A Look Back at Taso Gionis

Among the pantheon of great artists who were once students at the Academy is Taso Gionis. He was barely out of high school when he first came to us in the early days of the school. He has since gone on to tremendous artistic accomplishment in the entertainment industry as a character designer and modeler currently employed at Blizzard Entertainment in that capacity.. This is a concept he illustrated in our visual development class around the year 2000.

Taso was a student in our very first year coming up with excellent tonal / light studies for concepts he was developing. 

Taso went on to create incredible characters at the highest level of the motion picture industry. The video below is his demo reel. This is what talent, hard work, dedication and a solid foundation in fundamentals can do for you when you stick with it and keep growing and creating. You can see more of Taso's amazing work on his YouTube channel and on DeviantArt with more of his student work here.

Character Rotations

One of the most important skills associated with professional character design is the ability to rotate one's concepts. It's an essential aspect of the production process in animation. Rotations bridge the connection between concept design and production. A good character designer should be able to accurately turn their images. Below are a few recent examples of what some of our students have created in the Character Design 1 class at the Academy.

Adrienne Lim

Anna Karakalou

Blu

Edward Qiu

Kaycie Day

Matt Fisher

Vanessa Gallo

Latest "Before & After" - Character Design 1

Something I enjoy doing in terms of showcasing the kind of improvement our students make in relatively short periods of time is featuring their Before and After work. These following are samples of what some of our most recent students have come up with in Character Design 1 which is the entry class to or program. In the first session before any direction was given students were instructed to draw a teddy bear. The idea being that we would use their drawing as a gauge to determine the amount of improvement in their skills as the class progressed.

Here are some of the Before and After sketches students created over a period of about a month to five weeks into the class.

Edie Murphy

Carl Gilliam Jr

Hannah Smith

Kevin Hughes

Students share their thoughts

Some of our students and instructors articulate their experiences with the Academy in a recent video we've uploaded. You can find more of our videos here.

Art of the Week - March 12 2016

Latest sampling of recent work from our students and instructors...


Maia Gross

Joshua Pina

Hannah Williamson

Jamie Graham

Sara Yegan

Marcello Frisina

Lola Chee

Animated Facial Expressions - Ed Irizarry

Former student turned instructor Ed Irizarry stopped by for a visit this week. A very talented artist with many years of experience at Disney and Fox in their consumer products division. Here's a class demonstration he created when he was with us as an instructor. He animated the individual poses from the facial expression assignment in Character Design 1 to create this educational example of how to develop behavioral aspects of the subject...

We're 18 Years Old Today !!

This is the 18th anniversary of The Animation Academy! We conducted our first class in the back room of a local restaurant in Burbank California on January 19 1998...

Joel Valdez - "Frankenstein" StorySketch

Recently I assigned an exercise in StorySketch to Joel Valdez so he could practice some of his visual storytelling skills. The challenge consisted of retelling the scene from "Frankenstein" where the monster comes to life. This was something quick intended to keep his chops up over the Christmas break and also to be used as reference for our incoming students in StorySketch. Joel did a great job. Here's the results of his efforts. Click on the images for a better view...

Academy All Stars 2015

Happy 2016 to you !!

Here's some work from the Academy towards the end of last year from artists who made an impact.

Amanda Gonzales

Joshua Pina

Maia Gross

Jamie Graham

Chanaelle Chahayed

Autumn Galvin

Rajaa Alqadeeb

Lola Chee

Happy 2016 !!

This year will mark the 10th anniversary of the Academy's blog. This month will mark the 18th anniversary of the school. Here's a look at how the old year ended as we viewed the sunset in Burbank California for the last time in 2015. From all of us at The Animation Academy we wish you a Joyful and Creative 2016 !!