Science of Character Animation

Work on character animation starts with the character. For this reason, Markus will pay great attention to how really charismatic characters are created.

You will have a quick overview of Adobe Illustrator tools and then learn about blocking out a character, proportions, exaggerations and etc.

The author will continue talking about character design and will pay more attention to such things as hands & feet, face and hair and will finish with adding details and outlines and, of course, showing you effective ways of working with color.

Many believe that the main role in animation is played by easings and timings… But the truth is, the secret to good character animation lies in high-quality poses. So in this section you will learn what the line of action is and how to use it, how to work with weight and gravity, and how to build an expressive and balanced composition.

What emotion your character is expressing? There are a lot of small nuances in facial expressions, that’s why it is very important to know the basics of building emotions.

You will learn mouth and eyes designs and the ways to create different moods

So, let’s start animating, right? Don’t hurry… To start with you need to have everything planned thoroughly. This stage is extremely important, as it helps to avoid tricky corrections when animating and it will also save some hair on your head from falling out.

In this lesson, we will talk about ways to generate ideas, create concepts and how to turn them into a complete captivating story.

A character is a complex system consisting of lots of limbs and other elements. So it’s very important to secure yourself against unnecessary trouble by splitting and naming layers in Illustrator first, then import it in After Effects and create a flexible rig.That will save tons of time and make the animation process much more comfortable. This is what this lesson is about.

Alright, it’s time to animate. Markus will share with you a lot of different techniques he has learnt during his long journey as an animator. In this lesson we will talk about such principles as weight, anticipation, recoil and follow through.

After you have already got familiar with things that allow you to create the good animation basis it’s time to learn how you can add flexibility to your characters with the help of squash & stretch, whip and wave motion, and offsets.

A character consists of many details, and after main parts have been animated let’s create some secondary motion by animating clothes, hair and adding some smears or action lines to emphasize the motion.

One of the greatest animators Ken Harris once gave a great piece of advice:

“ A walk is the first thing to learn. Learn walks of all kinds, cause walks are about the toughest thing to do right”.

A run is not just an accelerated walk. This movement has different dynamics, that’s what we will talk about here. Markus will show you the key poses and some secret ways to make your run-cycles more expressive.

This approach will save you a lot of time while animating complex scenes with a lot of different actions. In this lesson you will learn how to plan your shot and all the further steps to achieve a really nice result instead of getting lost and spend a lot of time on experiments when animating each movement one by one.

Even the slightest brow movement can cause a significant emotional response from the audience. Would be nice to know this trick as well as some others, wouldn't it?

Here you will learn how to animate transitions between emotions and get equipped with the alphabet of lip-sync.

What if your viewers were able to watch your animation only once? Would they get the message? Animation is a true stage performance, so it follows the same principles and the same tricks can be used.

Here we will talk about body language, facial expressions, importance of the eyes and, of course, timings, which usually play even greater role in achieving the best possible dramatic effect than technically challenging animation.

It’s time to finish up your animation, create a perfect loop, add sound design, render it out and post it on your Dribbble, Instagram, Vimeo or whatever.