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The Lazy Animator Guide to Cartoon Animator Camera Craft (Coming Soon)

The Lazy Animator Guide to Cartoon Animator Camera Craft

Cartoon Animator's camera is like a very basic, fixed lens camera. You have two options, keep it still or move it around. But what if you want to get more cinematic with your animations? Create epic landscape shots, or follow the action in a more dynamic way? In The Lazy Animator Guide to Cartoon Animator Camera Craft (coming soon) I'm going to show you how to create more cinematic shots inside Cartoon Animator.

I'm excited to be starting work on this all new online course for Reallusion's Cartoon Animator with the goal of teaching you how to create more cinematic camera shots within Cartoon Animator itself. Shots that require a little more work than just key framing Cartoon Animator's camera.

The focus will be on how to create each shot 'in camera' reducing the need for additional applications like After Effects and making your scenes easier to edit directly, rather than having to re-export footage from CA4 into After Effects whenever you need to change something. 

That said, there will be times when using an additional application like a graphics editor is necessary, so I'll be using free, open source applications like Krita and Natron (possibly) so you can follow along without needing to sign up for any subscription services.

As well as creating cinematic camera shots the course will cover the basic shots used in both video and animation projects so you can get up to speed if you're an absolute novice.

In all cases I will demonstrate the shot, how to create it in Cartoon Animator, and give you explanation for when you might use such a shot.

Note that the techniques for creating each shot in this course are not the only way to create them. I'm simply teaching my own techniques based on years of using Cartoon Animator. If you can streamline them or find a better way, then by all means do so, I'd love to see your techniques.

In the final section we'll look at how to combine camera shots to create a complete scene, focusing on some camera shot rules you should keep in mind as you build your scene.

While this course is centered around Cartoon Animator many of the techniques could be applied to other animation applications with similar work flows. If you would like to follow along, without purchasing Cartoon Animator, you can trial Cartoon Animator free for 30 days (more than enough time to do this course), or you can attempt to recreate my techniques on your own application of choice.

That's the plan at this stage. Sign up to the newsletter to be kept up to date on the course creation process and when a release date is announced.

It's going to be quite a challenge recreating some of the cinematic shots I have in mind within Cartoon Animator. As far as I know there isn't any course like this out there specifically for Cartoon Animator.

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