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ANIMATION TIPS & TRICKS

Posted on January 23, 2023January 10, 2023 by dermot

Over the course of several years I created a weekly ‘Tips & Tricks’ course. Each week a new movie was posted – by the end we had about 16 hours of material! As you can imagine, there’s a lot of content there. Everything from the principles of the classical era, but over time the courses widened to cover the history of animation, mental attitude, career advice, production overviews, and more. I’ve slowly begun to assemble ‘virtual courses’ where I pull movies from the Tips & Tricks course to build secondary collections, dealing with FX animation, side-scroller games, isometric games, career advice, and so on. However, if you don’t want to wait for me to dig through the entire thing, which will take a few more weeks, you might want to dig into the 16 hours of material yourself feel free!

LINKEDIN: ANIMATION TIPS & TRICKS (Sign up via that link and I get a small commission).

Here are some sample images from the weekly ‘tips & tricks’ series:

The traditional principles of animation:

principles of animation

Counterpose/torque:

counterpose torque animation

Overlap & follow thru
overlap follow through bear

Center of mass:
hammer center of mass

Timing charts, timing & spacing:

timing charts bouncing ball spacing

Thumbnails & breakdowns:
thumbnails jumping

Drawing technique from gesture drawing to cleanup:
gesture rough tiedown cleanup drawings

Anticipation:

anticipation and thumbnails

Cartoon physics:
cartoon physics

Transformations:
transformation morph

*

If you want the complete series of all my courses, there’s an overview of my entire collection here, with recommendations for viewing depending on your interests.

5 thoughts on “ANIMATION TIPS & TRICKS”

  1. jparrott says:
    February 4, 2023 at 11:40 am

    Hello Angry Animator,

    Do you have any tutorials for animating and planning a scene using a 12 field guide?
    I’m curious if there are coordination tricks when zooming in/out and animating camera movements around a scene. Is it common to plot arcs of a camera when when moving to coordinates in a 12 field guide?

    Might be a useful tool for plotting a scenes composition when animating in today’s animation programs

    Thanks for your time! I am learning so much from your courses

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    1. dermot says:
      February 6, 2023 at 2:31 pm

      Hm, no tutorials on that I’m afraid. These days it’s easier to eyeball thinks like that, though you can of course plan them out in TV board style. If you look in my Storyboards course you may find stuff in there on camera moves and how to lay them out in the section on Live Action boards.

      Also, I found my old Don Bluth studio document ‘The Perfect Pan’, which shows the old traditional methods for scene planning. What a nightmare! I was going to scan it for you, but Jon Hooper’s old site ‘animation meat’ has a nice pdf of it.

      http://www.animationmeat.com/pdf/featureanimation/perfectpan.pdf

      Hopefully there’s some usable info in there!

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      1. mr-parrott says:
        February 9, 2023 at 5:37 am

        Thanks again for this document! I read through it and it has all the camera specs and technical info I was looking for. Much appreciated!

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        1. dermot says:
          February 9, 2023 at 12:59 pm

          I dug up another, this time I could find no online copy so shot it myself. Hope it’s useful, at least of interest for historical reasons.

          https://www.angryanimator.com/word/2023/02/09/exposing-fievel/

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  2. mr-parrott says:
    February 7, 2023 at 8:12 am

    Way to cool, thank you so much! This is perfect. Pretty Wild you have the original Don Bluth studio document haha

    My goal is to re-create the traditional camera set up in Blender 3D to film cartoons. Do you happen to know the type of camera & lens they used at Don Bluth Studio? Or maybe the camera used for 1930s cartoons?

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