sustain.

His colleague, animator Mike Lah said, "He didn't have any more space. He used it up. His Droopy is my favourite cartoon character.

He'll be able to draw anything - from the most difficult, realistic characters, to the most wild and wacky. And it's not likely he'll exhaust his resources and suffer burn-out. Everybody shut up, and stayed shut up. His work is a classic of broad and crazy animation.

The myth was that all they needed was to have a good draftsman as an assistant to do the final drawings and everything would be fine. But in the mid thirties, when the new wave of young animators with better drawing skills came on the scene and learned from the old guys, the ground was soon littered with out-of work animators who could only handle the cruder car- toons. The new breed of better draftsmen took their jobs away from them.

If the present boom in this medium ever contracts it's certain that the more skilled artists will be the survivors. Those are the times when you'll have to know something about drawing. But since most of the feading computer animators draw rather well, many work out their positions in small sketches, and, of course, the planning, layout and story artists and designers draw exactly the same as their classical equivalents.

They had a very impressive set-up of expensive computers but, from what I could see of thelr work, none of them seemed to have any idea of drawing at all. During my talk I stressed the importance of drawing and the great shortage of good draftsmen.

All of us here draw very well. At the end of the talk, showed them how to do a basic walk, and as a result got mobbed at the exit, the kids pleading desperately for me to teach them more. The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its, life drawing and excellent draftsmen. Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. He ran international conferences of the arts, About sixteen years ago he invited me to Amsterdam to a conference of the deans of the leading American art colleges.

He knew me well enough to know was bound to say controversial things, so I was invited as his wild card. No real drawing. The Graduate. Number one: since classical drawing was rejected years ago, we have no trained teachers who can draw or teach conventional drawing as they never learned it themselves.

They would rather decorate themselves as living works of art — and that's exactly what they do. So-called classical drawing seems to be coming back, but with a hyper-tealistic photographic approach because skilled artists are thin on the ground. Shading isn't drawing, and it isn't realism, Good drawing is not copying the surface. We want to get the kind of reality that a camera can't get.

We want to accentuate and suppress aspects of the model's character to make it more vivid. And we want to develop the co-ordination to be able to get our brains down into the end of our pencil. They look more like circus clowns than animals.

But don't confuse 2 drawing with a map! We're animating masses, not lines. So we have to understand how mass works in reality. In order to depart from reality, our work has to be based on reality. Grim was the oldest of the great animators, being already in his forties when he animated eighty-three scenes of Snow White in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I'll never forget the image of this big Norwegian American sitting in the golden twilight, extending his long arms and spatula hands saying And here's the spacing.

The ball overlaps itself when it's at the slow part of its are, but when It drops fast, it's spaced further apart. That's the spacing. The spacing is how close or far apart those clusters are. That's it. The spacing is the tricky part. Good animation spacing is a rare commodity.

To experience this, take a coin and film it in stages under a video camera. First plot out the timing — where you want the ball to hit the ground. Try it with different timings and spacing. You're already animating. You're already dealing with the important fundamentals and you haven't even made a single drawing. You're doing pure animation without any drawings.

The importance of the timing and the spacing will become obvious. Because you did it, a certain amount of personality will creep into the action - whether the ball is deliberate, slow, jaunty, erratic, cautious, even optimistic or pessimistic. And all this, before you've made a single drawing. Recently he was one of the principle designers of Disney's Tarzan. You missed a stage! He was right. Nothing new.

Ignore style. Just concen- trate on the drawing and style will just occur. Why fight it? I'll never make it! Go the other route. And I'm glad did. My goodness, I've enjoyed that a lot more than I would have enjoyed just animating scenes all my life. Tex had a twenty-year run with his wildly funny approach to the medium, but he foun impossible to sustain. His colleague, animator Mike Lah said, "He didn't have any more space. He used it up. His Droopy is my favourite cartoon character.

He'll be able to draw anything - from the most difficult, realistic characters, to the most wild and wacky. And it's not likely he'll exhaust his resources and suffer burn-out. Everybody shut up, and stayed shut up. His work is a classic of broad and crazy animation. The myth was that all they needed was to have a good draftsman as an assistant to do the final drawings and everything would be fine. But in the mid thirties, when the new wave of young animators with better drawing skills came on the scene and learned from the old guys, the ground was soon littered with out-of work animators who could only handle the cruder car- toons.

The new breed of better draftsmen took their jobs away from them. If the present boom in this medium ever contracts it's certain that the more skilled artists will be the survivors. Those are the times when you'll have to know something about drawing. But since most of the feading computer animators draw rather well, many work out their positions in small sketches, and, of course, the planning, layout and story artists and designers draw exactly the same as their classical equivalents.

They had a very impressive set-up of expensive computers but, from what I could see of thelr work, none of them seemed to have any idea of drawing at all.

During my talk I stressed the importance of drawing and the great shortage of good draftsmen. All of us here draw very well. At the end of the talk, showed them how to do a basic walk, and as a result got mobbed at the exit, the kids pleading desperately for me to teach them more.

The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its, life drawing and excellent draftsmen. Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. He ran international conferences of the arts, About sixteen years ago he invited me to Amsterdam to a conference of the deans of the leading American art colleges. He knew me well enough to know was bound to say controversial things, so I was invited as his wild card.

No real drawing. The Graduate. Number one: since classical drawing was rejected years ago, we have no trained teachers who can draw or teach conventional drawing as they never learned it themselves.

They would rather decorate themselves as living works of art — and that's exactly what they do. So-called classical drawing seems to be coming back, but with a hyper-tealistic photographic approach because skilled artists are thin on the ground.

Shading isn't drawing, and it isn't realism, Good drawing is not copying the surface. We want to get the kind of reality that a camera can't get. We want to accentuate and suppress aspects of the model's character to make it more vivid. And we want to develop the co-ordination to be able to get our brains down into the end of our pencil. They look more like circus clowns than animals. But don't confuse 2 drawing with a map! We're animating masses, not lines.

So we have to understand how mass works in reality. In order to depart from reality, our work has to be based on reality. Grim was the oldest of the great animators, being already in his forties when he animated eighty-three scenes of Snow White in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

I'll never forget the image of this big Norwegian American sitting in the golden twilight, extending his long arms and spatula hands saying