I watched the 1970s BBC drama ‘I, Claudius’ for the first time a couple of years ago. Tremendous fun – even with the limited TV sets and makeup of the era. The script and acting more than makes up for it. Brian Blessed, John Hurt, Derek Jacobi, and of course Siân Phillips as the murderous…
Author: dermot
STAGING & ACTING
Movies in my LYNDA/LINKEDIN-LEARNING ‘Tips & Tricks’ series covering staging & acting, assembled into a virtual course. BTW, check out my patreon, there’s going to be a lot of animation resources posted there! 1: TWINNING A no-no (in the world of Disney/Bluth/WB style of animation is ‘Twinning’ – when a character’s limbs mirror one another…
CREATIVE ANIMATION in PHOTOSHOP
My new course has been released in the Linkedin Library. It’s a fun one, aimed at anyone who is reasonably familar with Adobe Photoshop, who wants to do animation as well – but who may not want to struggle with another piece of animation software. Anything that you can draw in Photoshop can be animated…
DIALOG & ACCENTS
Movies in my LYNDA/LINKEDIN-LEARNING ‘Tips & Tricks’ series covering dialog & accents, assembled into a virtual course. BTW, check out my patreon, there’s going to be a lot of animation resources posted there! 1: INTRO TO ACCENTS Many students and beginners focus too much on the particular mouth shapes associated with a vocal sound. Far…
APPEAL & STRONG DESIGN
One of my favourite courses in the Linkedin Learning (Lynda) library is ‘Drawing cartoon characters‘. A series of movies in my ‘Tips & Tricks’ series took many of the drawings from that course and animated them. I’ve assembled all the movies on the topics into this virtual course. BTW, check out my patreon, there’s going…
BLENDER’S GREASEPENCIL
Really nice overview / review of the free animation software ‘GREASEPAINT/BLENDER‘ by Toniko Pantoja. I’m too far gone to spend time re-learning a new app, but might give it a go if I was 25 years younger. Definitely not quite as nice as TVPaint for 2D animation, but still some really impressive stuff possible, and…
AFTER EFFECTS SMOKE EFFECT
From the always impressive TextureLabs channel on YT, a tutorial that lives up to the title “mind bending”. Definitely check out more of Texturelabs videos – well worth a subscription.
EXPOSING FIEVEL
And before anyone complains: YES, that was the original cover created by the studio for the in-house manual. And if you think that was an outrage against decency, hope you never see a copy of ‘The Fourth Floor Funnies’. I’ve been going through some old material that I stowed away many years ago, and dug…
ANIMATION TIPS & TRICKS
Over the course of several years I created a weekly ‘Tips & Tricks’ course. Each week a new movie was posted – by the end we had about 16 hours of material! As you can imagine, there’s a lot of content there. Everything from the principles of the classical era, but over time the courses…
A SCENE IN ADOBE ANIMATE (FLASH)
This is a course I created in 2018, but it’s still usable as Adobe Animate doesn’t fundamentally change much. I should have posted this years ago! This course is aimed at animators with some Flash/AnimateCC experience who want to gain a complete view of the animation process. The course demonstrates the creation of a scene…
TEXTURELABS PHOTOSHOP MAGIC
If you’re a Photoshop user who hasn’t watched or subbed to Texturelabs Youtube channel, please do! The guy is astonishing. I used his halftone tutorial a while back to create my ‘posters & stuff’ image to the right! It made the original hi-res image look like a scan from an old magazine, a really nice…
STORYBOARD ANIMATION & LIVE ACTION
I put a lot of work into this course on storyboarding and story structure. It shows the difference between boarding for live action and animation: the similarities and differences; how to communicate story elements and character relationships through camera placements, different kinds of shots and cuts, as well as dos and don’ts. I created a…
ANIMATE ISOMETRIC GAMES
During the 1990s I was an animation director for Creative Capers Ent., a small animation and design studio. We animated many games for Disney Interactive, many based on classic Disney characters (Donald Duck) and others on more recent titles (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, The Lion King, etc). During that period we developed many techniques…
ANIMATE PLATFORM GAMES
During the 1990s I was an animation director for Creative Capers Ent., a small animation and design studio. We animated many games for Disney Interactive, many based on classic Disney characters (Donald Duck) and others on more recent titles (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, The Lion King, etc). During that period we developed many techniques…
FX: WATER / FIRE / SMOKE / EXPLOSIONS
A series of movies in my LYNDA/LINKEDIN-LEARNING ‘Tips & Tricks’ series cover various aspects of FX animation. I’ve assembled all the movies on the topics into this ‘virtual’ course below. BTW, check out my patreon, there’s going to be a lot of animation resources posted there! FX ANIMATION TUTORIALS These courses will demonstrate the technniques…
MAGICAL CAREER ADVICE
It’s natural to focus on the technical aspects of your craft and all too easy to overlook the psychological. On more than one occasion my work has improved (in quality and quantity) by changing my mental perspective. Athletes hire experts to deal with the stresses of performing, and I don’t think it’s that different for…