The Animator's Eye: Adding Life to Animation with Timing, Layout, Design, Color and Sound

This is a really great book. I am glad that I have added it to my library.This book is unlike any other that I have seen. The author/artist, Francis Glebas, walks you through everything, and I mean EVERYTHING on the journey to creating an animated short.Want to know what an animatic is? It's in the book. Want to see how to execute emotion in your drawings? It's in the book. From creating thumbnails to storyboards, character design to putting it all together in production, it's all in the book.PLUS, a dvd is included. On the dvd is the finished ANIMATOR'S EYE animated short. Also included is the animatic of the short. The really neat thing is you can watch the special movie that includes the finished short and animatic combined, so you can see how the finished movie evolved form rough drawings to completed work.This book contains a wealth of information, along with some fun stuff, too. The margins of the right hand pages are flip books of the some animated scenes. Very clever!I heartily recommend this book, and look forward to reading it again and again to help me with my profession as an animator and cartoonist.

First of all, the book is a lot bigger than I thought. It just sticks out on my bookshelf lol, but I'm fine with it because I really love the flipbook section; it's really cute :P. Anyway, this is a great animation book for anyone interested to learn more about animation. I have this book and the Character Animation Crash Course by Eric Goldberg, and I find both books very helpful. Goldberg's book teaches something Glebas doesn't teach (more technical), and Glebas teaches something Goldberg doesn't. But I have to say I learned more from the Animator's eyes because the author covers stuff like storyboarding, adding color and sound which no other animation books cover. If you already have the animator's survival kit, you don't really need character animation crash course because they are more or less the same. The Animator's Eye is different though, you will totally learn something new from it. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to further his or her knowledge about animation.

I teach basic animation at a local community college. I've gone through numerous texts as I never seem to find one that covers the subjects in what I would consider "just the right" amount of detail. Francis's book is one that does fit this bill. I often refer to the standards such as "Drawn to Life" and "The Animators Survival Kit" but for just one single overall text "The Animator's Eye" gives a nice comprehensive overview.

this is avery interesting book either for beginners and animation students....many subjects,many examples and the dvd is great too!

It was very organized compared to his first book, very informative, however felt it didn't have the same engaging quality his first book had. Still worth a read.

I really like the explanation this author gives for the various things to consider when creating an animation. The drawings and format of the book is nice to look at as well.

First off, you have to love the flip-book on the edge of the pages of The Animator's Eye. It works just like film but breaks it down. This book, the author Francis Glebas and his characters Iggy and Scared Bunny are a lot of fun, but don't let that fool you, this book is filled with a mass of serious information. When it comes right down to it, animation in the form of storytelling covers a huge amount of stuff just to get it get it done - and even more to make it "moving" and fun. This book gets "it". Even though a person could dig into any these areas for more info, the author gets what is takes to get started in animation and covers what is helpful to advance a career.I'm coming from a background of drawing illustration skills that transitioned to graphic arts on a computer. I also have interests in photography and video. Not being wholly advanced in the animation world, I can only guess what level of experience would find interest in this book. Yet, given the range of information from drawing, to movement, to gestures, to color, to storytelling, to sound, to lip sync, to organization, to structure, to production, just to mention some of what Glebas covers, I think even the very advanced animator would find something to improve upon. For the beginner this should be a must. This book takes me back to some my earliest drawing classes and reinforces some of their very best principles in a more compelling and informative way, like the use of balance and weight to give life to mere lines. The author shows you how to create three dimensional characters with the illusion of life-like movement so as to avoid what he refers to as "zombies".I like the way he builds from simple basics to get a character and story across. I love the emotional wheel. Art classes have gotten me used to the color wheel (which the author also takes great advantage of in the book) but I never thought to use a wheel for emotions, expressions, and gestures. Simple is better. I really like his use of post-it notes to produce a very simple but moving and easily edited story board. That makes so much organizational and productive sense. Like the author, I have always thought that tracing was a very valid method for learning the way others draw (which was sometimes frowned upon). He touches on helpful software to match your character with the appropriate color, sound, and environment that givs life and emotion to enhance and drive the animators vision. Glebas gives lots of helpful ideas to make animation work better and the process work more easily.The accompanying DVD shows the finished animation along with the earlier working versions to give you some idea of what to look for and how to progress. One of my favorite things on the DVD is where the author makes a video of himself to show exaggerated emotions and lip movement to use for references for drawing believable character expressions and speech.The Animator's Eye covers a lot of material, all with practical means to get professional results that will capture your audience's attention and sweep them off into a truly "believable" fantasy world just like Disney does.

This book is decent and I imagine if you were just getting started into your animation career and were wanting to know the outline of all the stages of an animation pipeline (in a traditional sense), this book would be a decent purchase. I personally found it to be mostly too simple and fractured in it's approach. The quality of examples and layout were quite disappointing for a book that is intended for artists. I hoped to glean some nuggets of wisdom to use in a curriculum I was developing for a studio layout team in the layout section on the subject of shot composition. I didn't really find anything too concrete to work with. That's hard to fault the book on as it doesn't claim to be an expert resource on any one topic, but more of a general breakdown of animation. The biggest gripe I had was just how ugly a lot of the page layout was, and how amateur much of the illustrations and examples were throughout. The quality of pencil scans was also pretty bad in spots. I likely will try and sell this to a new animator looking to grow their knowledge of the other departments before and after them or an aspiring animator who wants to make their own short films.

A great guide to animation by someone who has been and is very successful in the industry. Francis Glebas created some animatics and an animation (included with the paperback version I bought) to go with this book. These illustrate and the book describes the steps needed by all - including beginners working on their own - to create a successful animation.I like that the whole process is described from initial ideas right through to completion with music and special effects as part of the animation, and that the focus is on traditional drawn animation, but brought right up to date using animation programs on computers, with drawings and their layers created and stored within suitable software.A great book that is completely on an equal footing with the other animation classics and will join them. But with the advantage that this is a guide for how an individual can create their own animations right now - with all the benefits of modern computers and the wisdom freely available of those who have gone before!

Brilliant book with the whole animation process - each chapter a progressive stage. Nice touch is the cell type drawings on the right ended of the page - flip the pages & you see the project animated!!! Bought for my daughter’s university course! Highly recommend this book to any animations students!!!!

This book’s title is misleading.It is just a self indulgent display of the Creator’s Art.Page after page of Art, no complex explanations of choices and mechanics. Sorry I spent money on this.

Ein Vollblut Animator und Storyboarder. Kann dieses Buch nur jedem empfehelen der sich für Trickfilm, Comic bzw. allgemein für Storytelling interessiert.