HUMANIMATOR

About

I started learning to animate in 2014.

Rather than going back to college and incurring a bunch more student loan debt, I started digging around the internet and was surprised to find loads of tutorials and other resources.

Over the years, I’ve compiled links to some of what I found most useful. For anyone looking to get into animation, I hope this page comes of some use to you.

Below are some of the gifs I made early on in my animation explorations.

Tutorials Worth Watching

CEL ANIMATION

Alan Becker’s tutorials are quick and comprehensive. He focuses on how tools like Photoshop and Flash (now Adobe Animate) work, and leaves you to figure out how you want to use them. Even more helpful to me was his series on the Principles of Animation, which quickly sums up the life’s work of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Disney’s nine old men.

Alex Grigg’s Photoshop Animation Techniques—despite it’s long runtime—really helped me become more efficient. At the 40-minute mark, he goes into how he uses the Actions feature to do clean up. I use his Expand Fill technique constantly. And if that’s not enough, he also wrote a detailed article on how he went about making his Late Night Work Club film Phantom Limb.

Sean Buckelew, also a member of Late Night Work Club, shares here about his process behind Lovestreams from the second anthology, STRANGERS. I especially appreciate how open he is about what inspired him to make the film, but also the technical depth he gets into regarding how he lit a particular scene. He seems to prefer working in Adobe Animate and After Effects.

Caleb Wood and Charles Huettner use Photoshop in completely different ways to create amazing work. Their Photoshop Animation Tutorial shows how Huettner uses the Frame method, and Wood uses the Video Layer method. Wood also demos his ‘weave-looping’ technique in this video and he also has a Patreon page where you can follow his work more closely.

Patrick Deen’s run-through of his Animation Toolbar demos an Adobe Photoshop plugin which many animators attest eases the functionality of Photoshop as an animation program.

Jake Armstrong did a step-by-step Photoshop demo for Motionographer which you can watch here. It’s over two hours long, and showcases a really rad pose-to-pose looping character gif. The video is in real-time, which is actually really helpful. If the run-time still strikes you as too long, just be thankful they edited it down from the original five-hour duration.

Felix Colgrave’s Patreon is worth checking out for anyone interested in a Adobe Animate to After Effects workflow. You need to pay $30 for access to his project files, but you only have to do this one time to access all past uploads. It’s cheaper to get behind the scenes content. He has one video that walks through a shot from Throat Notes that sorta blew my mind.

VECTOR ANIMATION

Ben Marriott’s AE tutorials are my top pick for learning various After Effects techniques. Ben is really good at putting together concise instructional videos. To someone new to AE, they might feel really intimidating, but if you watch closely and re-watch parts that feel like they’re moving too fast, you’ll pick up a professional workflow pretty quickly.

STOP MOTION ANIMATION

Edu Puertas is the mind behind Kinetic Armatures, and he’s super generous with his ideas, processes, and experiments. He’s all about stop motion, which, as I’m writing this, has been a fixation for me in the past months. This YouTube channel is a great place to get inspired if you want to get into the field of armature building and animation.

I spent 2018-2019 researching stop-motion armature building techniques. I have a whole other list of resources specifically related to that project here.

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OTHER

Thomas Romain’s tips for creating strong background art.

book recommendations

The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation 
by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston

The Animator’s Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion and Internet Animators 
by Richard Williams

Character Animation Crash Course! 
by Eric Goldberg

The Nine Old Men: Lessons, Techniques, and Inspiration from Disney’s Great Animators 
by Andreas Deja

The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation 
by Ken A. Priebe

The Art and Making of ParaNorman 
by Jed Alger

The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox 
by Wes Anderson

The Art of Spirited Away 
by Hayao Miyazaki

Drawn to Life 
by Walt Stanchfield