Animating a Facial Take by Victor Navone

Published by Tim Formica [Room335] on October 31st, 2006 in Tutorials

Victor Navone first came to the attention of Pixar with his animation 1999 classic Alien Song. In Alien Song, the character movements are fluid and expressive and it's easy to see why Pixar grabbed him. Since then he has worked on the major motion pictures Monster Inc, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

His Animating a Facial Take tutorial takes you through a ten frame sequence of Dash along with notes about each frame of which Director Brad Bird guided him through. Though it may at first look like a short tutorial, it is packed with plethora of information. It's amazes me how much information can go into something that will fly the screen in less than one second.

It's not often that you find a gem like this from a pro and it's one tutorial that's definitely worth keeping.

Alien Song

Also worth checking out are his showreels, in particular The Incredibles that has some funny out takes at the end of the reel.

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11 Responses to “Animating a Facial Take by Victor Navone”

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1 Bart Oct 31st, 2006 at 7:36 am

That's a great find, Tim. I'm amazed at how much action and emotion this guy can put in only ten frames.. Thanks!
2 Mikhail P. Schalk Oct 31st, 2006 at 8:16 am

That's really funny -I was just watching The Incredibles with the audio commentary like 10 minutes before I read this. Yeah, definately a must read tutorial.
3 @ndy Oct 31st, 2006 at 10:14 am

it's 'Victor Navone' btw :)
4 Bart Oct 31st, 2006 at 11:43 am

@ @ndy: updated, thanks!
5 Aligorith Oct 31st, 2006 at 12:14 pm

Great find!

I found it to be quite a useful resource. It's amazing sometimes how much motion can be squeezed into even 10 frames, and such dynamic motion like for hand-drawn 2d characters.
6 Tim Formica Room335 Oct 31st, 2006 at 3:36 pm

@ndy

Big Oops :-$ Thanks for catching that.
7 CurtiS Oct 31st, 2006 at 4:06 pm

Being a big Pixar fan, this was very interesting to see how much thought goes into such a quick sequence. Its the attention to detail that has put Pixar on top.

Ciao for now!

CurtisS
8 Bassam Oct 31st, 2006 at 4:26 pm

dang..now I have to rig pupils AND irises…. curses!
thanks for linking this really useful mini-tutorial
9 Eugene (etr9j) Oct 31st, 2006 at 6:16 pm

I loved the in-depth analysis of each frame. Really showed me how much effort is put in to just 10 frames as well as teaching me some great technique.
10 jamie Jan 14th, 2007 at 11:22 am

hi my name is jamie phelps and am 14 years old. I started aniomation this year at school and realy enjoy it i love media and i love coming up with ideas for movies i was wondering if you could pz let me know any animation programs and how to become a director:) please write back 2 my email adress
11 Tim Formica [Room335] Jan 14th, 2007 at 5:07 pm

jamie,

Welcome. The fact that you're at this site says that you must have heard about Blender, a free animation and modeling suite which can be downloaded at http://blender.org/cms/Blender.31.0.html

To learn animation and modeling - http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

As to being a director - Mike Wellins book is an excellent source - Storytelling through Animation and if you are still interested in being a director you might consider a good film school like U.C.L.A. Film School or Chapman University's film school when you are older. Both are in the U.S.A. ,Southern California
Also, a great place to hang out and ask Blender and animation questions is http://blenderartists.org/forum/ and of course, check out this site daily for titillating Blender news.