Jason Ryan approach

Jason Ryan, a supervising animator at Dreamworks opened his site with tutorials earlier this year. I had already seen some lectures of him at Animation Mentor and I liked the approach he uses for his shots. He works with Flipbook
an application where you can quickly sketch and test your animation. Recently I drew a lot of thumbnails for my animations to test out different poses but once in Maya it took me a long time to get my animation and the timing right.

With this method your can draw the animation with little stick figures really quick, test your animation and timing on the fly and solve your animation in no time and because it works so fast you have more time to experiment with some poses.

Once the animation is done in Flipbook, you can export the animation and use it as a template in your workspace. This way you have a great guide for your animation. The timing is already solved in Flipbook and now you can spend the time to really finesse those golden poses. I bought two tutorials last week and had a lot of fun doing some tests. I will post them soon.

Check out Jason Ryan's site .