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.
The Human Head part 1: preliminaries
The first part in a series on drawing the human head! Here we look at some examples from Moebius and realist animators, before diving into ways of breaking down the head like the famous Loomis head.
Evolution of the anime girl, part 1
We continue our investigation of the human head by starting a deep dive into the history of anime. ‘Anime style’ has meant many different things over time, but what exactly is it today, and where did it come from?
When robots got muscles
A history of robot designs from the eighties on with a throughline of biomimesis and mechabare.
How we made 'The Tale of the Little Witch', part 1
Make a short 3DCG film in a week and make it look goood! It’s possible. Here’s how.
How we made 'The Tale of the Little Witch', part 2
The next part of making a short film in a week! We have a set, we have characters, we have lights, here’s how we make it a film.