APT Student Animation: Anthony Bennett

Here's another student profile from my Animation Personal Trainer classes. Today we'll take a look at Tony Bennett's work. Tony has been through the APT twice now, the first time being the summer of 2007. Back then he had just graduated from another animation school and was looking to further improve his skills. We spent a good amount of time back then developing a good workflow for Tony, as well as improving his body mechanics and polish.

Every student- regardless of experience- brings some innate talent to the table. Tony has a good sensibility for performance, but his ability had not matured to the point where those ideas could show through clearly. Here's an example of Tony's work before his second session....

There are some neat ideas there, but they're downed out. Everything is too big- a problem I see with many inexperienced animators. Everything is set to the max- poses, timing, screen movement, accents- they're all as big as possible. There's no variation. What's missing is a sense of texture. So we spent a lot of time developing his eye for texture in his animation.

Here's what his work looked like after the session...

Now we're seeing those ideas come through. There's more here than a pretty render (though it's always nice to dress things up if you can). No, the real quality here comes from knowing when to go big, when to go small and when to save a little something for the biggest impact. And you'll note that the polish has improved as well. There's still some need for more development regarding arcs and drag/overlap, but Tony knows about those things and he's well on his way to improving them on his own. That's the goal, really. Help the student get past the big hurdles, give them things they can keep working on and send them on their way with skills that will serve them well for the rest of their careers.

At this time Tony is animating for the Mass Animation Project on Facebook, and he's doing some nice work.