ANIMATION BOOTCAMP

START YOUR ANIMATION LIBRARY

There’s a ton of Animation knowledge out there.

Animation is not new, and there have been decades worth of books written on the subject. Unfortunately, these books weren’t written
for you, dear Motion Graphics Artist. They were written for TRADITIONAL animators. This means that a bit of mental “translating”
is necessary to apply the concepts to, say, After Effects. After surviving this course, you should have all of the tools you need to take
traditional animation books and apply their lessons to your own MoGraph. Here are some of the best to start your Animation Library
with.

The Animator’s Survival Kit

Just go order it right now. This book is basically
The Bible of animation. It’s filled with amazingly
detailed drawings, charts, and notes to help explain
some of the trickier concepts. Some of the material
won’t be as applicable to Motion Design, but the
fundamentals and examples in this book are just
gold. If you only buy one book, this is the one.

Timing for Animation

Once you get the hang of “thinking like an animator”
while inside of After Effects, this book can give you a
lot of ideas about making things feel “heavy,” making
impacts feel “harder,” and generally how to get a
certain “feel” that you’re after. You’ll have to mentally
translate some of the examples into more MoGraph-
ish techniques, but you should be able to do that after
Bootcamp.

Elemental Magic Volume 2

This is some advanced Wizard-Level animation
right here. This book shows you in excruciating
detail exactly what it takes to animate fire, water,
explosions, and any other “natural” phenomenon
by hand. You may never actually draw a water
splash frame-by-frame, but the lessons about
how to THINK about doing something like that are
extremely valuable even if you work exclusively in
After Effects. However, adding some hand-drawn FX
to your reel is a sure-fire way to impress your fellow
animators (assuming you do them well.)