Ian's Rambles - Hooray For Old School

Recently I heard that one of the major animation courses in town (possibly THE major animation course in town) was dropping all drawing from its program. WHAAA!?!?! Man I am so glad I don’t work there. Now I sense an opportunity for the Southbank course.

There are only two full time courses I am aware of in Brisbane that still use traditional animation to teach basic, fundamental and I believe essential animation principles, and out of those two our students utilise traditional techniques far more than the other. There is often a misunderstanding as to why we consider it important. Its not because we think hand drawn animation is better, that depends completely on the practitioner. Its because there is no more immediate way to form an intimate understanding of timing and posing. You are forced to start from nothing for each frame, you put it there on that frame and here on this frame and see the results. There is a direct connection between what the student created and what appears in the animation, its not some vague, arty farty thing about “feel”, or “intuition”, it’s a solid physical memory between what you created and the resulting movement.

Someone who has really understood how to control timing through drawing each frame by hand will never trust the software to space out the inbetweens, or create an arc in a movement, because they will always be able to remember the physical process they had to go through to create convincing human movement from nothing. Its not about being a great illustrator, you can achieve this intimate understanding with stick figures and blobs on the page. Its about that direct connection from your brain down through a pencil and onto the page , instead of adjusting a number that results in a rotation along a specific axis. All the commercial work I do these days is digital, but I believe down to my cotton socks that drawing is and will continue to be the absolute best way to introduce students to the world and possibilities of animation.

Few..

Anyway all this has left me hungry to share some more old school animation wisdom with the world. So I’ve made this tutorial about traditional FX animation, this is one area that is truly dominated by computers these days, even traditionally animated films have traded in their hand drawn effects for CG stuff in recent years. But I think anyone working in this field would benefit from the experience of having to draw the FX by hand, just so they understand what’s going on down to a micro level (graphically instead of mathematically). Anyhooo, enough of my babbling (written babbling anyway), I hope you enjoy and find this useful.


Demonstration/tutorial on Traditional FX Animation from laceyi on Vimeo.