ANIMATION MASTERCLASSES

FOUNDATIONS OF ANIMATION
This replaces Disney’s ’12 Principles’ with a more comprehensive collection – adding essentials like ‘accents’ (streses in dialog and performance). The course begins with the basic foundations, and moves towards the more complex. Learn the fundamentals of animation in under  2 hours!

DRAWING CARTOON CHARACTERS
This is based on my years working for Don Bluth’s studio in Dublin. It covers the rules of thumb that were used to create the classic Disney/Bluth/WB/HB styles. These principles are universal, and apply to most styles of animation and design, as well as to classic comic book characters.

APPLYING THE FOUNDATIONS
This course applies each of the 21 foundations sequentially to a single scene. As each is added the animation evolves from a basic TV style into a more feature quality work. We see how they mesh into a unified creation. Integrating the 21 foundations is key to creating top quality animation.

STORYBOARDING
This explains camera angles, cuts, staging, differences between TV and feature, story structure, character, adding atmosphere with tone and colour, and demonstrates some all too-common errors in film-making! This should be useful to anyone storyboarding whether in animation or live action.

FX: WATER / FIRE / SMOKE / EXPLOSIONS
The holy grail of FX animation is a sense of irregular / chaotic undulation, but not so much that the water, fire or smoke feels floaty. I use a straight ahead approach, then combine it with a ‘churn’ action on the breakdowns – I’ve had some good success with this method.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF ANIMATION
This course is important as it covers many traditional terms and concepts that are universal. You should know the difference between drawings, frames and exposures, aspect ratios, frame rates, etc.

MAGICAL CAREER ADVICE
I’ve had many interesting ‘leveling up’ moments in my career, often at points where I’d considered quitting the industry. Maybe some of this stuff will help you, either at the personal/professional level, or the psychological/emotional.

ANIMATING IN PHOTOSHOP
It sounds bizarre, but you can do fantastic animation in Photoshop. The best part is that most people are familiar with the software, so the learning curve is easy. If you can draw it in Photoshop, you can animate it (with a little patience). Many of the slides in my courses are done in Photoshop. This opens a world of possibilities!

CREATIVE ANIMATION IN PHOTOSHOP
The beauty of animating in Photoshop is that you are now able to animate any drawing, using traditional animation techniques. If you can draw it, you can animate it. Artistic styles (think of the ‘A-HA take on me’ music video) can be animated in Photoshop, as can VFX magic, the kind of things that were done in the pre digital era.

2D ANIMATION IN HARMONY
My most under-rated course: quick and dirty – about forty minutes long: how to create hand-drawn animation in Harmony. In little over half an hour, this tiny course gives you enough instruction to show you how to draw keys, a breakdown, and inbetweens, as well as how to colour them. Great if you just want to draw, old school!

ANIMATEcc: STORYBOARDING
How to storyboard a sequence in Adobe AnimateCC so that the animators can easily build upon your work and animate the scenes, using your staging and camera moves. Whether you’re going to use Animate to create a personal project or work in a studio environment, this is crucial information.

LEARNING ADOBE ANIMATEcc
A very simple project-based course, demonstrating the process of rigging a basic alien character. We go on to animate him using nested symbols. Camera moves are added, and a stagger is created using exposures on the timeline. The principles in this course can be applied to a far more complex scene or character.

ANIMATEcc: ANIMATING SCENES
This is a project-based course. It’s a level of difficulty up from the previous one. It shows you how to set up an entire complex scene from background to characters, how to add camera moves, explosions, camera moves, at the level you’d need for a scene in a TV show. The scene is assembled to allow you to add high end FX.

COMPING ANIMATEcc IN AFTER EFFECTS
This takes the animation from the previous course and composites it in After Effects, where we can apply the powerful visual tools like blurs, glows, camera moves and effects in order to dramatically ‘level up’ the original animation. By combining Adobe Animate & After Effects we can push the look of the project into a higher quality.

MIGRATE FROM FLASH TO HARMONY
Only watch this if you’re a Flash/AnimateCC veteran who’s looking to retrain in Toonboom Harmony. Both versions in this course are a bit old now, but I think you’ll still be able to use the course to help transition to Harmony, as much is still the same in the newer versions of each program.

HARMONY ESSENTIAL TRAINING
This course shows you how to create a full character and environment, with camera moves. We rig an entire TV style facial system with dialog mouth shapes and eye blinks, as well as fun shape morphing to create nice squash and stretch. IK and FK kinematics are also used to pose the character.

WALK CYCLE BASICS
The mystery of walks is broken down into the main poses: the contact, the passing, the recoil (or down pose) and the high point. The contacts set the speed and attidute of the walk, and we add character and looseness with the passing pose. The mystery of foot placement is also explained, allowing us to avoid the dreaded ‘moon-walk’.

ATTITUDE WALK CYCLES
More people should watch this course! Yeeks, don”t you want to do fun walks? For years I didn’t know how to do the classic cartoon walks like sneaks, etc., it wasn’t until the Richard Williams book that I found out. Anyway, this course shows how, applying the methods in his book. Sneak, strut, stomp.

ANIMAL WALK CYCLES
The mind-twister of the 4-legged walk and run is explained. The exercise files included in this course are a must-read, as they include a lot of great reference. I also stabilised the Muybridge photos for this course, and corrected some errors. I also include some super simple 4 legged runs!

ANIMATING IN HISTORICAL STYLES
One of my favourite types of job is animating a historical pastiche. This course shows you how to throttle or tweak the foundations of animation to create 1920s rubber hose, 1940s looney tunes, 1960s TV, and 1980s saturday morning cartoons. It’s not just about copying the style of the period, you need to know the essentials.

SIDE-SCROLLER PLATFORM GAMES
During the 1990s I animated many side-scrolling and 2D games for Disney Interactive. We drew them by hand, then they were scanned and digitally converted for the programmers to struggle with. I developed many tricks to help plan the structure of the animated scenes so that they could be compiled by the tech team.

ISOMETRIC  GAMES
This is a short collection of movies demonstrating a ‘virtual dermot’, and how he might interact with an isometric obstacle course.

LOOSENING UP
If your animation feels stiff and mechanical, this course will offer you techniques to help loosen it up.  By appling reversals, counterpose, overlap and head articulation, you’ll begin to feel your character come alive! Stiff animation can bedevil those with even moderate experience, so a useful mini-course.

HAIR & CLOTHING
Examples of secondary action: anything that is moved not by its own power, but by someone or something acting upon it. Hair and clothing, mostly. Sometimes blown by wind, sometimes reacting to the motions of the character. My personal breakthrough in animation these is to animate them straight ahead on a fixed timing beat.

ANIMATE FLYING CREATURES
From the tiny (butterflies) to the medium sized (birds) to the enormous (a dragon) this will show you different approaches to winged flight. Some examples are simple, some are more intricate. The dragon is a personal favourite, as I think I did a decent job of capturing his mass with correct spacing and timing!

TIPS & TRICKS
For about 3 years I created a short lesson each week on a variety of topics. Much of this content was repurposed into main courses. HOWEVER, there’s also a lot of content in there that you haven’t seen! The entire course is SIXTEEN hours – so there’s a huge amount and variety in there. Well worth a scan.

MONSTERS AND ALIENS
If you only watch one movie from this course, watch the one about animating a zombie. It’s a great example of using leading action and breaking of joints – how to apply two of the foundations of animation to create a very specific effect, and not just using them to loosen the actions of a regular character.

LEARNING 2D ANIMATION PRINCIPLES
This is a very old course, and has been superceded by ’21 Foundations of Animation’. Still, if you want to watch it, there might be a couple of movies that are helpful. Won’t hurt anyway, and you can see how my courses have improved since!