Every aspiring animator knows there's only one animation bible: Frank & Ollie's Illusion of Life. Enough words have been spoken about those two, so I don't feel the need to rehash... but Ollie, the last of Disney's famous Nine Old Men, passed away yesterday. It's truly the end of an era.

It makes it even more fitting that last week was all about Frank & Ollie's 12 Principles of Animation. These are the fundamentals to giving your animation the illusion of life. While I was familiar with most of these, it was great to have examples showing what happens when you animate without taking some of this into account.

There were some important points in the lecture I wanted to remember, but I forgot. >_< I'm hoping it'll come back soon.

There's a quote I wanted to add but forgot to last week: In AM, they had this definition of animation: "Animation is "the art of breathing life into something that is dead."

I find that simply amazing and inspirational. Animators create life.

I just started classes at Animation Mentor, an online school for Character Animation. I want to blog about it so I can remember the wonderful things I learn, as well as share what I'm working on. I'll leave all the posts public for anyone else who might be interested.

So begins my chronical of a 18month voyage into animation. Maybe after I graduate, I can create artistic wonders of beauty like Planet Unicorn. >.>

Week 1
My first week at AM was pretty amazing. The entire environment and educational atmosphere is so different from anything I've done before. It's fantastic. It's a very social, encouraging program with a lot of enthusiasm and wisdom. Every week there is a new video lecture about the week's topic and assignments. Also, we have an hour long Q&A/lesson with our "mentor", essentually, a teacher who is currently working in the industry, and will be guiding us and helping us along this class.

I was fortunate to have Anthony Wong as my mentor. Not only does he have a wonderful background in traditional animation from Disney Feature Animation, but he also currently works at Pixar, having done work on Ratatouille and other projects. (Pretty much where I want to be-- 2D and 3D) Not only is he incredibly talented, but he loves what he does, and I already feel like I've learned so much from only two weeks.

Lecture notes: (i.e. cool stuff I want to remember):

Anticipation: When a character/object is going to move in one direction, it's more interesting/realistic to have it move in the opposite direction slightly first, then proceed to the final direction.

Head tilt: Animators love to make things more visually interesting. A great example of this is with head tilts-- instead of having the head perfectly perpendicular, they tend to have them tilted so that the eyes are on an angle. (Example)