Teaching animation with TVPaint?

[slowtiger]

I start my TVP demos always with drawing a circle on some frames and play back - animation done in seconds. This usually hooks them up. "Everything else is just refinement" I tell them.

[Fabrice]

... because your list is oriented towards sales ...

Btw, ... When I do a training, the licenses and the training session are already sold, so I'm not in a purpose of selling the product : I try to find a progressive and coherent way to introduce the software, and a way to finish with specific answers about specific needs.

When selling the product, I mostly use pre-prepared tvpp projects, because most of the people have less than 10 minutes, like in the MIFA.
They allow me to cover some possibilities of the software in a short amount of time.

[Animark]

Hi,
I am also one of these guys teaching TVPaint and more. My speciality is digital 2D animation. I have about 10 students in class and their goals at the university are, to learn different animation techniques, to make their own films and graduate as a kind of an animation director. (Yes we know, there have to be much more than some years in a film school to finally reach that goal, but that's another discussion.) The students learn during their first year a lot of basics in drawing and animation, in experimenting and also story telling. They can use all possible techniques, from cut out to handdrawn, from sand to paint on glass, from 2D to 3D from analog to digital. Later some of them are able to choose the best technique and form to tell their films.

I begin to teach when the students start their second semester. They will learn 4 different softwares at my lectures: Animo, TVPaint, Anime Studio and Adobe Flash. TVPaint represents the most important part.

I start out of the box with an overview of what could be done with TVPaint. I show the examples of TVPaints user gallery and what I will find anywhere. Than I give a short indroduction on how to use the software and the students start to animate a walkcycle. At the next lectures I will have special topics (making brushes, making panels, FX Stack, ...) and I try to find some practical exercises for that. One of the most important things is, that the students are provocated to be creativ and having fun doing little exercises. I believe in learning by doing and having fun while doing.

Last year we had a very good situation for learning TVPaint and I hope I can repeat this year. I another seminar the students made some storyboards spontaneous. The storys where so rich in content and ideas, that teachers and students decided to turn them into animated films. The most students did it with TVPaint and learned the software on their own projects with all their individual challenges.

[Animark]

Peter,

I like the issues of your lectures. The results are very good and demonstrates, that it is possible to have fun while learning animation. I did a comparable exercise with a tennis match in the past. I divided the students into 2 parts - the left and the right parts of the tennis field. Every student had to animate a ball coming into the screen and a character who brings the ball out. In the end, we put the scenes together and got a funny tennis match.

Your exercises inspirates my for new ideas for my lectures.