MAXI DIAZ Animation blog

The quadrupeds appear in practically all the productions. In this post you will find a video in which I explain the keys to locomotion in primates. Not only is it enough to have a good reference video to make a great animation. Rotoscopying the video will only lead to inconsistent and empty animation.. We need to understand the basics of locomotion ...

Hello! Today I bring a very interesting article that sheds a lot of light on one of our main concerns: Get our next job in the industry. To be clear about our goals, what better starting point than to have the wise opinions of all those professionals who are currently hiring, people who are today at the head of the main studies ...

Today we have with us Michael, an animator who grew up in his professional career thanks to hard work and his strong commitment to all project in which he was involved. A great example to follow for new generations! 1.Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. Well, my career began a long time ago, in 2003 2003 ...

One of the most common mistakes when facing a lip-sync, is to try to make our characters vocalize all the words in the dialogue. Without a doubt, the result will be a run-over lip-sync that will cost us a great job to simplify. To avoid this problem, the first thing we have to understand is the concept of Hierarchy ...

Monday Feedback is an online animation workshop 3 meses de duración en el que te acompañaré como tutor para que consigas sacar a relucir todo tu talento. I will analyze your past jobs and your demoreel to see what type of plane that will contribute more to your professional growth. Trabajarás en un único plano de forma intensa durante ...

One of the major problems we face when dealing with a shot, is meeting production quotas while still maintaining a good animation quality. We are often left feeling that the shot could have turned out better or worse yet, nos pasamos del tiempo de ...

We could define a film as an audiovisual work that tells us a story, where each individual shot shows a short part of that story. This way, the viewer keeps receiving the information with enough time to understand what happens, both from the cognitive as well as the emotional standpoint. Tengo claro que el trabajo fundamental del animador es ...

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that a good movie is one that you can watch in mute with no need to listen to what the actors say. We should be able to see what the characters are thinking in their faces, in their facial expression. LA IMPORTANCIA DE LA FORMA Un error muy común consiste en construir la boca en función del sonido ...

Date: Wednesday, 18 de Mayo de 2016 Next Wednesday 18 de Mayo estaré en las aulas de la ECIB en Barcelona impartiendo una masterclass orientada a profundizar en la principal misión de un animador: Contar esa pequeña parte de la historia que contiene el plano. I speak of visual language in the plane, the narrative tools, de los diferentes métodos de ...

One of the challenges that animators frequently set to themselves in their animation tests, is achieving the purest cartoony style animation. It’s an interesting challenge, but before going about it we must analyze its techniques, why they work and when to apply them. Una animación cartoon no es un personaje moviéndose como loco de ...

To achieve a good lip-sync many times we obsess over making the mouth shapes match the audio sounds, as if it were the most important part to achieve believability. Notice Jim Henson's mastery in handling Kermit the Frog. There are no shapes, only a mouth opening and closing, pero su actuación resulta ...

To everyone who is passionate about animation, keeping an open mind and the eagerness to learn, is a must if they're to keep progressing as professionals. I've been asked many times for advice on what to do or what to study in order to keep growing as animators. I think there are a lot of options, like life drawing, photography, el teatro… En general cualquier disciplina ...

01. Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. My first two jobs as an animator were in Barcelona, initially at a small company called Dragma, then I went to Anera, to animate a television series for Disney Channel. I was given the opportunity to go to Bren to work for the feature ‘Donkey Xote’, ...

A good animator has to manage to create the impression that their character thinks, because the camera has the capacity of constantly reading the thoughts of the character. If our character stops thinking for a moment, they will look as if they were daydreaming and the audience will perceive it immediately. At that point, the spectator will disconnect and the illusion of the movies will vanish… Why? ...

01. Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. I was one of those kids who love drawing all the time, even in class 🙂 I also love sports, but he could not make a career as an athlete 🙂 So I thought it would be good to study some artistic type. ...

Surely everyone of us has at some point tried adding something original to our character, details that would make him/her stand out from the rest and achieve an animation that would stick out. We start thinking and thinking and after long and fruitless hours our mind is still in a blank state, with no ideas and nothing new to provide. Creo que el error está en buscar esa ...

Back when I studied Fine Arts, we had a sculpture class where we’d spend our spare time doing clay copies of classic Greek sculptures. One day while I was working on a Greek bust, the Chair Professor came up to me, touched me in the shoulder and glaring at me said: “You see…” Después le dio dos caladas a su ...

01. Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. Well I started over 12 years ago at a small studio called Limaia in the province of Orense, my hometown, that was trying to pull off a traditional animation project called “La Flor del Agua” como aquello no salio adelante de ahí salte a la animación 3D en ...

In daily life people have a habit of not always saying what they mean. Sometimes they realize that it’s not polite saying what they really think, por eso encubrimos la verdad con otras palabras y dejamos a la suspicacia del interlocutor que consiga entender el significado real de lo que se ve en la ...

We humans are social beings by nature and therefore feel the need to communicate with others. We express ourselves through words, facial expressions and body movement. Within this context there are aspects we control more easily, for instance, what we express through words. But there is another much more involuntary part and ...

Do you inquire as James Gandolfini achieve those memorable actings in The Sopranos? Take a look at the book of his acting mentor: Harold Guskin. Finding a good acting book is tricky. The title and front cover made me skeptical, but this book thoroughly surprised me. Is one of the best book on acting I've ever read. Harold Guskin is ...

When we have to go about a scene in which a character has to lift something heavy, we usually tend to address it in a purely physical fashion. We try to figure how much the object weighs and consider how much physical effort should the character put into lifting or moving it. But to achieve credibility in acting ago ...

I recently had to revise many applications to form the feature film animation team Capture the Flag and called my attention misuse many artists platforms Vimeo and Youtube. Most artists use these platforms to upload their demoreels because they are free and play the video at a rate ...

The task of the coordinator is to show the public how the character feels. As animators, is essential to have good knowledge of how the mind works and human behavior. Lying is probably one of the most common behaviors that we find in a movie and as animators, need to know how to be the performance of the character to display a liar ...

Throughout my career I have seen very talented artists end up failing and even leaving the profession by the lack of an essential quality in work and in life: RESILIENCE. In our profession we are subjected to very difficult tests, as constantly changing city, Company, work style, of ...

Credible characters always leave an indelible mark on the public. Are accepted and welcomed by the audience. The litmus test for a character believable is your reaction and how it occurs. To successfully transmit pain of a character, either emotional or physical, we must first understand the following concepts. TIMING ...

In most cases in the form of start profession freelance usually work with. Small orders that reach us through some known or advertisement on the web. One of the issues that generate more questions in our early is how much money would be right to ask for a particular job. There is always the fear spend ...

Social animals have rules that prevent killing each other for food, partner or a place to live. They face each other and often fight to establish a hierarchy, after which they never again struggle unless any attempt to change the pecking. Status is the relative position ...

I have over 25 years dedicated to this profession and today not trade it for any other. I love the world of film and television because I can do what I like: Storytelling. I do not want you to think it is a world in which everything is rosy. Like any other profession there ...

1. Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. Well I started with this in my own country, in Palma de Mallorca , one study of audiovisual production pequenyo traditional animators sought to develop a pilot for a TV series. Alla by 98 3d beginning to be booming, but what they wanted ...

The living space is the area around a person psychologically and considers his. Most people value their living space and bothered, angry or overwhelmed when they invade your own space. Allowing a person to enter our space and enter the space of another person, are indicative of the type of ...

01. Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. Well, since childhood always gave me good drawing, but my dream was to be a biologist and study birds. At the end EGB a friend I sign unwittingly comic course being taught in our school. That was the trigger for all. Little Bit ...

When we propose an acting, always try to find ways that the character expresses his emotions for the viewer understands that happens, but sometimes, the character his own emotions swallow can I be more effective even to convey what he feels. Not all the time we get to the outside what we feel, in fact, ...

1. Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. Professionally I started to 21, after a couple of years in CICE, Madrid. I've been enjoying a lot of movement between 7 cities and 3 countries working for TV series, Shorts, commercials and several feature films. I have also been fortunate to be a teacher ...

When performing a dialogue, anticipation plays a very important role for the viewer not the little nuances of the performance is lost. As we saw in a previous post, anticipation is a warning viewers about what will happen next. The video we have below belongs to Pulp Fiction. ...

One of the most important things to be solved in an animation is physical movement. If the body movement of the character is not credible, the acting scene will not work. Normally, first thing we usually analyzed are the physical characteristics of the character as age or physique, but we forget the most important: ...

The most widely used resource when planning an anticipation is that the character makes the opposite movement to be executed below. This heritage comes from the cartoon animation that became ago 50 years, in which each time a character running tore it was always preceded by an advance in casting ...

I am convinced that there is a job for each of us in this industry, but it will be very difficult to achieve if we do not step in the right direction. In my view, the process has to be very similar to when you're trying to solve a puzzle. Every time I take a piece, first ...

When we ask a flat animation we must not lose sight of what the primordial essence in our work as animators. If we look at the etymology of the word “Animation”, see from the Latin “Spirit” which means Alma. Cheerleading is not giving life to a character. A plant is alive but has no soul. The animation consists of ...

Surely more than one occasion we will have encountered a situation where after working many hours have not achieved the results we were looking. Working long hours is not synonymous with performance and if you do not get good results your effort will not be recognized. There must be a balance between production and effort you make ...

01. Tell us brief fly about your professional background up to this day. As many, I started at home. I bought a book from 3D Studio and taught myself. After years “playing” with 3D, I decided it was time to jump more and moved to Madrid to study with Dani “Pepeland” Lara. 5 ...

One of the best resources you can use to enrich the acting in a scene are the objects in the environment of character. When we started working on a plan we focus exclusively on the character and forget that objects are within reach can also contribute much to the performance. The first thing ...

One of the things that most concern the animators is our demo reel. Clearly a good reel has an important weight to get a job as an animator, but it will not do much if not accompanied by a good strategy to get pass all the tests in the selection process. In all the years ...

Many times when making a facial acting we focus mainly on the eyes and mouth work more as a complement than something that has value by itself in action. We just work conscientiously lip sync and adding complement to mouth smile expressions, sadness, etc. It is ...

All entertainers dream of having the chance to animate an important level within a movie. This fantastic plane that will allow us lucirnos as animators and then will raise the value of our demo reel. Conversely, if you give us a plane of characters who are upstage, back and ...

When encourage a dialogue we usually care for acting the parts where the character is talking and we forget that silence can be much more important in the scene. We can use these silences to enter details of acting also add entertainment to the plane, They can even be determinants ...

There is much information on the internet about how we face a plane of artistic form or technique, but there is little information on how we should deal with it from a psychological point of view. When one begins to learn animation, usually used to make their own animation test. We ourselves went where will our map and all the challenges ...

The video I want to show you today is in a film released in the 2008: Two Lovers. He was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Foreign Film at the César Awards. The protagonist actor Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Leonard, a psychologically unstable young woman trying to recover from his latest crisis. ...