Special announcement to my European friends! I have been invited to speak at this year’s Pixel Vienna in the beautiful city of…well…Vienna, Austria. I am very excited to be able to present my talk “The Power of Pantomime: Creating unique characters through purposeful movement” during the weekend of Oct 30 – Nov 01…(Read More)
(Let me know what you think in the comments!) This October I will be teaching the “Advanced Sequence Work” workshop at iAnimate.net. More simply known as Feature Workshop 6. And while I have been teaching it since the inception of the school, I have always felt that it is the most mysterious and misunderstood…(Read More)
I think everyone who has ever decided to keep a blog has had this post – the one that reads “Oh man, it’s been SO long since my last post.” I’ve certainly written one or two of those in past incarnations of my blogging career. This one is thankfully for good reason, and…(Read More)
This week I signed a deal to have both the SplatFrog.com and Crackerbox YouTube Channels distributed through the Channel Frederator Network. That sounds much bigger than it is, but it will have some nice benefits. Frederator, as you may know, has been pioneering the indie cartoon world for a while now, discovering the likes…(Read More)
Blame it on a sudden curiosity in robotics (and the math that drives it all), but I have recently begun to see animation principals in terms of equations. For instance, the principals of timing and spacing, the foundation of what we do as animators. These have an obvious mathematical relationship to themselves when it comes…(Read More)
“Equilibrium: a state in which opposing forces or actions are balanced so that one is not stronger or greater than the other” There are three elemental things that I am always thinking about while animating basic action or acting: force, mass, and gravity. My own layman’s definitions. Gravity is itself a force, I…(Read More)
…AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!! Phew! I’m coming back up for air. As is the typical bloggers lament: after all these months of neglect, it’s finally time to start communicating again. And there’s a lot to communicate – what’s been happening, and what’s on the horizon. Let’s just make a list and make it…(Read More)
Do you know? Have you heard? I have teamed up with my friends over at SplineBomb.com to sponsor an animation contest we think is pretty unique, and we’re pretty excited about it. I was super flattered to have been asked, and so happy to offer my videos and my time to make…(Read More)
Here’s how I was going to start this simple thought: “The pendulum may have swung, I think. Where once student animators used to be blamed for over-acting and over-animating, I think the opposite may now be starting to happen. There is this blanket of seriousness and a focus on subtlety that…(Read More)
Hey Everyone, A bunch of people have requested that I post the succession of playblasts from the “Attitudes & Acting Beats” tutorials. I finally had some free time to collect them and get them online. I will update this post at some point with some embedded streaming versions, but for now here is a…(Read More)
