Brad Bird on Caricature.

A while back I did a lecture for the CTN animation expo in Burbank on the successful traits of an animator. For the lecture I asked a bunch of people what their thoughts were on the subject. I was unable to get this into my lecture for lack of time so I wanted to post this snippet of gold from Brad Bird. Big thanks to Brad for taking the time to do this. Brad is always so knowledgeable and inspirational. I hope you enjoy this short clip…

The question was: “What are some traits an animator should have?”

-Enjoy…Andrew

bird_traits

Expression Change

This was sent out the other day as a great reference of expression change. I wanted to share it…

Now that the Olympics are over we can look at the best clips. Like I said, some of the best clips are the reactions to events and sometime not the event themselves. This is a perfect example of that. You can see the Canadian reaction is so much different. When they cut to the Russian bobsled team you see the guy on the right get excited, then realize that he is on TV and react differently. It looks like there are 3 main beat changes in this reaction. Also, look at how his teammate reacts.  Click on pic for video… Please post links to your favorite reactions in the comments section.

PS: coming soon – more spline casts and hopefully some interesting posts.

-Andrew

Richard Williams Expanded Survival Kit

I usually don’t review books here on Spline Doctors, but since Richard was nice enough to do a great Spline Cast with us, I wanted to talk about his new Expanded Edition Animation Survival Kit. Most animation students have the first book. It has so many great tidbits of information. The new book looks to be twice as thick and has so much more info, its a must have for animation students and professionals. I have been paging through it and some of the stuff I really like are the example of animal action. Fellow animator Holger has some examples of the images on his blog… I’m not sure if its out yet, but when it does come out, its a great book to have.

-Andrew

Cool behind the scenes Avatar clip

Heres a cool behind the scenes clip that I’m sure you have seen… Yeah, we get it… This is not animators doing the performance… Cameron did everything… I wonder if they should have given another name for the “animators” working on this project since they don’t seem to respect the job of what an animator does. I am blown away by the work on Avatar, but I don’t understand how the animators did not get any love on this film… There was so much great creature/robot stuff. I’d love to hear from some people on the crew about how the roles of an animator were defined on this picture…Expressions must have been pushed, Physicality, interaction… What is the Motion capture to animation ratio?

-Andrew

Marty Says Passion and Story…

Martin Scorsese was honored with a Cecil B Demil Award last night at the Golden Globes. When interviewed by the press afterward he was asked about what students need to have in order to make movies. The common theme that always comes up is passion and story.

Click the image for the link….