Cartoon Animation Course

Lesson 1 • Visual Storytelling Fundamentals

Introduces composition, staging, and silhouette as tools for readable cartoon storytelling. Students apply these principles to simple storyboard sketches.

Lesson 2 • Animation Styles and Genres

Surveys limited, full, motion-graphic, and stop-motion cartoon styles. Students identify stylistic choices and their effect on audience perception.

Lesson 3 • Core Animation Terminology

Defines essential vocabulary: frames, keyframes, tweens, rigs, and timing. Shared language enables precise communication throughout the course.

Lesson 1 • Designing Supporting and Background Characters

Teaches contrast and hierarchy in character design so leads, supports, and extras read distinctly. Students design a small cast with visual relationships.

Lesson 2 • Principles of Cartoon Character Design

Covers shape language, exaggeration, and appeal as the core drivers of memorable cartoon characters. Connects design choices directly to animation performance needs.

Lesson 3 • Building a Character Model Sheet

Guides students through orthographic turnarounds, expression sheets, and proportion guides. Model sheets ensure visual consistency across all animation scenes.

Lesson 1 • Navigating the Animation Software Interface

Orients students to the timeline, canvas, tool panels, and layer system of a professional animation application. Efficient navigation reduces production time and errors.

Lesson 2 • Working with Keyframes and the Timeline

Teaches keyframe insertion, manipulation, and interpolation within the software timeline. Students animate a simple object moving across the screen with controlled easing.

Lesson 3 • Layer Management and Scene Organisation

Establishes naming conventions, grouping strategies, and scene hierarchy for scalable projects. Organised files prevent errors during collaboration and final output.

Lesson 1 • Squash, Stretch, and Anticipation

Introduces the three principles most responsible for cartoon life and energy. Students animate a bouncing ball and a character wind-up to internalise each concept.

Lesson 2 • Follow-Through, Overlapping Action, and Arcs

Teaches secondary motion and natural arc paths that prevent stiff, mechanical movement. Students add hair, clothing, and tail overlaps to an existing walk cycle.

Lesson 3 • Staging, Straight-Ahead, and Pose-to-Pose

Contrasts two fundamental animation workflows and teaches staging for maximum clarity. Students produce the same action using both methods to compare results.

Lesson 4 • Exaggeration, Solid Drawing, and Appeal

Covers the final three principles that elevate technical animation into compelling cartoon performance. Students push a subtle action into a fully exaggerated cartoon version.

Lesson 1 • Building a Body Rig

Walks through rigging the torso, limbs, and head with proper deformation and control handles. A well-built body rig allows animators to pose characters quickly and accurately.

Lesson 2 • Secondary Element and Prop Rigging

Extends rigging skills to hair, clothing, tails, and hand-held props that require their own control systems. Secondary rigs add realism and cartoon personality to character performance.

Lesson 3 • Facial Rigging and Lip Sync Controls

Creates mouth shapes, eye controls, and brow rigs needed for expressive facial animation and dialogue. Facial controls are the primary tool for character emotion and speech.

Lesson 1 • Anatomy of a Walk Cycle

Breaks the walk cycle into contact, down, passing, and up positions and explains the weight shift logic. Understanding the mechanics prevents the most common walk cycle errors.

Lesson 2 • Run Cycles and Speed Variations

Adapts walk cycle knowledge to faster locomotion, covering the airborne phase unique to running. Students animate slow jogs, full sprints, and cartoon speed-blur runs.

Lesson 3 • Personality and Specialty Locomotion

Applies character design knowledge to create locomotion that expresses personality, weight, and mood. Students animate a sneak, a strut, and a comedic stumble.

Lesson 1 • Full Facial Acting and Emotion Arcs

Combines mouth, eye, brow, and cheek controls into a unified facial performance that tracks emotional arcs. Students animate a character transitioning through multiple emotions in one scene.

Lesson 2 • Phoneme Shapes and Mouth Charts

Maps spoken sounds to their corresponding mouth shapes using standard phoneme groupings. Accurate phoneme mapping is the technical foundation of readable lip sync.

Lesson 3 • Syncing Mouth Animation to Audio

Teaches waveform reading, audio scrubbing, and frame-accurate mouth shape placement in the timeline. Students sync a pre-recorded dialogue clip to a rigged character.

Lesson 1 • Background Design and Layout

Covers perspective, colour keys, and depth layering for cartoon backgrounds that support character action. Backgrounds establish world, mood, and spatial context for every scene.

Lesson 2 • Sound Design and Music Integration

Synchronises sound effects, foley, and music to the animated scene for a complete audiovisual experience. Audio timing reinforces comedic beats, action impacts, and emotional moments.

Lesson 3 • Visual Effects for Cartoon Scenes

Adds cartoon-specific effects such as speed lines, impact stars, dust clouds, and motion smears. Effects amplify action and reinforce the cartoon visual language of the scene.

Lesson 4 • Final Composite and Delivery

Assembles all scene elements into a final composite, applies colour correction, and exports for target delivery platforms. Students submit a polished scene meeting professional output standards.