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…
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.
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?
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…
Perspective! 1: theory side
An accessible, accurate introduction to the world where every point is really a direction…
Perspective! 2: the nature of a vanishing point
What is a vanishing point, really? How do we jump from ‘3D space’ to ‘canvas space’? How big is a perspective drawing?
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.
Perspective! 4: the bag of tricks
How do you make sure two things are the same height? How do you move things around on a plane? And, especially, how do you cast shadows? We start to build up a bag of tricks for perspective-wrangling.