Animation: 5 Tips that will improve your skills!

What can I do to get ready for an animation school?

This is a question that I get asked quite often, usually by prospective students or friends of friends and family that don’t know exactly what to expect when starting an animation school or want to improve over break. Here are 5 animation tips that you can use to improve your skills.

When I first got to CalArts, I remember how overwhelming it was to be surrounded by so many talented students. At first, I felt out of place with so many of the students from the LA area who had grown up near the animation industry. There were so many talented students, and some students even had formal life drawing training at their high school. At most, I had gone there with a general idea of how animation was made. The best information I could have gotten was from picking up the original copy of the book The ILLUSION OF LIFE and reading it from cover to cover.

Maybe you are a high school student or a college student attending an animation school and about to go on break… How can you use your time wisely to be better prepared for what you will face as an animation student? At this point, you probably are not sure what to expect, and perhaps you are not sure what aspect of “animation” you are most interested in. Don’t worry; you have some time for that. Not everyone becomes an “animator.” I will outline in a later post some of the different disciplines within the animation field, but the following list of animation tips is meant to be a catch-all that will prepare you regardless of which route you take later on, whether it is as an animator, technical director, or 3D modeler. Here are a couple of boiled-down essential things that you can find the time for to be better prepared and know what you are getting into. This to-do list is organized so that each skill builds on the previous one.

1. Build up your drawing and observational skills.

The first and most important item on the list is to begin keeping a sketchbook! I know what you are thinking: “But I just want to do 3D animation.” Bear with me. The sketchbook is an exercise that will build up your skills, regardless of what aspect of animation you are interested in. You’ve probably never had to do this before, and it will be a new experience for you. Every animation school will have you do this. I always had scraps of paper stuck in a folder and always wished I had done this growing up. I spent a lot of time drawing cartoon characters, which helped as well, but there is nothing like gesture drawing the people, animals, and locations around you to improve your skills for a career in animation. It’s a great morale booster to look through your stack of sketchbooks from when you first started to see how far you’ve come. Go out and buy yourself an inexpensive sketchbook. I always prefer the spiral-bound type because they are easy to flatten out, and I can make sure that it is not too small. In my opinion, it is best to get one that is at least 8.5 x 11 to 11 x 14. I know that some people like to draw small, and perhaps you are afraid of being spotted drawing someone, but trust me, your drawings may suffer in a smaller sketchbook, and your work may tend to look stiff. Now that we’ve cleared that up, you’ll be drawing everyday life rather than manga or anime characters or scantily clad girls with bat wings. By gesture-drawing humans and animals, you will be practicing your observational skills and pushing poses for animation. Gesture drawing will also help you practice your anatomy, which will help you with your 3D modeling and animation rigging skills. Observing and caricaturing people is an excellent way to build up your skills as a character designer. If you have been doing this already, then awesome! You will be ahead of most of the aspiring animators that I have spoken with. Dave Pimentel has a great blog with some examples of what I am talking about. The artist whose site it is has a ton of industry experience as well, and he’s a great guy to boot.

2. Study the principles of animation.

The next thing to do on the list is to pick up the book The Animator’s Survival Kit, by Richard Williams. Yes, this book is for animators, but I can almost guarantee you that any animation school will have you start with a basic class in animation as part of the curriculum, so you might as well be ahead of the game. This book is loaded with “how-tos,” from the most basic animation principles to more advanced techniques. This book is the mandatory text in a few of my animation classes and is one of those reference books that you will always refer to, even after you have been working in the animation industry. I have a list of other animation books and resources that you can check out when you get the chance, but this is the first one you should get to get a better visual understanding of some of the principles of animation. Make sure to read to page 95 in the Animator’s Survival Kit before going on to the next thing on the list!

3. Get a head start on some simple animation exercises that you will most likely be doing first in animation school.

Make yourself a schedule during the summer to do some animation tutorials between your summer job and hanging out with friends. I would start with the bouncing ball tutorial since it is the exercise that just about every school will give you to get used to the animation principles of squash and stretch, timing, spacing, volume, and arcs. I would start out doing the exercise in 2D animation to learn the foundations of the animation principles and not have the interface of a 3D package distract you from the performance. Here is a pretty good free 2-D bouncing ball tutorial to start out with. Download Pencil. This is a free animation program that is both vector and bitmap for you to do 2D animation tests. Here are some free tutorials that I found online on how to use the Pencil program. If you have some extra cash laying around, then you can try the software that we used at SCAD called Flipbook. It’s an inexpensive and easy-to-use 2D animation software package, similar to the proprietary package that we had at Disney. There are other higher-end industry standard 2D programs, such as Toon Boom, but for the purpose of what we need, I would hold off on that right now. You can check out a great tutorial by Jason Ryan on animating a 2D bouncing ball in Flipbook here: Part 1, Part 2. After you have completed the 2D bouncing ball exercise, go on to doing the bouncing ball exercise in 3D animation. By doing this, we already have the mechanics of the exercise down, so we can focus on the Maya interface and the process of animating in 3D and using the graph editor.

4. Download the free trial version of Maya at the Autodesk website.

It is the industry standard 3D animation software package, and every animation school will teach you 3D animation using this program. I always suggest that people download the free trial version and do a simple tutorial over the summer to get used to the interface and the graph editor in particular. This seems to be the biggest learning curve for most people. You can check out a good free bouncing ball tutorial for 3D animation here. There are a few places you can go if you have some extra funds this summer. The following two sites are paid sites, and I don’t make any money off of them, but they are relatively inexpensive to subscribe to every month, and they give you thousands of tutorials to start with:

Lynda – This site has a ton of tutorials, but it is a paid site.

Creature Art Teacher—Animator Aaron Blaise has some incredible, inexpensive tutorials on his site that you can start with.

5. Watch one film a day.

It always surprises me when I ask people who are interested in getting into animation how often they watch animation and what their favorite animated films are, and their responses lead me to believe that they don’t watch much animation at all. It’s a good way of separating the “fans” from the filmmakers. I suggest getting a Netflix or Disney Plus account and watching one film a day over the break. It is good to watch both live-action and animated films. You will most likely have a history of film or animation class, so why not start now? You will start building your eye as a filmmaker. Here is an excellent list of films that are a must-see for any film or animation student. I recommend beginning by watching one animated film per day and first and foremost analyzing the story. At the end of the day, all animation is a way to tell a story that would be impossible to tell through live-action. When you are done, try going frame by frame on areas that particularly interest you, whether it is how a shot is lit, how a character blinks and turns, how much attention to detail may or may not be on a 3D character model, or perhaps just to find out if the background is a matte painting or an actual model. This exercise is designed to get you to pay close attention to the animated films and allow your attention to detail to begin developing and building your eye for your animation discipline and developing you into a filmmaker. The other thing to take note of when watching animated films is to make sure to watch the credits on some of the more recent animated films. This will start to give you a better idea of what animation job titles there are in the industry and maybe spark an interest in something that you may have never thought of. Here are a few links to some good film lists:

http://www.filmsite.org/greatlists.html

http://www.afi.com/100years/movies10.aspx/

http://www.filmsite.org/animatedfilms.html

http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/legacy/best-pictures.html/

Well, that should keep you busy for now. Whatever path you are taking to learn animation, whether it is going to an animation school or just learning on your own, I hope that you found this information useful and that it gives you a good start. I would like to hear any comments, questions, or suggestions. If you have any ideas to add to this list from your past experiences, I would like to hear them.

Gregg