Tutorial: Animating Characters for Feature Films
The Gnomon Workshop has released Animating Characters for Feature Films, a new masterclass recorded by Disney Senior Animator Alissar Kobeissi.
It reveals how to take your animation to the next level, eliminating generic elements and achieving natural, compelling performances that reflect the character’s unique personality.
The workshop provides over four hours of video training in Maya, and is suitable for intermediate-to-advanced animators.
Learn to animate the Disney way: create compelling, characterful performances
In the workshop, Kobeissi walks through the process of animating a two-character shot in Maya.
They begin by exploring how to film authentic reference footage, how to pose the characters to create appeal, and how to push the blocking to create visual contrast between the characters.
Kobeissi then moves on to spline the body, eyes, and mouth, discussing how to achieve natural spacing and clean arcs, what makes the eyes feel alive, and how to approach lip sync.
In the final lesson, they set out an eight-step process to polish animation to feature-film quality.
The workshop uses commercial rigs from ProRigs, and commercial Maya add-on animBot.
About the artist
Alissar Kobeissi is a Senior Animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where they recently worked on Zootopia 2.
They previously worked at Sony Pictures Imageworks on Smallfoot and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with a period at Illumination Studios Paris working on Sing 2.
Pricing and availability
Animating Characters for Feature Films is available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, which provides access to over 300 tutorials.
Subscriptions cost $57/month or $499/year. Free trials are available.
Read more about Animating Characters for Feature Films
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