The Social and Community Aspects of Animation Mentor

You'd be surprised at just how social a worldwide online animation school can be! Honestly, when I first began Animation Mentor, I didn't think that an online school could be anywhere near as social as a real life campus. The reality, however, is that I've come out of Animation Mentor with new friends and colleagues from all over the world. I've even gotten the chance to work with some of them in the industry!

I've often said that my favorite part of Animation Mentor is the critiques. I don't just mean the mentor critiques, as awesome as those are. Having a community of people who love animation as much as I do constantly looking at my work and giving me feedback is an incredible resource.

There's only one catch: you have to participate. Like any school, you get out what you put in. So, if you decide to enroll in Animation Mentor, make a point to get involved in the community.

Check out other people's work, give them critiques, ask questions in your Q and A, and post on the forums. You'll find that others will respond, and before you know it, you'll be making friends -- and possibly lifelong contacts.

Guest Blogger Nelson Brown

How Much Reference Do Studios Provide to Animators?

Speaking as a director who has had to provide reference, the answer is always the more the better.

There is a caveat to that, though. I don’t want to hamstring the animator or artists by giving them EXACT information. I want them to be able to take what I want as a director and make it better.

You want to give the animator enough to understand it but then also allow room to keep the animator excited to add their own touches to the scenes.

Guest Blogger Mike Gasaway

The Importance of Time Management

As an alumnus of Animation Mentor, I remember that my biggest question as a new student was, "how much time will I actually need to put in to be successful?" The one statement I read that stood out to me before I started school was something along the lines of, "kiss your family goodbye, forget about your friends, because you'll need to put 100% of your free time into Animation Mentor." I was determined not be one of those people. I find I need variety in life. To me, people who eat, breathe, sleep, and think about nothing else other than animation are, well, boring.

Obviously the answer is different for every student, but this is how I ended up handling it.

When I started classes at Animation Mentor, I was working full time, and my wife and I just had our first baby. Those two alone took up most of my time. However, I found that if I kept a pretty tight schedule and stuck to it, I was more efficient in getting my school work done while finding time during the week for myself to unwind. I also found that by managing my time better I focused on my tasks more, and I avoided burnout by MAKING TIME to do nothing and get away from the computer.

My schedule looked something like this: during the week, I'd go to work from 9 am to 6 pm. This part was a no brainer. I'd come home, and eat dinner with my family. Once we put our son to bed around 8 pm, I would head into my office and work until about 11:30 or 12 am (however, I never missed an episode of LOST). On Saturdays, I would spend my mornings working on my assignment trying to get as much done as I could, with my afternoons free to be with my family or hang out with my friends. Sunday mornings were for any last minute fixes, then I would get away from the computer for the rest of the day.

I never pulled all-nighters and have tried to hold true to this when I started working at Blue Sky. I find after a certain point, my productivity goes down if I'm over tired and that can actually lead to me making poor decisions while animating. So while attending Animation Mentor, by going to bed at a relatively normal time I found that I could get more done in the morning than in the hours after 1 am.

And what do you do with the free time you carve out for yourself? Go EXPERIENCE LIFE! How can an animator bring characters to life if they're chained to their computer and don't live one for themselves?

Guest Blogger Richard Fournier

Have You Ever Felt Discouraged in your Animation Career?

"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -Henry Ford

Don't give up. There may be times in your career where you think you just can't do it-- that learning animation is too much or you just can't get your head wrapped around it.

Don't give up. You are not alone. All of us have been there before. I like to call this place "the crossroads."

It is a place where you have to make a choice. You can choose to either give it all up and follow some other career path or to persevere and have faith that it will all come together.

No matter what anyone tells you, you CAN do it! If you are truly passionate about animation, believe in yourself and work really hard at it, you will succeed. I believe in you!

Guest Blogger Joe Mandia

Taking Control of your Animation

Here’s a question that I get quite a bit in my classes: Why does my animation look bad when I take it out of stepped mode into splines for polishing?

The answer for me is relatively simple. Don’t let the computer do your animation. If you don’t like the inbetweens that your computer is giving you, don’t let it do the inbetweens! Control the arcs of your character, the way a head turns, the speed at which the arms move, how much space the body goes through.

I like to say that if your computer looks like computer animation it’s because it IS computer animation. You, the animator, haven’t put enough inbetweens or enough love in your splines (whichever method you like to animate).

Ask anyone in my personal life. I’m a control freak. I have to be in control. I’m learning, through tons of therapy, to get better but the fact still remains. This comes in handy when I’m animating. I will usually put a keyframe every 2 frames or so. Sometimes I’ll even drop one on EVERY FRAME. I trust my computer to crunch numbers extremely fast. It knows the difference between a one and a two. But, it doesn’t know anticipation. It doesn’t understand arcs. So I have to put that in there. I have to let it know that on frame 46, my head is going to do this and my left arm is going to do that.

I make sure that I put that keyframe on EVERYTHING. Not just the head or the hand, but EVERYTHING. Let me say that one more time with feeling. EVERYTHING. I do this because I do like to work in stepped mode to finesse my animation and see where the keys are. The last thing I want is to hit that magical spline button, and everything falls apart. Why is that not moving? Why IS that moving? Believe me, I’ve yelled that at the top of my lungs before. If I put a key on everything, it doesn’t do things I have no control over. It doesn’t do things I didn’t anticipate.

It does what I wanted it to do.

Silly computer. Animation’s for animators…

Guest Blogger Mike Gasaway

What Tangents in the Graph Editor Do You Typically Use-- Clamped, Splined, Linear, or Plateau?

Typically, when I start a shot I work primarily in stepped mode. This allows me to get my key poses in and hold them in place without having them loosely spline from pose to pose.

One thing I do during this phase is roughly block in my holds. I place the same pose at the beginning and end of a beat (or similar pose for ease ins/outs). It's important for me to do this, because it's misleading to let the stepped keys do the hold for you. If an animator doesn't account for that end pose, once they hit spline, that hold will disappear and that’s a big reason for splining to feel swimmy initially.

From time to time, I will select all my keys and convert them to linear. This gives me a rough sense of timing, and lets me know how fast my transitions are between major poses. I'll go back and forth between stepped and linear a few times, and when I feel I have all the information in there and my timing is working well, I’ll convert to spline.

Guest Blogger Rich Fournier

How often do you work on colleagues’ animation and what are some tips for doing so?

You can work on a colleague’s animation from time to time, and depending on the circumstances, you'll handle it differently.

Typically, it can be very frustrating to work on someone else's file. Animators have different methods and workflows that they incorporate in their process. Sometimes you will get a file and when you analyze it, it makes perfect sense to you. Other times you may be left in absolute confusion trying to decipher the animator’s thought/work process.

The former can be relatively easy to work with if their workflow closely resembles your own, so changes should go smoothly.

The latter, however, can cause you to go gray overnight and utter countless curses on the file’s creator. In this case, I will strip out everything but the key poses and maybe some breakdowns to maintain the essence of the animation and rebuild it. I find that this saves me oodles of time and countless hours on the therapist's couch.

Guest Blogger Joe Mandia