I now know the Principles, so what next? The Newbie asks.

Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to This fantastic edition of  Animation talk on HypefroActive. It would seem a great deal of trouble making up your mind to learn Animations and seeing that dream through, especially when you are learning on your own. And trust me, i know, especially if you are a complete newbie. It is worse for those that are touching the computer for the first time. Now that is reeeeaaaaalllll trouble if you ask me. Quite an interesting topic and would love to talk about it right now but the topic or focus for today is "I now know the Principles, so what next?"

Well, after learning about an animation software and understanding how to model and rig a character down to skinning and now you are in the animation stage, ready to make your scene come alive. And you thinking "oh, i now know the principles by heart. Now i'm an animator at last". Eeeerrr no,the battle to animate is just about to start. You see, knowing the principles don't mean everything about animation is going to come easy. As a matter of fact, even after gathering all these, it still won't come cheap for you. You have to do a lot of simulations, run tests and make stupid and weird poses and faces. And after all these, the fact will surface, staring at you in the face and saying "You can only animate as far and as much as you understand".

While Learning and still learning i found and agreed with the fact that animators are actors. We tend to portray or simulate whatever it is we see and couple it into a film. So, in reality you are only as good at animating in relation to what you know. This means, no matter how good you get or how experienced you get, You'll always be limited to what you understand and know in real life. For example, if you do not have any fighting experience and you try or attempt animating a fight scene, the chances of you pulling off the simulation in such a way as to make people believe and applaud the animation is at most less than fifty one percent. Sixty if you are very very good. So you probably saying, what is he talking about, what about similar scenes i see in animation films? Yep, it's either they have a knowledge about a fighting art, or they used mocap, or maybe they have enough time and money to employ the services of a Choreographer. It's like a writer, the more interesting the novel or script is, the more research he had o gather or already has under his belt to cook the book. There is no magic to this, animation is hard work. It's worse because everybody else into different occupations see this things and understands how the human body moves and relates to every other body or object around him. So animating something that looks different from what you are trying to translate will only make them raise eyebrows and in no time they loose interest in watching the animation. And I've seen it happen a lot in animated films even on cable channels. This has got nothing with knowing how to draw poses or not. I f you don't know these things and how they work, then you don't know. And like The Great "Richard Williams" said, You don't know what you don't know.

My advice to you a newbie is that, the first step to doing great animations is to continually practice simple basics. Don't be in a rush to animate big and complex scenes. Mastering or getting real good at the basics opens doors for understanding other basics. Practice alot and test everything to see how things work in real life. Then as you do all these, dont forget to read animation books and watch videos as much as possible. And yeah, Jeff Lews CDs would also help alot. But if you have the money, just look for a very good animation school and learn from them. That guaranteed will save you at least a year or two learning on your own.

Yeah and the image on top has it's animation right here just in case you are wondering  http://youtu.be/Z-vY3sZ5hlM 

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