An overview of the popular animation teaching course, The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators.

Review of The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators.

Does The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators really teach you how to create an animated movie? The answer is, yes. Aimed at "beginners" and artists wanting to learn how to "make an animated movie" this fully animated film teaches a workflow system developed by animator Dan Burke.

Dan's walk through of character building, creating animated scenes and his general workflow are right on the money. HIs workflow is fast and efficient based on his 15 years in animation and a life time of study. The movie is easy to understand and follow. Each section builds on itself to teach animation from idea to execution. It also teaches the ingenious way Burke developed to dialogue sync a movie called "Easy Sync™". When creating basic speaking animation, such as seen in games, and children's animation, this system works well. It's weakness is that it only uses basic mouth shapes. However, it does make it incredibly easy to lip sync a movie. If you are making the Flintstone's, a client demo that has to be completed ASAP or game characters, this system works (limited animation) great. Perfect sync every time. However,r for complex characters like we see in "Snow White" in won't work all that great. I don't see how you can escape hand drawing if you want to make a Disney film. That is of course, why it takes 1000's of people to produce an Disney animated film.

What about small studios that do not have crews of artists? Easy Sync™ will work very well for them. For most independent animators, Easy Sync™ will be a fabulous time saver. You can sync a 30 minute movie in about 30 minutes with this system which is actually pretty darned amazing. About 1/4 of the film discusses and teaches in detail how to use "Easy Sync" giving various examples.

Like most animation pro's Burke instructs the animator to use the best tools for each part of the job and showcases how that works. Photoshop for bitmap painting and scanning, Flash for animation, and Movie making software, like Vegas,Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects to create the final movie.

Dan Burke has some specific advice on all stages of animation creation. Here Dan comments on using Flash to do audio work. "Struggling to create final films with sync in Flash is a foolish waste of time. The application was never meant to be a sound editor. Don't try to do sync Flash. Music or dialogue. That is a Flash weakness you have to stay away from. I know that is how most people do it, but that doesn't mean it's the "best" way or even a good one. I too, wasted years of my life, doing audio in Flash."

"First, it's too time consuming, it's very clunky, you can barely see the audio track in Flash, and it does not "test" well, (testing the movie does not work as the audio often "drags" behind the animation when you test it, even if you set the audio to "event".) and after you are done syncing in Flash, you still have to export out the animation and re sync it again one more time in the output software. Why do this twice?

Most studios use After Effects to complete a film and merge the sound effects, special effects, and animated files into one final film. There is a After Effects method to do lip sync but it's a big learning curve and requires learning After Effects in a big way. Easy Sync™can be understood in minutes and can be used in any software (like After Effects or Final cut pro)) that allows timelines.

"It takes about a fraction of the time to do it (make a film) in software that is actually meant to produce a finished film. If you want to layer music, sound effects, dialogue and so on, you need to do it right. Don't do sound in Flash "

The movie gives various examples of how to create animated characters and scenes working from paper or from completely digital artwork. The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators explains the details of digital coloring, character creation, and animation in Flash, photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro. But the lessons do apply to all 2-d software the principles of animation production apply to all animators.

There are detailed tutorials in in the film on drawing in Flash that include characters and backgrounds and how to animate them. I especially liked the section "green screen" animation, and using transparent overlays to create animated scenes. The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators uses very simple examples that are deceptively easy. Burke animate's a child's crawling of a dog in the beginning of the movie, and once you see that, you get the idea that anyone can do this animation thing.

On the CD that came with the movie were open FLASH animated movies to study and dissect and that is exactly what did with them. These were very valuable to look at and learn from. All of these "open" Flash films were from the movie production itself, so you can see how scenes were created and how they play in the actual film,The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators. Also there are several hours of audio lessons that were well produced and contained even more detailed lessons than the movie about animation production.

The instruction book that comes on the CD is short and concise covers character building in layers. There is also a full color 100 page book showcasing the animated films of the author. Some very beautiful work. I love to look at animation art, and this stuff is very clean. And Burke, it's obvious, can animate some very beautiful women.

An inspiring and well thought out "crash course" in modern animation production.

For people that have no idea how to go about creating an animated film from the bottom up, The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators is a real God send. The ideas of a simplified workflow and using limited animation to make movies fast is the foundation of the course.

The bottom line? My 10 year old watched the film with me and she was able to open Flash and create an animated head in under 30 minutes with key frames and tweens. The Animation Film School for Lazy Animators can teach anyone how to be an animator.