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Animation gives us the possibility to explore movements that don’t necessarily obey the exact rules of real-life physics. With animation we have the chance to take the foundation of real-life physics to a higher level with exaggeration, resulting in something much more interesting and fun to watch.

Real-life movement and poses and acting is already interesting, but how much more entertaining it can be to put your audience into an alternate reality, where the rules of physics and nature are bent and stylized a bit – to make something truly unique.

How would you enjoy watching a classic Bugs Bunny short but with realistic, motion-captured movements?  It wouldn’t be as enjoyable would it?

It is easy to feel limited by the rig you are working with, but you shouldn’t be scared of pushing it beyond its limits. Although rigs can be broken, it is likely that when played back at full speed, what looked weird for one frame of your shot may be unnoticeable. Testing the rig you have and finding how you can work around its limitations is always useful. Remember to break the rig to your advantage!

One way to exaggerate your animations is through your poses. Animated poses aren’t just a reflection of real life, they are staged for the camera or audience’s view to more fully embody the moment and action, carefully crafted to tell the story and convey the emotion the best way possible. A carefully crafted exaggerated pose creates more appeal — it’s more interesting to look at. There may be times when you match the pose exactly as you see it in video reference and that may work well, but you will want to find places and parts of the body you can push to make the pose work better. A great way to do this is first creating the pose you see on your reference and once you are satisfied, go back to it and figure out how you can make it more interesting. Can you simplify the line of action running through the body? Can you create a stronger contrast with other storytelling poses? Is this the best, most entertaining way to make this pose?

The other major opportunity is exaggerating timing. Animated movements often have simplified transitions, sped up to
emphasize the poses before and after. That makes an animation look
“snappy”.

The timing in your video reference should only be used as a guide and most often you want to push it for maximum effect. Imitating reality can lead to very floaty and dull animations.

Depending on the context, exaggeration can be in small or large amounts. If the production and designs are more realistic, exaggeration should be minimal. More stylized designs lend themselves to more stylized movement and posing.  It is important to keep in mind that a subtle exaggeration in timing or spacing may be just what your animation needs. Don’t forget that you often want to feel the exaggeration more than you want to see it!

Felix the Cat is introduced and it is considered to be the first animated movie star. Aside from the animated shorts, Felix starred in a comic strip drawn by Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, and was later redesigned by Joe Oriolo as the cartoon began airing on American TV in 1953.

1928

Warner Brothers Cartoons is founded, the in-house division of Warner Bros Pictures during the Golden Age of American animation. It was responsible for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, which featured characters such as Speedy Gonzalez, Sylvester and Tweety and Daffy Duck among many others.

1937 

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is released by Walt Disney Studios, making it the first animated feature to use hand-drawn animation. It was both a critical and commercial success, earning $8 million in its initial international release, assuming the record of highest-grossing sound film at the time.

1960

The Flintstones become the first animated series on prime-time television. Its popularity was based on the juxtaposition of modern everyday concerns with the Stone Age setting. The series was the most financially successful network animated franchise for three decades.

1984

The Graphics Group releases “The Adventures of Andre & Wally B”, the first fully CGI-animated short film. The animation done by John Lasseter, was groundbreaking by the standards of the time and helped spark the film industry’s interest in computer animation.

1987 

Matt Groening creates “The Simpsons”, the longest-running American animated sitcom. Groening created a dysfunctional family, naming the characters after his own family, substituting Bart for his own name. After a three-season run, it became a half-hour prime time show.

1995

Toy Story is released, becoming the first fully computer-animated feature film. Pixar, which produced short animated films to promote their computers, was approached by Disney to produce a computer-animated feature after the success of their short film Tin Toy (1988). The studio, then consisting of a relatively small number of employees, produced the film under minor financial constraints but became the highest-grossing film upon its release earning over $373 million worldwide.

2001

2014

2016

Finding Dory premieres, grossing over $1 billion worldwide and becoming the first Pixar film to cross this mark since 2010’s Toy Story 3. The film set numerous records, including the highest-grossing animated film opening of all time in North America.

Hailing from the artistic city of Florance, Italy, Sylwia Bomba is a young and talented artist. She has been involved in several projects at Pixar and Disney in the past years. She was also a drawing and painting instructor at AnimSchool where she taught students how to draw and paint digitally. Recently we got a chance to interview her about her art and any advice she had for artists around the world.

Sylwia, tell us about yourself and your journey to becoming an artist.

First of all, I would like to thank you for having me! It’s a pleasure.
I have been drawing since I was a kid and I never stopped. I’ve always loved being surrounded by my papers and pencils. I still remember the day when I told my parents about my dream: I was about 5-6 years old. They didn’t take my decision seriously but I was a very stubborn kid and I kept insisting. My dad saw my determination and decided to support me with all his heart. Shortly after that, he became my first drawing teacher – the most meticulous, diligent and patient one.  I’ve learned from him that being satisfied with our work while having a big ego kills our ambition and turns it into blind pride.  He wanted me to push myself in my work asking me to work harder all the time. This is how my adventure with art began. I would be sketching after school, at school, on holidays, on summer breaks…I was growing up with a pencil in my hand.
At the age of 15, I moved to Italy and started studying in Italian High School. Being in a country with such long history of art inspired me even more. I wanted to learn everything about art but it was hard in the beginning: I had to learn a totally new language. It was a struggle to find myself an accepted place after being a stranger in the society. But I was determined that even if I had to lose many things in my life – I would do so because, for me, my passion for arts defines my whole life. So I kept going on.
The most important thing we all need to remember is to never lose our faith. There will always be something to complain about, there will always be someone who won’t like what we do – but we need to pursue it as hard as we can! Dealing with setbacks and failures, using them as a learning opportunity to push ourselves more, learn more and discover more is the only way to move forward and be successful.

Looking at your portfolio I cannot help but feel the emotions you are able to pour in each of your paintings. The portraits are full of personalities and emotions. How are you able to do that? How do you make portraits seem relatable in this age of photography and selfies?

Thank you very much! I like drawing and painting portraits because through portraits I can show my deep emotions without using any words. When I moved to Italy at the age of 15 – I was not familiar with the Italian language and was finding it hard to communicate with people. Art helped me then to express myself. I started observing the world around me with more attention and accuracy. I observed that when we stop using words – we see things differently; we notice with great intensity just how majestic our world truly is. Tones and colors change immediately: we pay attention to any little expression we see, so much so that we can almost feel it on our skin. The same thing happens when we watch silent movies. They have their own taste and charm which we don’t see in modern movies.
Time has changed but people can’t change that much. We still are emotional beings and we feed our curiosity with interesting stories. We love to see what someone is doing, what he is eating and how he is changing his life. People in the past used paintings as an instrument to tell us their stories. A good painting should tell you a story or arouse emotions in your heart and bring life to your memories. In fact, Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

What I enjoy the most when I view your portfolio and your blog is the variety of media you employ to paint your paintings. There are oil paintings on canvases and then digital paintings as well. How do you manage to work with both media?  

How do I manage to work with both media?  I enjoy it! The more techniques we try, the more flexible we will be in digital Arts. Through computer we imitate coal brushes, oils, canvases – why shouldn’t we just learn how they work in real life – to improve the use of a digital imitation of them?

What’s the best and worst aspect of both media and do you miss ctrl+z when you paint on canvas?

Of course, I miss my ctrl+z on canvas! Maybe that’s why I find the oil painting more challenging. You need to focus on your colors. You can’t just pick them up. You also can’t just make a selection of an arm and move it. But using computers, you can’t feel the unique smell of the turpentine, you can’t touch the canvas and feel how soft is the brush. Computers save your time but take from you the satisfaction of touching your art piece. Moreover, using traditional media – you always have one original painting. You can sell many copies of your art – but you still have that original.

A video posted by Sylwia Bomba (@sylwior) on Jun 16, 2015 at 7:21am PDT

I am always impressed by the lighting and colors of your art pieces. It is a very difficult thing to do. We at AnimSchool also offer a 3D lighting course. What advice would you like to give to the students of that class which would help them get a better sense of lighting and colors in their work as well.

A painting demo by Sylwia in AnimSchool class

Thank you very much! The greatest teacher is “observation”. The more time you spend observing the world around you, the more you see. Studying photography is also a good method to understand the composition and the lighting of a scene. Traveling everywhere with your camera is very helpful. It’s good to create your own folder with your inspiring pictures of different lighting and then using them into your scenes. You can also choose a landscape you want to photograph – but before taking a photo think about the lighting. Which emotion does it evoke? Representing one landscape in different lights during a day helps us to understand how many stories we can tell through the lighting.

You taught an art class before at AnimSchool. How was that experience?

It was and still is an unforgettable experience. Art isn’t about getting the right answer but is also about getting the right question. The questions taught me more than you can even imagine. I’ve learned a lot from AnimSchool students, their questions taught me to look beyond books and seek more information. I love teaching but I love it more when students interact with me during the class and show me their work and express their different views. It’s an extremely inspiring part of teaching.
 I’ve seen so many AnimSchool graduates achieving great successes on their career path, working for big studios. It’s an honor to be a drawing instructor for AnimSchool and meet so many great people. I’m thankful for it!

I see that you have also animated few shots. In your experience, how does knowing fine arts helped you in animation?

I grew up constantly doodling and being passionate about art, but didn’t believe that art was something you could really pursue. This led to me studying mechanical engineering and feeling really dissatisfied in school. In my third year of college, I had my first real world exposure to 3D modeling when I worked at a virtual simulation lab. It blew my mind that you could actually have a job making models. I’ll always remember the first model I ever made for that lab; it was a simple shelf that took me way too long to figure out because I had no idea how to actually make 3D models. After reading and watching a lot of tutorials, I fell in love with 3D modeling and thought it was the perfect balance of something technical and artistic. When I graduated, I had a choice whether to stay in the Washington, DC area and work as an engineer, or go to California and work for a fine artist. I still had a lot of flexibility, so I chose to take a chance and pursue art. I decided that AnimSchool was where I could get the most out of learning 3D modeling and really hone my skills.

My favorite thing about being a 3D artist is the ability to make even the most fanciful designs look and feel real. I love how every time I work on something new, I get to research and gather references to understand what things are supposed to look like and how things work. It’s like solving a puzzle and is a constant learning process. I especially enjoy environmental modeling because there are so many elements and small details that all have a part to play. Every object is important and needs care and attention to bring a scene to life.

I’m a very active person and love running, hiking, and practicing Aikido. I also enjoy machining and fabrication, eating good food, and travelling. I always feel like there are way too many things I want to do and not enough time to do them all. But right now, I’m really focused on getting good at 3D modeling, so I spend most of my time in front of a computer.

My husband is my main inspiration with his unwavering love and support. My friends and family have also been extremely encouraging. The incredible teachers at AnimSchool motivated me to do my best. Juan Pablo Chen and Brien Hindman were especially influential in making me a better modeler with their encouragement and exceptional attention to detail. The many friendly and talented people in the community also make me excited and passionate about being an artist.

Aside from working on my portfolio and reel, I’m currently part of a few animation projects that I joined through Artella. The teams are filled with incredible people and I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to work with them. There’s The Book of Mojo (https://www.bookofmojo.com), Mal & Ava (https://malandava.tumblr.com), and Pure (http://thisispure.com/). Keep an eye out for them in the future!

I have grown exponentially since first starting AnimSchool. When I first started, I felt pretty overwhelmed with how much I had to learn. Basic models felt really challenging to make, and I had to really go through and soak in a lot of information. I think that having teachers I could interact with really made a huge difference. I was able to get a lot of feedback, so I worked a lot harder to improve myself. I’m really happy that I studied at AnimSchool and feel that I’ve benefited enormously from the experience.

What was it about this particular concept art from The Lorax that made you chose to turn it into a 3D model for your Environmental Modeling class? What part(s) were you most excited to model?

Can you tell us about the process you went through in creating this environment?

What about the process did you most enjoy?

What was a particularly challenging aspect that you experienced while working on this project and what did you take away from it?

To learn more about the modeling process, come and join us at one of the best online animation schools: AnimSchool.com

In this clip from AnimSchool’s 3D animation class for facial animation, Animator Terence Bannon discusses making appealing mouth shapes.

To know more about our online animation programs, visit www.animschool.com

The 33 year old is from Washington, D.C. and got his BA from Yale University. He is a very talented, hard-working guy and was a pleasure to interview.

To learn animation, visit our online animation school, www.animschool.com