AM - Class 2 / Week 6 - Lecture

And another Blocking to Final lecture by Mike Stern.

Mike was among the first group that graduated from Animation Mentor, now he is working at DreamWorks as a character animator.

His impressive list of credits includes: Bee Movie, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and recently Puss in Boots.

Check out his AWESOME Animation Mentor graduation short: Distraxion.

AM - Class 2 / Week 5 - Lecture

Weight and Balance

Weight & Balance are crucial elements in animation, sometimes it feels wrong even when watching a high budget animated movie from major studios.
To create a solid character animation we need to understand weight & balance in real life before we start applying it into animation.

In order for a character to be balanced; its weight needs to be evenly distributed a long its center line of gravity, (the center line is the vertical line that connects the supporting foot on the ground with the base of the neck)

In real life, a fat person requires more time and power to move forward as well as to stop, same in animation, a character with a big mass requires more time & energy to propel it self to obtain locomotion than a smaller character would.
Balance wise, the faster the person is moving, the less balanced he is, the slower he moves the more balanced he is,
But if the person is completely balanced he can't move anywhere, therefor we need to break off that balance in order for us
to move around.

If you don't follow the rules of real life weight & balance while animating a shot it will simply look lifeless, there is a fine line between exaggerating the rules of weight and breaking them, you can exaggerate the rules of weight but the one thing that you Can Not exaggerate is balance, you can only break the balance of a character during locomotion & that is about the
only time that your character is off balanced, like walk, run, jump, or what kind of locomotion you have for the character.


Quick notes:
- A well balanced character is the one that all its parts are working with each other to balance itself.
- Extreme reversal action helps selling the idea of weight (for something like a pull, a push, or a jump)
- In order to sell the weight!! exaggerate!!
- Exaggerate the squash & stretch by compressing its body clusters closer together, or stretching them a part.
- When you're animating a character throwing a heavy object; make sure to utilize the entire body to make that object go far... same principle applies to a jump.

Line of Action.

Our mentor John Nguyen shared with as a very nice article that might be known for some but not for others!!
It talks about the line of action, and the Rule of Thirds..

Here, check it out!!

AM - Class 2 / Week 4 - Lecture

 Walk-Through: Blocking to Final

Yet another lecture hosted by Ethan Hurd explaining his way of approaching a shot from start to finish.
Ethan is such an amazing animator, he animated on famous titles like Toy Story 2, Shrek 2, Madagascar, Open Season, Surf's Up, Bolt, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and Gnomeo and Juliet.

Its really cool to see professional animators walking us through there process of animating a shot..
They are humans!! just like us!!

AM - Class 2 / Week 3 - Lecture

In-depth Look at Hips

In this lecture, Bobby takes a closer look (through real life references) at hips & how they move.

When we watch beginner animators reels we'll notice that the hips is often ignored!!

Well.. actually everything starts & drives from the hips, and to start understanding how hips moves you'll need to analyze
live footage & see how the weight is distributed between the hips and legs.

One thing to keep in mind is that the center of gravity is always above the point of suspension.
In a well balanced character pose; you should be able to draw a straight vertical line between the base of the neck and
the supporting foot on the ground.

Another thing is that the hips (in most cases) counter rotate the shoulders, this will make the pose rather appealing.

And like we always say, once we understand the principles of hips rotation, we can exaggerate it to serve the purpose of
that shot.

AM - Class 2 / Week 2 - Lecture

BLOCKING TO FINAL

This was another lecture that talks about animating a shot from Blocking all the way to the final stage.
It was hosted by Dimos Vrysellas who is a great animator, worked on a number of features like:
The Wiled, Shark Tale, Sindbad, Spirit, and The Prince of Egypt.

AM - Class 2 / Week 1 - Lecture

CLARITY IN BLOCKING.

Blocking is setting up the foundation for a shot.
In order to sell the idea to your self or the director first you'll need to block it out , blocking should convey your thoughts
on the shot with a bunch of posses, this is the best way for you to know if your idea is working or not.

1 - Things you need to know before you start blocking:
-Understand the shot.
-What are my goals in this shot?
-What dose the shot calls for?
-What are the limitations in the shot?
-What is the duration of a shot?

2 - Once you answered all these questions, you can go a head & find / shoot a reference video for the action you're about
to animate, even if you know exactly what you need too do you still need to take this step because it will help you finding
this nice little gestures in the reference that you can slide into your shot to make it more interesting.

3 - The next step is to draw little thumbnails poses with the help of the reference, its good to accompany the drawings
with frame numbers to know on where each pose will fit in the timeline.

4 - Then you start blocking in Maya with Stepped Tangents keyframes.

5 - After you finish blocking, re time the posses in the timeline

6 - Push your posses further (exaggerate) to get the most out of each pose.

7 - convert your keyframes to liner, at this stage show your work to others ( director, colleague, wife ) to get feedback.

8 - After you're done with blocking here is a check list that you need to double tick:
-Dose the shot reads correctly??
-Are the posses looking interesting??
-Is the animation looking interesting??

If all the above are OK, you can proceed to the next steps, which is Blocking Plus, then Splining, and finally.. Polishing.

Have fun!

AM - Class 2 Starts !!

For Class Two, I got assigned to mentor John Nguyen.

John has been working in the industry for over 13 years, he worked at studios like Disney, DreamWorks, Warner Bros,
Digital Domain, and Rhythm and Hues.

I'm sure its gonna be a great learning experience with John, wish me luck!!

AM - Class One Q&As

Yayyy !! Finally.. Class two has started after two weeks of waiting!! but before we get into that I still have some unfinished business with class one!!

I would like to take a moment to talk about the Q&As we had with our mentor Adam Green.

As I probably have mentioned in earlier posts, each week we have what's called a Q&A session where we get to see our mentor live through a video camera talking about different aspects of the animation industry, and we get to ask questions.    Working at Disney and  BlueSky, Adam had so much information to share from his past experience,but since our small
group of students was the quiet type, it was all up to him to fill this weekly hour with juicy tips & interesting stories.

On our last Q&A he told us about his inspiring story struggling to learn animation, and all the devastation he faced from people around telling him that he made a bad choice for his career becoming an animator because he sucked at it (at the time).. but he ignored all that and kept on practicing and climbing up the ladder until he became the animator he is today.
He used an inspiring phrase that caught my ears which was "the ones who make it through are the ones who don't give up"
So always keep that in mind young animators!!

Anyways, here is a couple of notes that I wrote down during these Q&As:

- Characters are very similar to a bouncing ball in the way they move, squash & stretch, hang time.
- Workflow is very important, take your time on planning & blocking, it will make your job of splining the shot easy later on.
- Keep your timeline & graph editor clean, so you'll be prepared if there is any changes in the future.
- When animating a walk, offset the keys of the body a couple of frames from the foot for a better sense of body wight.
- When applying squash & stretch, stay faithful to the the material your animating, rubber, wood, metal..etc.
- Everything moves in arcs, so always keep track of your arcs.
- Do not over animate your shots.

At the end of each term, the mentor will make an assessment for each student he mentored during the class.
Here is what Adam had to say for me:

Areas of strength: EXCELLENT first term Manar. Overachiever through and through. I could fill this page up with positive things to say about you. You have a bright future and I'm excited to see what you do in AM and in your career. You have a lot of talent, great instincts and a huge imagination. Nice work.

Areas of improvement: The only thing I can say is that your one weakness is letting your enthusiasm for animation sometimes overwhelm what you're trying to say with the animation. The animation can be too broad or too busy. At Disney, we call this "over-animating." When you're animating a film for a director, many times over-animating can be worse than making bad animation. I think in the future you should focus on being more discerning about your choices, and finding a balance between nailing the focal point of a piece of animation, versus bombarding the audience with tons of motion (no matter how sophisticated that motion is). I think you'll find that the more you "keep" from the audience, the larger the contrast will be when you "really give it to them." It's all about finding that balance, and I've learned that the best animators are masters at minimizing what's unimportant as much as they are at maximizing what is. Regardless, you're very talented and you'll go far. Never stop learning. Good luck Manar!!!!!

With this highly appreciated advice from my mentor Adam Green I will wrap up my posts for class one.

Class Two.. coming up!!

AM - Class 1 / Week12 -Assignment

This was the last week for Class One, Unfortunately.. I missed watching the lecture, As for the assignment it was to collect
all the work we've accomplished during this term in a progress reel and upload it to AM site... Hope you like it!

AM - Class 1 / Week 11 - Lecture

Week seven lecture was a continuation from week seven about Graph Editor spline editing in Maya.
It was hosted by Victor Navone, one of the best animators at Pixar, he has some great tutorials on his Blog, Check it out.

AM - Class 1 / Week 10 - Lecture

In week 10 lecture, Carlos talked about Walks with personality.
Walks are important because they define who the character is, it could tell us about the personality and physicality of a character, as well as size, attitude, & mood.

If you are animating a personality walk, the first thing to do is to get the key posses right, then play with timing & spacing
and the inbetweens...  and the possibilities are endless..

Its always a good Idea to film yourself for reference.

AM - Class 1 / Week 9 - Lecture

This lecture was about : Exaggeration.

Animation is all about exaggeration, if we copy real performance as is while animating a character it will look very plane,
therefore.. we need to exaggerate to make it more interesting, so exaggeration in animation is taking reality and push it further, so it will not look boring.

Exaggeration could be in : poses, time, ideas, and personality.

- exaggerate timing by giving more time or less time to certain poses.
- exaggerate the essence of an idea you're trying to convey.
- exaggerate emotion & wight..  for example, happy character feels lighter, sad character is heavier.
- exaggerate a very carefully chosen moments or actions in a shot.

So.. in brief words, exaggeration helps to sell the idea, if you over do it you will confuse the audience, if you under do it
you will bore them.

Here is a list of some animated movies with cool characters to analyze :

Character of Dopey - "Snow White and the 7 dwarfs".    Character of Ichabod Crane -"Legend of Sleepy Hollow"  
Character of Slue Foot Sue - "Pecos Bill"    Character of MacBadger - "Wind and the Willows"  
Character of Sir Giles - "The reluctant Dragon"    Character of Sheriff of Nottingham - "Robin Hood"  
Character of Baloo - "Jungle Book"    Character of Hopper - "A Bug's Life"    Character of Woody - "Toy Story 2"

Thanks for reading.. 

AM - Class 1 / Week 8 - Lecture

This lecture was an introduction to animating vanilla walks.

Vanilla standard plane walk is one of the hardest things to animate, well.. at least for me!!
If I want to animate a personality walk I could make so many critical mistakes in the body, hands, & legs rotations, and
hide behind the fact that this is A personality walk, BUT.. when animating a vanilla walk I need to get all the body mechanics perfect otherwise it will look wrong.

This week at AM we focused on getting the rules and mechanics of a plane walk right, then we can exaggerate and push it farther latter on.

So, here are some important facts about walks which I learned the hard way :

- Walks are a controlled fall, with each step we take we are actually falling forward, then the leg in the back will move fast to the front to catch up and prevents us from falling.
- While walking, the body is moving forward evenly, NO ease in or outs.
- Careful observation on how the wight of the body shifts between the legs will lead to a proper animated walk cycle.
- It takes some energy from the hips to lift the back foot off the ground.
- Knees are always progressing forward.
- For a good walk cycle, you will need at least 150 to 200 frames to loop, so it will not look repetitive.

There are number of key posses that every biped character walk should have, I created a frame to demonstrate the key poses :

Once you merge these frames together (after removing frame 0) it should show up something like this :

Then of curse you'll need to fill up the inbetween and work on there spacing.

Hope that was helpful!! Till next time : )

AM - Class 1 / Week 7 - Lecture

This week's lecture was short, more technical / Maya centric, focusing on the Graph editor and how to edit your spline
curves in Maya..

Nothing much really to say about this one..

AM - Class 1 / Week 6 - Lecture

This weeks lecture was about Overlapping Action.

Overlapping Action is braking off the movement to add flexibility to your characters so it will not look mechanical & stiff.
It consists of several sections: Follow Through, Successive braking of joints, Drag, Lead & Follow.

In a chain, the root (parent) driving force always moves first, then the lower sections (child) will gradually flow with a slight delay.  For instance, in human body an arm is moving to reach out for a glass of water, you might think that the driving force
is the hand, but that is wrong, the initial source of the movement comes from the shoulder, it will start to move first, then the arm will follow, then the hand.

The principle of Overlapping Action is based on real life laws of physics, we just need to observe & comprehend these
laws to be able to apply them to animation, but just be aware of over using it too much.

AM - Class 1 / Week 5 - Lecture

This weeks lecture was about Anticipation and Squash & Stretch.

Anticipation : Without Anticipation the movement will look unnatural.  Now, to be able understand anticipation we have to
go through Squash & Stretch first.

Squash & Stretch : Squash & Stretch is what gives life to a character, you can apply it to something as simple as a ball, or
as complex as a dinosaur.   For example, if a ball (that has character) is trying to jump up in the air, first it squashes on the ground (this is the anticipation) then it stretches as its jumping up in the air..
In this case, the more the ball squashes (anticipates) into the ground, the higher its jump will be.. and the less it anticipates (squashes), the lower the jump will be.

So this leads us to Anticipation..  well, Anticipation is a build up of force, its the setting up for an action, a small Anticipation should be followed by a small action, on the other hand.. a larger Anticipation would be followed by a stronger action, and
this is where most people get it wrong, you ALWAYS have to tune your anticipation to match with the action that follows.

As you can see by now, Anticipation and Squash & Stretch goes hand in hand together, and this principle applies not only
to cartoon animation but realistic animation as well, but the more you add it the more cartoony your animation will be.

AM - Class 1 / Week 4 - Lecture

In this lecture we got introduced to Timing & Spacing.

In very brief words,  Timing is what gives the meaning to movement.  as for Spacing, its how you put your characters
in space, or its the gaps between the key poses/drawings.

Timing & spacing always goes hand in hand together when talking about animation, they are usually influenced by
a number of laws :
"Wight"  "Gravity"  "Momentum"  "Inertia"  "Acceleration & Deceleration"  and "other Force"

Aside from that; the most important advice that I got from this lecture is to always try braking up the constancy while animating, repetitive motion tends to be boring.  braking off the rhythm makes (in most cases) something as simple
as walk cycle a lot more interesting.

AM - Class 1 / Week 3 - Lecture

This week's lecture was about the importance of Planning & Blocking.

Planing your work a head before you sit on your computer to animate is very important, yet its something often missed by
many people ( especially in the middle east )

There are different aspects for planning a shot, I'll try to mention some of them :

- When brainstorming for ideas, do not always commit to the first idea that pops to your mind, the first idea is always good
but its usually a Cleché that been used over & over again, so try to find different and more creative ideas.

- Close your eyes and try to visualize your shot/shots from start to end, this might be hard at the beginning but this is a skill that will develop over time.

- Observe the world around you, shoot as much video references as you can to help you out with your work, do not copy that recorded performance as is while animating but add to it & develop it.

- Drawing simple thumbnails or story board for your shot is a huge part of the planning process.

- Be sure to always ask for feed back from your fellow animators or even people outside the industry, this is a great way for you to improve your ideas & skills.

As for Blocking, there are three famous methods of blocking your shots :

1 - Layering : is when you layer the animation for a characters gradually along a sequence ( body, hands, head, legs.. etc )
2 - Pose To Pose : is when you set keyframes for the main key poses for a character, then add the in-between on later stage.
3 - Straight A Head : is when you start animating  full characters sequentially.

All three methods are correct, but its good to find the one that works the best for you, or you can combine all of them together.


OK!!.. That's it for this week folks!! Take care !!

AM - Class 1 / Week 2 - Lecture

This week's lecture was about the Principles Of Animation explained in a very basic manner, but they will be diving deeper into these principles latter on in future classes.   The lecture was hosted by co founder of Animation Mentor Carlos Beana.  Carlos has animated on many of Pixar movies like Toy Story 3, WALL.E, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo.


The principles of animation are :

Squash & Stretch.   Is what gives characters or objects the organic & elastic feel, while maintaining there volume.

Anticipation.   Is (in simple words) preparing the audience for the next action a character will make, without anticipation the viewer will not understand that action.

Staging.    Staging your characters in an interesting and clear pose.

Straight A Head & Pose To Pose.    Those are the two methods of animating.  Straight A Head method is to animate a character sequentially as you move forward in time.   Pose To Pose is creating the main key poses for a character then
filling in the in-between.

Overlapping.   A robot walking will have no overlapping action, on the other hand a human walk has a complex overlapping actions between arms, hip, head, & legs , so Overlap is what adds natural non robotic feel to the character.

Ease In Ease Out.    In real life nothing moves or halts without ease, so easing ( in-out ) is what helps giving a character natural non mechanical flow.

Arcs.    Everything in life moves in arcs, its as simple as that.  So take good care of your Arcs.

Secondary Action.    Is what keeps characters alive, it should support the primary action but not affect it, otherwise its no longer a secondary action.

Timing.    Is one of the most important principles in animation.  Timing is basically the number of frames that you have in
your animation, and how do you space them out in each frame.

Exaggeration.    Is pushing the action over the usual.

Solid Posing.   To enhance the character in the frame.

Appeal.   Is animating your character in way that looks visually pleasant and appealing.


I would like to wrap up this post by quoting a couple sentences I really liked from guest animators interview during the lecture.. The first one : " Moving a character from point A to point B is not animating, Animation is way far beyond that "    Second : " A lazy animator will create the main poses, & let the computer figure out all the in-betweens "