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The Animator's Survival Kit (Expanded Edition)

by Richard Williams · Faber & Faber

The most widely recommended single book for learning hand-drawn animation mechanics. Richard Williams' drawn manual of animation mechanics: timing charts, spacing, keys and breakdowns, walks, runs, weight, anticipation, overlapping action, dialogue and acting. The expanded edition adds animal locomotion and more advanced examples across 392 pages.

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The Bancroft Brothers Animation Podcast

Podcast in which twin animators Tom and Tony Bancroft, both former Disney feature animators, discuss their studio experience, the state of the animation business and artistic craft, and interview animators and character designers about their careers and working methods.

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Animation Concepts with Harmony Essentials

A free Toon Boom Learn Portal course. It moves from animation history and persistence of vision through the animation principles to a production pipeline, taught hands-on in Harmony Essentials, the entry tier of the industry-standard 2D software.

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Animation with Krita (Krita Manual)

Krita is the free, open-source tool. Official Krita documentation for frame-by-frame animation. Covers the timeline, onion skin and animation curves dockers, and walks through a walk cycle from keyframes to inbetweens to rendering, with notes on memory and transform masks.

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Howard Wimshurst Animation

A professional hand-drawn animator's channel with over 200 free tutorials. Topics include timing, spacing and tempo, arcs, inbetweening, character acting and effects, often shown as frame-by-frame breakdowns and critiques of real shots.

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12 Principles of Animation (Alan Becker)

This is the best free, visual way into the twelve principles before tackling the books. A 13-video series that animates each of the twelve classic principles, including squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, arcs, timing and appeal. Each short episode shows the principle working and failing, in stick-figure animation.

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Timing for Animation, 40th Anniversary Edition

A concise treatment of how the number and spacing of frames produce weight, force, speed and emotion in animation. The most focused book on timing. Whitaker and Halas's 1981 text, updated by Tom Sito with new images and advice from working animators, 184 pages.

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