Course Overview

Learning animation is kind of like building a house. You first tend to start with the foundation,  so the house has something to stand on,  and then you can add the fancy bits later on,  like the trim and whatnot. But if you started with the trim  and all the fancy bits first, there'd be nothing for them  to attach to and the whole house would just fall down. You must first develop a solid foundation for the house  to stand on, and then you can add that fancy stuff later on,  and even from time to time, you have to refresh  and keep your tools sharp on the foundation,  and that's what this course is for. A lot of times I'll see students try to start  with the the fanciest  and the prettiest stuff first,  like lip sync animation. I've  Thought about it a lot and we've talked about it too,  And they'll want to jump right into that advanced stuff  because that looks the most interesting.

But what ends up happening is those students get very  frustrated because those are more advanced concepts  and they don't have the foundational principles laid in yet. So all those concepts have nothing to kind of hang on,  and it all falls down just like the house  that has no foundation. That's why it's important to first grasp  all these foundational principles. So the course is laid out that we are going to start first  with the background information and the history  and science behind animation,  where it comes from and why it works. Then we'll jump into learning the most famous principles  of animation, and we'll do many projects along the way so  that you can learn and test these principles as well as  learning different types of animation mediums  and how to animate in those mediums. And even if you don't have those  tools, what that looks like.

But most of the course you'll be able  to follow along with even one medium. If you just wanted to stick with like a flip book  or stop motion animation  or whatever it is, you can apply all of these principles  to things that you have around your house. And towards the end of the course, I'll add a few  of my own principles I've learned from working  as a professional in the animation  industry for almost 10 years. It's the kind of stuff that you probably won't find in  textbook, and then we'll end the course with  what your next steps could be in your journey as an animator  and learning animation. Before we begin, let's create our first animation together  so that we have something to compare our progress  to at the end of the course. I'll see you in the next class.