This tutorial is taught by Conan Sinclair, a full time freelance animator working on cartoon and game projects in 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 (and this doesn’t just involve squashing and stretching the character)
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.
Like all CartoonSmart tutorials, source files are included in every lesson.