Animation and Video Life

Once you start getting into character animation you learn pretty quickly that people don't just speak with their mouths. Hand gestures and movements play a pretty important part of how people communicate too. The problem is, animating hand gestures and movements is extremely time consuming... and who knows what gestures and movements should be used and when? In Reallusion's Cartoon Animator I use pre-animated talking character motions that I chop and move gestures around so the arm and hand movements 'feel' right based on my own understanding of body language (and I also act out dialogue to get a sense of what arm and hand movements I might make with what's being spoken). Recently I came across a video by the creator of Culpamland Extra , an online animated series, in which they briefly outlined how they animate talking using the Family Guy Method. I'd never heard of this, and if you try to search for it online you'll be hard pressed to find anything. So I...

Harrison Killian sculpting a character head for his animated short, Rider on the Storm. Residing on a mountaintop in Liberty, located in the Catskill Mountains of New York, and primarily self-taught, Harrison Killian is a musician, sculptor, animator, and the founder of Grateful Motion Studios  which is currently producing an independent animated short film, ‘Rider On The Storm.’  The film uses Harrison's, groundbreaking, animation technique that fuses the artistry of stop-motion with the precision of CGI, creating imagery that blurs the line between reality and animation, leaving audiences questioning if what they saw was animated or real. 'Rider On The Storm' is culled from a feature-length screenplay written by Harrison that received high industry scores, landing it on the Red List on Coverfly . Written to evoke emotions and inspire imaginations, the story is about a boy named Rider who is orphaned at seven and endures a childhood of bullying by other orphans and abuse...