If you’re starting out in animation and want to learn how projects are strung together to produce something you can be proud of, you might find this course useful to observe how artists go from start to finish in their work. The creation of animated short films might seem overly complicated but this course breaks it down into each part necessary for you to put the whole thing together.
A course in Spanish with English captions
Taking a course in another language can be a challenge and this one is no exception. The lessons are in Spanish but I found that with the English translations it was easy enough to understand the process the artists were implementing. As a native English speaker myself I have to say a few English words were not making full sense in the context of the sentence, but I could pretty much guess what the overall meaning was and didn’t let it stop me from getting decent educational value from this course. In any case I felt that it was more about watching the instructors go through the processes that they have to complete a project, rather than being a course for complete beginners in animation.
The Project
The course shows you how they start to put ideas together and the tools they use to plan what they’re going to do. They decided to create a short animation in the artistic style of Escher, with a man looking into a box that contains an interesting mirror and a room with Escher-type stairs that go nowhere.
They use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create basic 2D sketches of what the character will look like and the movement around the environment. Then later they create the same character in more detail in 3DS Max where the animation will be implemented.
The course goes on to cover rigging the model, animating, as well as lighting effects and sound. They also talk about colour composition and post production.
Final Thoughts
This course is worth watching if you’d like to see an animation project from scratch. It’s expected that you will learn how to model, rig and animate elsewhere but if you want to learn how the industry experts are actually producing an animation ready for sharing with the public then this is for you.
The course is found here