I'm learning to be an animator! And in the process, I like to make detailed notes on how you go about making characters move. It's, basically, fun as hell.
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Animation backgrounds & camera movement
Telemon painted a cool background. This made me think, wow, animation backgrounds do some ingenious stuff with camera movement. I tried to pull out some tricks, and some particularly incredible examples…
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Breaking down Chimo's running girl
There’s a famous long cut by Ryo-Timo in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, where the protagonist goes through a series of emotions while running. It’s a wonderful piece of animation - so how does it work?
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Motion blur & smears
Animators love to use ‘smear’ frames to accentuate movements, add variation in a figure, and simulate motion blur. Let’s get down into the gritty details, and try drawing some smears ourselves…
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Perspective! 1: theory side
An accessible, accurate introduction to the world where every point is really a direction…
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Perspective! 2: the actual practicalities of drawing shit in perspective
What is a vanishing point, really? How do we jump from ‘world space’ to ‘canvas space’? How big is a perspective drawing?
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Perspective! 3: catching a plane
You can draw planes at all sorts of angles. But to do so, we need some more concepts in our toolbox. Let’s meet vanishing lines.