More Animation Tutorials - Tony White's Desktop Academy

Seems like everywhere I look these days people are posting tutorials and training videos for classical hand-drawn animation .

The latest tutorial website to go up is Tony White's Desktop Academy of Traditional Animation.

He has the first free tutorial up on the subject of Keys, Extremes, and Inbetweening:

Desktop Academy Tutorial 01 - Inbetweening

For those of you who don't know about him, Tony is the author of the excellent books

"The Animator's Workbook",

"Animation from Pencils to Pixels ~ Classical Techniques for Digital Animators"


and the new book

"How to Make Animated Films" (to be released in June, 2009)

New "Princess & The Frog" trailer

First "official" trailer for Disney's new hand-drawn animated feature "The Princess & The Frog" ---




High Quality Quicktime .mov version of trailer

Looks beautiful. I'm looking forward to later this year :

August - Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea

December - The Princess & The Frog

Yay !

Drawing for Animation: Construction

James Baxter demonstrates how to construct a character for animation:

If you've not seen the sequence that James supervised for Kung Fu Panda go watch it here:

Kung Fu Panda Opening Dream Sequence

Also, as I mentioned a few posts below , Don Bluth has been posting some animation tutorials on YouTube to promote his longer Animation Tutorial DVD's . These clips are excerpts from the longer videos, but contain some good information on how to construct a cartoon character for animation:






And here's an interesting demonstration by Glen Keane on how he approaches animating a scene. Glen's initial approach is to get the feeling , to capture the "forces" that are animating the character from the inside.



Each of these artists has their own approach to drawing, but all have in common their use of the principle of constructing the character from basic forms in a rough drawing before going over top of those forms to draw the details of the character in outline. (it's like drawing from the "inside out") One thing I've noticed is that a lot of students are still trying to draw too "clean" , drawing in outline , but without any structure underneath the outlines of the drawings.