Learning to Animate - Victor Paredes

I discovered the work and tutorials of Victor Paredes in 2012 when I started to make cut-out animation using book illustrations as source material. I wanted to make book trailers and was given a job to create one by Tradewind Books. The promise of a paycheque at the end of the process was a wonderful impetus to keep on keepin' on with learning to animate. For software, it was a choice between Toon Boom and Anime Studio. I tried the free trials for both and in the end chose Anime Studio: I liked the interface better; it offered a lot more kinds of animation for the price; and its process for cut-out animation seemed more straight forward than Toon Boom's. But what really sold me was the animation done by Victor Paredes in Anime Studio.




I am so in love with this young artist's work, his sensibilities, technique, and artistry. And he is an amazingly generous teacher with hundreds of helpful posts on the Lost Marble forum and absolutely wonderful webinars. Here's one that shows his brilliant rigging design for facial expressions. It's like watching magic.

There's so much to learn, but I'm having a lot of fun making book trailers, as well as sprite animation for apps.  Here's a little video of the progress of The King Has Goat Ears app. You can see a number of short animations in it that have been made from the illustrations in the print book. This is a screen recording with the theme music added. The theme music was purchased from a royalty-free audio website. (More on sounds in another post.)



I'm getting compfortable enough with the software to now be able to make a little video in a morning. Here's one made from a screenshot of a book cover by Georg Hallensleben. I adore his Gaspard et Lisa books and hope he'll forgive me for using his cover for a video birthday card for a friend who loves his art.