Wow! I feel like I was in the middle of an enormous sandstorm, and now that I’m done with chapter three I’m alone in the desert. So much information in that chapter. I feel like I could have spent twelve days reading it, a day for each principle.
I especially enjoyed the explanations of Secondary Action and Exaggeration. I think I’m going to have to make some signs myself and post them around my work area. They will say things like:
“Make a unified statement.”
“Try, fail, try again.”
“Make it convincing because real things are”
That last one is derived from a great quote by an unnamed artist,
“I don’t think he [Walt] meant ‘realism.’ I think he meant something that was more convincing, that made a bigger contact with the people, and he just said ‘realism’ because ‘real’ things do…”
There was a lot of great history on the trial and error that they went through to learn these principles. From Dave Hand trying to impress Walt with an animation of Mickey in a cab to Ron Clemens learning the consequences of twinning from Frank Thomas to all of the animators passing each other in the halls shaking their heads at the limitations of their “crude medium.”
I’m hoping to get some time animating this weekend and put some of these principles into practice. We’ll see though. I’ve got to get over the motion sickness from the amount of information that just whizzed through my brain.
Use your… oh you know the rest!
