Let’s start with the basic principles of animation and how to understand them with a straight-ahead approach (one frame at a time). In this lesson, simple exercises will give you an understanding of movement and how to trust your instincts when capturing a frame.

We’ll increase the difficulty by animating many objects, which means keeping track of several performances at the same time. We’ll also be getting a better understanding of using capture software to explore more advanced paths of motion.

Warm up the clay! The classic bouncing ball exercise brought into the physical world. We’ll learn about the basic principles of squash and stretch while using rigs to float a jumping object.

Our first adventure into the post-production process. In After Effects, we’ll learn how to remove the rigging from the previous lesson as well as other pesky problems like camera shift and light flicker.

When first learning stop-motion, you’ll often find yourself freezing on frame one while thinking, “Now what?” In this lesson, we’ll dive into the planning process of blocking key poses that’s typically used in television and feature film production.

We’ll explore how the blocking pass from the previous lesson can be used to create various distinct performances and go on to fully animate our first character performance.

Let’s get experimental! In this lesson, it’s up to you to decided how to creatively transform from one object into another. We’ll develop an appreciation for the breakdown poses between the keyframes all while flexing our creative muscles.

Grab your director’s hat. We’re diving deeper into the nuances of animation principles and performance by creating a full story about the interaction of two characters. A key lesson here is understanding how to control where the audience is looking when several moving objects are on the screen.

It’s time to put everything you’ve learned together and replicate the process of being hired to create an advertisement – from idea to polished animation. In this lesson, you’ll brainstorm and commit to a performance, resulting in a blocking pass of the advertisement.

Time to make the magic happen! Armed with your blocking pass, it’s now your job to animate the entire advertisement. Once that’s complete, you’ll need to polish the footage up in post-production by removing rigs, color correcting, and exporting the final video for the client.