Animation Tips & Tricks BY: Shawn Kelly FOREWORD Hello everyone! Welcome to the first collection of the Tips & Tricks articles that you’ve been seeing in our monthly newsletter over the last few years. If you’re a regular reader, I just wanted to thank you for all the support, all the encouraging emails, and for all of the great feedback and follow-up questions! If you’re a new reader, however, there are a few things you should know. First, I love animation. LOVE IT. I love everything about this art form. Doing it, talking about it, studying it, etc. Which is probably the root cause of the second thing you should know: as much as I seem to continually promise to be less wordy in these articles, it never really happens, so don’t hold your breath. And third, after re-reading a lot of these tips and tricks, I clearly have an unhealthy obsession for fried chicken and Bacardi Anejo y Coca, so just be prepared for that as well! :) Anyway - I hope you have fun reading (or re-reading) these articles. For the most part, they’re just me rambling on about this or that, but it’s been amazing to hear from so many of you that you have found them helpful. Thanks again so much for all the great feedback! Please continue to send in your questions and comments to tipsandtricks@animationmentor.com - I read and reply to every email that comes through, and a lot of your suggestions end up becoming great article topics! Keep animating, and as always -- have FUN! SHAWN KELLY INTRODUCTION Welcome to the First Edition of Animation Tips and Tricks. This treasure trove of information will give you an in-depth look at techniques professional animators use to create the movies, TV shows and special effects you love. This ebook is a collection of articles written by Shawn Kelly who is a co-founder of AnimationMentor.com. He is also the winner of the 2008 VES award for The Best Single Visual Effect of the Year for his work on Tranformers and he continues to work full-time at Industrial Light & Magic as an animator. Here he’s sharing proven tips and tricks he’s learned over the years so you can become the best animator possible. Now we’re sharing them with you so you can learn some of the cool stuff we’re teaching atAnimationMentor.co m. If you’d like to find out more about our school, and keep getting tips and tricks, please sign up for our newsletter. LETTER from AnimationMentor.com Founders Congratulations! If you’re reading this book, that means you want to be an animator, the coolest job in the world! We are animators from Pixar and ILM who love our job and wanted to share what we know with others so they could experience it too. That’s why we decided to start AnimationMentor.com a few years ago. Since then we’ve graduated 335 students and seen them go on to exciting careers. We’d like to help you do the same thing. Because we went to traditional art schools, we had to learn most of what we know about animating from our years on the job. However we were lucky enough to find people to mentor us along the way. Now it’s our turn to share what we know. Our 18 month program teaches everything we know about character animation. We hope you enjoy this book. It’s just a sample of the great stuff we’re teaching at AnimationMentor.com. We hope to see you in class! Bye for now, Bobby Beck Shawn Kelly Carlos Baena This book was created and distributed by AnimationMentor.com, the animation school created for animators by animators. Additional copies may be obtained by registering on AnimationMentor.com,. Please do not distribute this e-book to others. It is for your use only. Unauthorized distribution constitutes theft of intellectual property. Copyright© 2008 AnimationMentor.com. All rights reserved. FOUNDERS BIOS Bobby Beck Bobby was an animator at Pixar in Emeryville, CA where he worked on TOY STORY 2, THE INCREDIBLES, CARS and the short film BOUNDIN’, before being promoted to senior animator/character developer on MONSTERS, INC. and FINDING NEMO. For MONSTERS, Bobby co-developed Boo and for FINDING NEMO, he was the developer of the youthful fish Nemo. In both cases, Bobby determined the characters’ appearance and how they expressed their essence through gesture and movement. In September 2004, Bobby left Pixar to devote himself full-time to running AnimationMentor.com. Bobby and his team at AnimationMentor.com strive to provide their students with the highest quality and most personal learning experience possible. Shawn Kelly Shawn Kelly realized his dream to animate films with the help of three mentors who took a personal interest in his career. A summer internship at ILM in San Rafael introduced Shawn to another influential mentor, animation director Wayne Gilbert, and to the knowledge that he wasn’t learning what he needed at school. He left school in 1996 for a job as character animator at former video game and educational company Presage Software, and to continue his studies via twice weekly meetings with Gilbert. In 1998, Shawn fulfilled his aspirations and landed a job at ILM. Since that time, he has worked on numerous films including DAY AFTER TOMORROW, where he was on the team that animated the wolves; WAR OF THE WORLDS, for which he animated tripods and probes; and STAR WARS: EPISODE III – REVENGE OF THE SITH, where he helped develop and animate the vulture droids and animated Yoda in a pivotal swordfight. Shawn just finished working as a lead animator on TRANSFORMERS and was recognized for creating The Best Special Effect for the TRANSFORMERS Desert Scene by the Visual Effects Society (VES) in 2008. Additional credits include THE INCREDIBLE HULK, STAR WARS: EPISODE 2 – ATTACK OF THE CLONES and AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Carlos Baena Carlos is an animator at the Emeryville, California studio Pixar Animation Studios. His first job was animating commercials at Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon and four months later, he headed back to San Francisco to work on spots and short films at Click 3X and WildBrain, Inc. before moving to Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). At ILM, Carlos worked as an animator on JURASSIC PARK 3, MEN IN BLACK 2 and STAR WARS: EPISODE 2-ATTACK OF THE CLONES. Captivated by fantasy and comedy, Carlos left ILM for Pixar in 2002. Since then, he has worked on FINDING NEMO, THE INCREDIBLES, CARS and RATATOUILLE and the short film BOUNDIN’. For CARS, Carlos animated several scenes with the two Italian cars Guido and Luigi (he describes them as two of the funniest characters he has ever animated) and received an Annie Award nomination for his work. For RATATOUILLE, he worked mostly on the chief villain Skinner, who expresses his anger in many subtle and funny ways. (shameless plug) Learn Character Animation from Professional Animators who are Working at Leading Studios! If you’re interested in creating animation, you’ll need to learn more than just these tips and tricks. That’s why Shawn co-founded the first ever online character animation school with Bobby Beck and Carlos Baena. AnimationMentor.com is the online animation school that teaches everything you need to know to create a killer demo reel and land a great job in just 18 months. We’re always looking for the next great talent, so check us out and see how we can help you reach your dreams. TESTIMONIALS “Three things come to me right off the bat. First of all Shawn’s ‘Tips and Tricks’ are fantastic. I’ve printed them all out and keep them near as a reminder of...well all the different things he’s written on! I love how every week he apologizes that it is so long, but I’m always wanting more! And the promises that next week won’t be so big, but they are usually even bigger! Second, right when I started Animation Mentor Shawn had a live Q&A and talked about all sorts of things. It was so inspiring. Everything from showing the many items on his desk to talking about Transformers, and the story about coming up with the idea for Yoda throwing the lightsaber! I freaked out when he said that because just a few days earlier me and a fellow Star Wars fan were talking about how cool that very shot was! Third super awesome thing is when I got to go to Siggraph this year. I was walking around and just happened to see Shawn and some other Animation Mentor employees walking past me on the first day. I waved to them and said “I’ll be seeing you around the booth!” I kept walking because I figured they all had somewhere to be, but as they were all walking past me Shawn stopped and came back over to me and shook my hand and asked my name saying thanks for being part of the school! This not only made my day, but it made my Siggraph! Thanks Shawn! You’re everything every animator wants to be!” -Chris Schmidt “Shawn’s ‘Tips & Tricks’ are extremely helpful and insightful to all animation students, even those who are not part of the Animation Mentor family. I had subscribed to the newsletter for at least a year before joining Animation Mentor. Shawn’s words of wisdom are one of the huge reasons I finally made the decision to apply.
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