The Animator is the Actor

Those of you who have watched enough 'how to' documentaries will be more than aware of the process of video referencing - taking footage of a figure (often yourself) performing a certain movement, and using it to study how the movement breaks down into its component frames. And there's no reason to leave such a process to the big budget animation studios. If you have a camcorder, a tripod and a bit of floor space, you can do it yourself!

Taking your footage, it helps to play it back through video software that has buttons to allow you to move forward or backward a frame or two (PowerDVD and the K-Lite Codec Pack version of Media Player Classic are just two such examples), and image capture options. Processing it through a video editor works too, though is a little more time consuming. Save the key frames of motion, then import them into your animation program of choice to work from.

When its difficult to visualize what a movement might look like, video referencing is an invaluable production tool.

Benefactors can see my example of video referencing in the Benefactors' Lounge.

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