This is a very short and to-the-point course, only 27 minutes long! Creating 2D Animation in Harmony I created this course to be very tightly focused on the skills required to animate a classic hand drawn animation in Harmony. For those who are more interested in the traditional style, and who have some drawing skills,…
MONSTERS & ALIENS
I had great fun creating this course: it’s a collection of monsters and aliens! The course shows different actions for each, some walks, some runs, sneaks, slithers and turns. LYNDA: Animate Monsters & Aliens LINKEDIN: Animate Monsters & Aliens Here are some sample images. First up the entire family of horrors (click all images for…
FLYING CREATURES
My course on flying creatures is short and useful. It shows how bird anatomy relates to human, and takes you through the different flights of small, medium and large birds, as well as insects (flies, butterflies), and ends with a fantasy creature, the every popular dragon. I’m particularly happy with the way the dragon turned…
preston blair deciphered
A student recently asked me about the famous Preston Blair animation books. They contain some excellent material, but frankly, the walk and run sections can be very difficult for a student or less experience animator to understand. As great as the reference animation is, Preston offered no help in timing, or in the sequence in…
AnimateCC: A COMPLETE SCENE
A couple of students requested a Flash/Animate course that didn’t just show how to animate a character, but the process for creating and animating a complete scene – everything from background, foreground, character, effects, etc. So I created this course for those who want to see the process. Usually when I get TWO or more…
WALK, JOG & RUN CYCLES
It’s been too long since I updated this blog, so I’m making up for some lost time. Back in 2016 I created two really useful animation courses for Lynda/Linkedin Learning, dealing with walk cycles. #1: Walk Cycles Basics The first course deals with the essentials: contact, down, passing and up poses, foot placement, arcs, timing,…
MIGRATE FROM FLASH TO HARMONY
My latest course for Lynda.com has gone online: ‘Migrating from Flash to Toon Boom Harmony’ It teaches a Flash animator how their favourite Flash tools and processes correspond to the Harmony equivalent. The first twelve years of my animation career (1988 – 2000) were in the traditional hand drawn field, in feature, tv, and games….
FOUNDATIONS OF DRAWING CARTOON CHARACTERS
My latest course for Lynda has gone online – and it’s the most fun yet! The course teaches the classic animation drawing techniques, which are also applicable to comic books. This was a 28 year long ‘brain dump’, in which I included everything that I could remember from working for Don Bluth in the late…
A SUPERIOR ANIMATEcc PALETTE
It’s not news that the default palette for Flash is dreadful. There’s not much that you can do with this, other than pretend it’s not there: I made my own early in the 2000s; it’s much more subdued (maybe a bit too subdued) but you’ll find it much more useful than the default. Here’s an…
HAND DRAWN ANIMATION IN FLASH
My fifth course for Lynda.com is online. It’s called ‘Hand Drawn Animation in Flash’. If you don’t have a Lynda.com membership, you can get a free 1-week trial here, and watch it. A preview of the two main scenes that the course will demonstrate: And the thumbnails that were used as reference – first, the…
2D ANIMATION PRINCIPLES
UPDATE (2019): this course is fine, but has been superceded by my new course on the 21 Foundations of Animation, which is also on linkedin learning and lynda.com: It’s online! My fourth Lynda course has just been uploaded. If you don’t have a Lynda.com membership, you can get a free 1-week trial here, and watch…