PENCIL LINES: MOEHRLE MAGIC!

PENCIL LINES

Journeys from the desktop of a traditional animator in the digital age!

"The ANIMATOR'S NOTEBOOK" TUTORIALS!

Click below to download my latest interactive digital tutorials! Just pick the tutorial link of your choice and load it onto your desktop instantly! Each tutorial contains about 20-30 pages of my personal hand-written notes, with embedded illustrations and related animation clips. A unique and valuable resource for all animators. For beginner to industry professional/2D to 3D/Cut-out to Stop-frame & Claymation! $9.95 each.
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February 2012

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Tony White
Tony White is a British Academy Award-winning animation director, animator, author, educator and consultant. At the beginning of his career, he studied advanced animation techniques with some of the finest masters of the art-form. Specifically: Ken Harris (original lead animator of "Bugs Bunny," "Roadrunner," etc.), Art Babbit (original lead animator on "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," etc.) and Richard Williams (3 times Oscar winner and author of "The Animator's Survival Kit"). Tony is currently animation program director and instructor at the inspirational non-profit, AIE-Seattle (www.theaie.us), where he is developing a 2-year program that will enable students to enter the industry without the extreme student loan challenges that are common at other animation schools in the USA. Tony is founder of "Drawassic Age" (www.drawassic.com), a ground-breaking animation studio that seeks to preserve, teach and evolve the art-form of traditional animation in this digital age. Tony's ultimate dream is to establish a unique atelier-style studio/academy of advanced animation - where his most talented student graduates can gain industry experience through an MFA-level style apprenticeship with master professional animators, on unique, ground-breaking animated films. To help realize this dream, Drawassic Age is currently producing a short 2D animated teaser for its first intended movie production "Bad Penguin". (www.badpenguinmovie.com) Tony's current best-selling books include: "The Animator's Workbook"; "Animation from Pencils to Pixels ~ Classical Techniques for Digital Animators"; "How To Make Animated Films" and "Jumping Through Hoops: The Animation Job Coach". His latest (and Tony believes, his best) animation book, "Animator's Notebook", is to be published in October 2011 by Focal Press.
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MOEHRLE MAGIC!

Inside the DigiPen 2D classroom with Peter Moehrle.

I was privileged to attend a Peter Moehrle lecture at DigiPen during my lunchtime today! My own project class had ended and as I ate my lunch I watched Peter present to the 2D project class, a wonderful class conducted by excellent instructors Dan Daly and Pamela Mathues. The students have reached the background stage of their team productions and Peter was asked to show them slick, quick ways of creating a color concept representation of the final background. He speedily worked his magic in Photoshop and entranced the students (and myself) as his skillfully created background guide materialized before our eyes!

Peter demonstrates on the screen as Pam, Dan, the students and I watch fascinated.

And if you're wondering what the demo material looked like, here's final piece. Its essentially a color & lighting guide for a final background that will be completed later. The whole thing took Peter about 30 minutes to produce with his amazing Photoshop trickery!

Note how the skillful use of light and color value are used to give strength and focus!

The DigiPen 2D sophomore projects follow a year of intense instruction (2D) in the principles of movement during the freshman year, where they are guided through 'walks', 'runs', 'jumps', 'weight', 'overlapping action', etc. The class follows as closely as possible the production process or a genuine 2D production, wonderfully supervised by ex-Disney artists Dan and Pam.

The students are required to produce model sheets and observational sketches before they animate.

They even sculpt models, so they can understand their 2D-designed characters three-dimensionally.

Of course, this all took me back to the wonderful days I spent working on 2D films myself - alas seemingly so far away now. But it was in listening to Peter that I committed to the notion that it won't be that last time I'll spend my lunchtime watching a maestro at work!