Richard E. Williams

Triple-Oscar-winning, world-renowned animator - and author of the seminal book The Animator's Survival Kit - Richard Williams' legendary career in the world of animation is brought to the page here for the first time.Written with his wife and collaborator, Imogen Sutton, Adventures in Animation follows the life and career of this pivotal figure in animated features, from the influential moment when, aged five, Williams saw Snow White, right through his career of more than sixty years. Over those decades, Williams created full-length features, short films, title sequences for films and hundreds of commercials - all of which were graced by his characteristically elegant, sinuous lines and magnificent imagination. Williams' place in animation history is assured: he directed the Academy Award-winning 1971 adaptation of A Christmas Carol and perhaps most famously worked as Director of Animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for which he won two Academy Awards. Serving as the linkman between the original creators of the world of Disney (Snow White, Dumbo, The Jungle Book) and the current generation of digital animators (Toy Story, The Incredibles and Ice Age), it is fair to say that his like will not be seen again.Williams' first book, The Animator's Survival Kit, and the masterclasses he ran, saw him pass on his hard-won craft to future generations of animators. In Adventures in Animation, the story of the man behind the images will inspire them all over again, bringing more animators and fans of animation to the life and work of this master of the artform.

WALKSFrom Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit comes key chapters in mini form.The Animator's Survival Kit is the essential tool for animators. However, sometimes you don't want to carry the hefty expanded edition around with you to your college or studio if you're working on just one aspect of it that day.The Animation Minis take some of the most essential chapters and make them available in smaller, lightweight, hand-bag/backpack size versions. Easy to carry. Easy to study.This Mini focuses on Walks.Walks are full of personality. Walks reveal the character, they tell the story of the person. In this Mini Richard Williams provides the building blocks of how to construct walks, using stick figures to make it easy to learn, copy and understand.The process will encourage you to invent and entertain.

FLEXIBILITY AND WEIGHTFrom Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit comes key chapters in mini form.The Animator's Survival Kit is the essential tool for animators. However, sometimes you don't want to carry the hefty expanded edition around with you to your college or studio if you're working on just one aspect of it that day.The Animation Minis take some of the most essential chapters and make them available in smaller, lightweight, hand-bag/backpack size versions. Easy to carry. Easy to study.This Mini focuses on Flexibility and Weight.How do we loosen things up and get snap and vitality into our performance at the same time as keeping the figure stable and solid?The answer: successive breaking of joints to give flexibility.In this mini, Williams stresses the importance of knowing where the weight is on every drawing. He demonstrates that the best way to show weight is to be aware of it, conscious of it, and think about it all the time - knowing where the weight is coming from, where it's traveling over and where it's transferring to.

DIRECTING, DIALOGUE AND ACTINGFrom Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit comes key chapters in mini form.The Animator's Survival Kit is the essential tool for animators. However, sometimes you don't want to carry the hefty expanded edition around with you to your college or studio if you're working on just one aspect of it that day.The Animation Minis take some of the most essential chapters and make them available in smaller, lightweight, hand-bag/backpack size versions. Easy to carry. Easy to study.This Mini focuses on Directing, Dialogue and Acting.As a director, whatever your idea is, you want to put it over, so the main thing with directing is to be clear - very clear. The Director's job is to hold everything together so that the animator can give the performance. Richard Williams shows how that performance can be achieved with flexibility and contrast. With Acting and Dialogue, the temptation is to try to do everything at once - Williams' advice: do one thing at a time.

RUNS, JUMPS AND SKIPSFrom Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit comes key chapters in mini form.The Animator's Survival Kit is the essential tool for animators. However, sometimes you don't want to carry the hefty expanded edition around with you to your college or studio if you're working on just one aspect of it that day.The Animation Minis take some of the most essential chapters and make them available in smaller, lightweight, hand-bag/backpack size versions. Easy to carry. Easy to study.This Mini focuses on Runs, Jumps and Skips.As with Walks, the way we run shows our character and personality. A lazy, heavy person is going to run very differently to an athletic ten-year-old girl.Richard Williams demonstrates how - when you're doing a walk and you take both legs off the ground, at the same time and for just one frame - a walk becomes a run. So, all the things we do with walks, we can do with runs.This Mini presents a collection of Williams' runs, jumps and skips inspired by some of the cleverest artists from the Golden Age of Animation

Animation is one of the hottest and most creative areas of film-making today . During his more than 40 years in the business, Richard Williams has been one of the true innovators, and serves as the link between the golden age of animation by hand and the new computer animation successes.In this book, based on his sold-out Animation Masterclass in the United States and across Europe, Williams provides the underlying principles of animation that very animator - from beginner to expert, classic animator to computer animation whiz - needs.Using hundreds of drawings, Williams distills the secrets of the masters into a working system in order to create a book that has become the standard work on all forms of animation for professionals, students and fans.This new expanded edition includes more on animal action, invention and realism with sophisticated animation examples

This is the one book every animator should have on their desk - whether they work in film, computer graphics or video game animation. Richard Williams is the pre-eminent figure in motion picture animation, and he has forged a reputation as an outstanding teacher as well as a top practitioner. In recent years, the Academy Award for animation effects has been virtually guaranteed to go to a student of Richard Williams, whether the movie in question is Toy Story or Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.This book is based on master-classes Richard Williams has been giving to professional and would-be animators around the world over the years. Companies such as Industrial Light and Magic, Disney, and Dreamworks send their animators to study at Williams' feet as he is generally regarded as the link between the 'golden Age' of Disney animation and the new-style computer animation exemplified by Toy Story.