Video Tutorial Bundle on Traditional Animation Techniques Using Adobe Flash

Ten Hours of Video Tutorials on
Traditional Animation Using Flash

Course Compatibility: Adobe Illustrator CS5

"Tradigital" Animation Tutorial Focusing on Head Movements

This Bundle Package is taught by Conan Sinclair, a full time freelance animator working on cartoons and game projects in Victoria, Australia. His first course on "Tradigital" Animation (using traditional skills in a digital environment) focuses entirely on head animations: movements, turns, flexibility, dialogue, etc.

This four hour course is divided into five parts, outlined below:

Part 1 - The Basics - This first lesson covers basic animation techniques applicable to any program you choose to animate with, but Conan does spend some time early on teaching a few of the tools within Flash that he will be using throughout this series of lessons.

Part 2 - Head Turn Animations: Learn how to do a head turn animation, starting with two key poses, then work with timing, ease-in and out's, and in-between frames.

Part 3 - Flexibility: Learn how to get more flexibility in your animation when going from one keypose to another.

Part 4 - Lip Syncing: This part covers dialogue animation using mouth shapes (or phonemes) and then the instructor brings in an audio file to sync an animation to.

Part 5 - Cleaning Up: This last part teaches how to clean up your animation, paint in a more polished, professional look to your frames, then include Layer effects to add a variety of styles to your final piece.

As usual, source files are included in every lesson.

"Tradigital" Animation Tutorial Focusing on Body Mechanics

In this second tutorial, Conan will be tackling the following topics:

Part 1 - Body Mechanics Basics. This lesson teaches the basics of how to make your body animations look real. Even though in a cartoon world anything is possible, there's still some "rules" to play by. You can't have joints bending every which way, and that's one of the things this part looks into. The second half of this lesson teaches a simple animation exercise by making a body move from one side to another.

Part 2 - Jumping is a great movement exercise where you can get an appreciation for weight.

Part 3 - Sitting and Standing. Think about how often a character on TV gets up or sits down in a scene. In your own animations, you'll find this a useful exercise to add some movement to a scene where your characters might otherwise only be talking.

Part 4 - Walk Cycles. The next few lessons focus on every animators favorite (or possibly most dreaded) sequence: the walk/run cycle. Conan teaches his method of breaking these down into four manageable key poses, which he then adds in-betweens to.

Part 5 - Run Cycles. Runs are similar to walks in that you'll learn to create four key poses of the cycle, but this time with a bounding motion to it, and the faster the run, the more of a lean is added to the character.

Part 6 - Advanced Movements. This final lesson converts our side view cycles into front view and three-quarter view cycles, which can be a real test for new animators. Conan also teaches a walk cycle with a "double bounce" movement.

As usual, source files are included in every lesson.