Learn the rules before breaking them !

Here is a very nice article about thinking out of the box, with very good examples, and very good thoughts.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/01/14/how-to-think-out-of-the-box/



Going in the same way, I would like to talk about animation, and talk about all the people I see animating stylized or more common said "Cartooney", and never realistic for different reasons.

Stylized animation is not easy, and not without rules, many people thinks that stylized animation is everything and anything, is not constant, and just everything is exaggerated... but in my point of view, they are wrong.

For me stylized animation, is like a caricature, if you want to do a good caricature, you need to study the face of the person, and know how to draw realistic, and when all this is good, then you start your caricature.

Stylized animation is an exaggeration of certain aspect of movement ... but how can you express them nicely if you don't understand them properly, how do you want to be able to break the rules, if you don't know how to apply them ?!

Here is the issue for me, if you look at Tex Avery cartoons, there is exaggeration, but it's constant, they always do it the same way, all the way to the end, and because of that, it's constant and have a logic in his own way.

So if I can give you an advice, try to learn your physics and weights, work on it very hard, try to really understand them before doing crazy animations totally freaky, it reminds me when I was studying at Animationmentor, it was in class 2, we had an exercise which was to start an expressive walk cycle at frame 60, then the next assignment was to justify the walk within the 60 frames ... people started to do short films, and totally went out of subject, and bobby had to remind everyone to keep it simple and focus on the exercise, as we will have plenty of time after to do crazy animations, but first thing first, we need to learn and for that, we need to stick to the rules and learn how to apply them.