"If you think something, you can draw it - and if you can draw something, you can animate it."

Origins:

Every year since 2020 respected instructor, Tony White has hosted a program of 48 "live and online" classes on animation, film production, and graphic storytelling. This "Working in Moho" on-demand course is one of 4 that record Tony's teaching in the classroom from those live classes.

Course content:

This course adds more "core principles of movement" in a digital 2D (Moho) environment, previously taught in his traditional hand-drawn, 2D animation course 1. Not entirely deserting traditional 2D animation with the first "Runs" assignment, the rest of the course does cover additional important animated actions, created in the Moho digital environment. However, the course is not a teaching Moho software course, so animators of all persuasion can learn from the techniques and content presented.

Who should take this course?

Tony's live courses have been primarily taught to young high school level students, looking for a strong foundation of learning for a college or industry career in animation. In graduating from Tony's program, they receive a diploma and school credits upon their successful completion of the classes, where applicable. However, that said, the material Tony presents here is very compatible with the level of the material taught in advanced degree-level animation courses - or even as solid instruction for aspiring professional animators. As a result, everyone will benefit from the material included here - as well as from the material in Tony's other "In the classroom" courses.

Expectations:

Most students enter into Tony's 48-class online program knowing absolutely nothing about animation. However, by the end of the 4 modules, they have gained significant foundational experience in traditional hand-drawn approaches to animation, as well as for digital 2D animation approaches. Ultimately, they graduate from the full program, having worked through the Pre-production and Production stages too - creating their own, short animated film in the process. This particular course reflects the Module 02/Digital 2D aspect of the teaching, which should prepare students well for preparing to make their own animated film likewise.

Bonus material:

In addition to learning the essential, core principles of movement taught here, students on the course were also required to participate in an observational gesture drawing session, as a warm-up at the beginning of each class. These exercises - taken from Tony's "Drawing for Animation" course, also available on-demand here. Observational gesture drawing helps each student develop their "animator's eye". Through these exercises, each class begins each class with a warm-up, observational gesture drawing exercise which significantly helps the creation of key poses and observed real-world action. In addition to all this,  however, Tony has added an additional bonus item by including some of this "History of Animation" material at the end of each on-demand class.

Drawing ability:

Although drawing is a small part of this course content, students should be assured by the fact that they do not need to have strong drawing abilities to succeed with the material presented. In general, the Moho approach alleviates the need to do a significant amount of drawing to produce animated material - although the observational gesture drawing and character design aspect of the teaching and digital 2D production is somewhat required - even though rigged characters are supplied if students do not want to design and rig their own characters to work with.

Outcomes:

By the end of this course, students should know and be able to demonstrate many of the essential principles of movement presented. These include...  including "runs", "walks", "simple and advanced jumps", "sneaks", and "throws".