Category: Blog

Cat Anatomy Notes– The Spine

Just got back from teaching a few weeks at the always relaxing and inspiring Animation Workshop. I agreed to do a short course in animal animation in 2D before I remembered that I haven’t animated on paper in three or four years– yikes!

They tend to ask me to teach something with animals when I go, and this time around I thought I’d have the students all do cats. I think I kind of overwhelmed people with anatomical information, which is a particular geekery of mine! When I saw people trying to get in each individual muscle in their ruffs, I tried to do a streamlined version of how to think about the anatomy for animation purposes. It’s pretty rough and random but I figured I might as well put it up here in case anyone missed the handouts.

Click on the image to get to the large version, but these are formatted for printing so they’re really huge…

There’s a few more pages, click on the “continue reading” link. At some point I should clean these up and make them make more sense! I have notes on the legs as well, if people are interested I can put those up here (at least I could when my laptop gets fixed.. motherboard, ouch! ). Read More…

Long Time No Post

Yikes it’s been ages since I’ve posted.. very tiring production; also, the dailies room where I’m working is really terrible for drawing in. I got only a few drawings of the folks around here (click for larger, resemblance to persons living is entirely coincidental):

Dailies

meetings

more meetings

Underground

underground sketch

I had a resolution this year to do a drawing every day on the underground on my way to work. Unfortunately it turns out that in order to draw I have to be able to move my arms, which isn’t possible on the Jubilee line at 8:30am. Fortunately a late evening at work lets me keep my hand in.. click on the image to see larger.

Masked Theater and Animation

I’ve been in Denmark at the sooper-cool Animation Workshop these last few weeks teaching a crash course in transitioning to CG from hand-drawn animation. Everyone who has worked with me in CG can now be reduced to hysterical laughter at the thought of me trying to teach someone how to do constraints, cope with breaking rigs, etc. etc…

On the last day of the course just for a change I talked a bit about animation as a stylized theater– before I studied animation I did a degree in Theater History. I was particularly interested in masked theaters, such as Noh or Commedia del’Arte, and as I got more into animation I started to see it as obviously part of this tradition– an animated face, after all, very much resembles a mobile mask:

Masks
It isn’t so easy to find good reference about this sort of thing and it helps to know your way around some theater history lingo so I promised the class I’d collect some stuff and put it up on this website. You could write several large books on this subject so this is going to be more like a Rough Guide to Abstract Theater with a lot of YouTube links:
Read More…