Review: Animators Notebook

(Originally published in 3D Artist issue 37)

Tony White's Animator's Notebook: Personal Observations on the Principles of Movement Price £24.99

This book shows you how to learn how to animate the traditional way, through observation, rather than with production tools.

Easing you into the world of animation, this collection of the authors’ personal notebooks sets out classical techniques in a software agnostic format. By steering clear of any 3D software training, it instead deals with understanding the artistry of animation and is well-illustrated with hand drawn images that clearly demonstrate the points being made.

It’s primarily suitable for beginners, covering basics such as animation principles, biped and quadruped walks, runs and jumps. Some topics such as weight, arcs, overlapping action and basic dialogue go into more depth, and contain instruction that’s of direct use to beginners and also some intermediate animators, as a reference.

The almost A4 size, lined notebook layout is a welcome change to the usual standard format of other textbooks, but usually one or two sentences per page are struck through by light brown lines, which is unsettling. Specific units are available as individual PDF’s at Focal Press online - should you only be interested in certain parts of the books content - and judging by the PDF sample these don’t suffer the same strike through problem, although it’s a lot cheaper to buy the book. The supporting website mainly hosts hand drawn animated examples for each chapter, which are sadly not available for download to view offline.

website

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tony-Whites-Animators-Notebook-Observations/dp/0240813073

Summary, A useful collection of notes on movement, but slightly marred by the notebook style layout. A well compiled collection of notes that assists beginners in understanding the importance of observation for animators, and how to read movement.