Guide Your Audience Eyes

At animation, you should consider many things, and while keeping in mind the basic principles is great, sometimes it just wouldn't always suffice.
It is a well known fact that an animator is really an actor (I would like to consider my self as a shy one).
An actor, just like a magician who needs to perform in front of an audience, should maintain the illusion he wishes to portray, and for doing that, sometimes includes to control the audience point of view and visual focus.
He needs to manipulate the audience eyes to look to one place while he's making an "magic trick" he doesn't wish the audience would see in a different place (sometimes it even could be used to conceal a bad animation).
There are many ways to do so, and I'm not going to get much deeper into it, but an animator could use his animation of course to guide the audience eyes by using his animation (such as body language), by a correct staging and composition, by using his props and surroundings in the scene, etc.

I would like to thank Shuki Gamliel which is a great animator and a good friend, who gave us a short lecture about this subject (it was mainly on using a technique called NLP but I felt it also fit well in animation and I've waited too long to write this post).

Here you could find two examples of how easily you can manipulate the human eye.

Walk! A Tutorial About Walks

A good friend of mine (April Peter) had written a serious and thorough tutorial about animating walk cycles.
She has given special attention on how she looks at it from her point of view, what should and shouldn't be done while making a walk cycle (for example - walk cycles in place is a big NO) and it's also really nice to see all the short video samples she made, showing each step to be as clear as it gets.

Read it here!

Dan The Man

This one is really funny and well made, everything is so perfectly understood with out using a word ;)

Shana Tova!

For those of you who celebrate the hebrew holiday - Have a shana tova (happy new year)!
Now is the first time I can really get some rest and maybe give myself a few hours of sleep and quality time with my beloved family :)

Sketchy Ice Creams

This short animation really made me lough (and even at the second time I've watched it).
For those of you who don't have kids, this is why you really MUST NOT take your eyes off them for a second ;)

AM Student Showcase 2010

I just love seeing the new student showcase of Animation Mentor.
Here is this years student showcase of 2010.

(I especially enjoyed the dialogue by Jeffrey Engel ;)