I was watching this short clip regarding the making of Disney’s new movie ‘Tangled’ and one thing in particular caught my attention:
“An animator here at Disney will produce anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds of animation… per week(!)”
- Byron Howard, Walt Disney Animation Studios
It gives an interesting perspective of how much effort and energy is put into the making of one of these pieces of art 
Just for fun… lets put some maths to this 
If one week is 40 hours and the animator is animating 5 seconds and each second is 24 frames, then:
(24 fame per second * 5 seconds) / 40 hours = 3 frames per hour
In other words the animator is spending an average of 20 minutes on each frame to get it right!
Further more, if only one animator was working on a feature film with a duration of 70 minutes; working in this pace it would take her/him somewhere between 16 to 40 years to complete it
Check out the clip for yourself.
Cheers mates!
Talking about turning classic animation into 3D-animation (my previous post about The Road Runner animation). Now it’s Tintin, Snowy (Milou) and Captain Haddock‘s turn to enter the third dimension!
You can read more about it and see some renderings at Empire:Magazine.
“With CGI we can bring Hergé’s world to life, keep the stylised caricatured faces, keep everything looking like Hergé’s artwork, but make it photo-real.”
- Peter Jackson
I’m looking forward to this
The two classic characters Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner (wiki) from Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies have been brought back to life in full 3D by Radium – Reel FX. 
Check it out!
Well, I loved it!
Cheers mates!
So it finally finished, and I’m very satisfied with the result But one step at the time. My next step was add the breakdowns. Breakdowns are used for defining the motion and cleaning up the interpolation between the extremes. Here it is with added breakdowns.
After that I switched over to the Straight Ahead method rather then Pose to Pose in order to add Secondary Action, Follow Through and redefine the Inbetweens. Also I started to work on the Facial animation, not a very easy task I tell you! :S He is talking very fast and at only 24 fps there was only about 2-4 frames per word to work with. But I think it turned out pretty well
But ‘nuf said, here is the end result – enjoy!
Feel free to comment and suggest improvements so that I will evolve as an animator
Cheers Mates!
The blog is going strong, I have TWO confirmed readers! So this post is dedicated to them.
My project is moving along nicely and so far every thing is going according to plan. For the last few days I’ve been working on the Extremes in the animation and I’ve refined some of the key poses to what I believe to be better ones By the way, the Extremes are poses that defines direction and changes in direction in the animation. Here is the result with the Extremes added and all tangents in the Curve Editor set to Linear instead of Stepped, allowing me to preview the transitions between Key Poses and Extremes. This makes the animation much smoother and gives a good overview on where I need to create my Breakdowns (os Passing Positions) later on.
Next step will be to add the Breakdowns, refine the Inbetweens and add Follow Through and Secondary Action. And that is lots of fun I’ve printed out a paper with the 12 Principles of Animation worked out by Walt Disney and his animators back in the 1930′s and I have it beside me as a reminder of what to work with. It helps alot to keep track on what to do and improve the animation
Here is the time schedule
Thursday – Basic Idea and Storyboarding
Friday – Animatic, Key Poses and Rough Animation in FlipBook
Saturday – Key Poses in Maya
Sunday – Key Poses in Maya
Monday – Extremes and refining Key Poses
Tuesday - Extremes and refining Key Poses
Wednesday - Extremes and refining Key Poses
Thursday - Breakdowns and Inbetweens, Secondary Animation
Friday - Breakdowns and Inbetweens, Secondary Animation
Monday - Modelling Props (Alien, Knife and Room), PowerPoint Presentation
Tuesday - Facial Animation
Wednesday – Facial Animation
Thursday – Facial Animation, Final Tweaking, PowerPoint Presentation
Friday – Presentation!
Hope you enjoyed this, see you in a couple of days for more updates.
Cheers Mates!
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This was Part 2, don’t miss:
Part 1
Part 3 – Finished Work
We’ve started a new project in school that will be running for two weeks. The goal of this project is to animate in Maya and I’m going for character animation
I’ve downloaded the audio file for last month competition from 11secondclub.com and I’m going to animate a free, pre-made character rig called Max for Maya. So I will spend all my time on animation and don’t bother with character modelling, texturing and rigging.
Here is my time schedule for this project.
Thursday – Basic Idea and Storyboarding
Friday – Animatic, Key Poses and Rough Animation in FlipBook
Saturday – Key Poses in Maya
Sunday – Key Poses in Maya
Monday – Extremes and refining Key Poses
Tuesday - Extremes and refining Key Poses
Wednesday - Extremes and refining Key Poses
Thursday - Breakdowns and Inbetweens, Secondary Animation
Friday - Breakdowns and Inbetweens, Secondary Animation
Monday - Modelling Props (Alien, Knife and Room), PowerPoint Presentation
Tuesday - Facial Animation
Wednesday – Facial Animation
Thursday – Facial Animation, Final Tweaking, PowerPoint Presentation
Friday – Presentation!
So far I’ve defined the Key Poses (the storytelling poses) in FlipBook and made an Animatic/Rough Animation that I use in Maya as a guide for posing my character. Very nice workflow, thanks goes to Jason Ryan for introducing this method to me, check out his webinars here. As well as Richard Williams for his work on The Animator’s Survival Kit, very handy book for animator wannabes 
It is also available as DVDs: The Animator’s Survival Kit Animated.
Here is the FlipBook Rough Animation.
Here is the first blocking of Key Poses in Maya.
Stay tuned for updates, there’s still eleven days to go!
Cheers mates!
—————
This was Part 1, don’t miss:
Part 2
Part 3 – Finished Work
As you probably noticed by now you can find all kinds of thing on the internet and I’ve recently found a blog that I found to be really inspiring. The old Disney films are truly works of art and they are beautifully animated. But other then that I’m also very fond of the backgrounds. The backgrounds are really beautiful pieces of art by them self, unfortunately you perhaps don’t think about them too much because you are focusing on all the animated action. However, believe it or not, I found a blog that is entirely devoted to animation backgrounds! It is really, really nice to just sit and watch these pictures and take in all the details. You should take a look at; http://animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com/
Here are some of my favourite highlights, from the film Pinocchio.
Check out the rest at: http://animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com/search/label/PINOCCHIO
Enjoy!
Gobelins is a French school of animation, both traditional (2d) and 3d animation. Here are some examples of really, really, reeeeally cool stuff from some of the students:
Pyrats
Brilliant short animation set in the Golden Age of Piracy, brilliant animation and interesting characters. I’ve heard some rumours that it might be turned into a feature film—that would be awesome!
Check out their website for HD version and some Making-of material: Pyrats.net
There’s more, keep reading…