Stuart Sumida Comes to Escape Studios

Stuart Sumida

Paleontologist and animal locomotion expert Stuart Sumida was at Escape Studios yesterday; we hosted over 60 artists from Framestore at our Shepherd's Bush campus as they attended a masterclass in animal anatomy.

Stuart's lecture to our visiting animators and VFX artists was all about how to make more believable and authentic animals and creatures in film.

 
Stuart's visit is a reminder of how technical the business of animating animals and creatures has become. Science and animation now overlap more than ever before.

I was lucky enough to work with Stuart on two feature films; on Lion King, where he led the animators on accurate animal anatomy, and on Spirit, Stallion of the Cimmaron, where he did extensive talks on horse anatomy, locomotion and gaits.

On both movies it was very important that the animators become experts in how the animals moved; only by fully absorbing the fundamentals of locomotion and gait could we move beyond basic principles of motion into acting and performance. 

In November 2015 I caught up with one of Stuart's talks about animal and creature locomotion. You can read my notes from the talk here.

---Alex

The Escape Studios Animation Blog is a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our new BA/MA starting in September 2018, follow this link.   To apply, visit the offical page here.