Escapee Alfie Williams Reports from inMotion 2026

Alfie Williams and Glen Keane at inMotion

Escapee Alfie Williams was a volunteer at this year's inMotion event which took place in London last week - part of the We Are Playgrounds series of educational events. 

As always, we recommend that our animation students volunteer for events like this one; they offer huge opportunities to build industry connections and make the most of our prime London location.

How Animators Find Industry Mentors

One question I sometimes get asked by students at Escape Studios is "How Do I Find a Mentor?"  The answer (of course!) is to start with your tutors, and then broaden out from there.  Over the course of a long animation career our Escapees are likely to have many mentors, though very few of these (if any) will be formal mentorship roles; most will be informal, and you might not even realise these people were mentors until many years later.   In my case I have been lucky enough to be mentored by animators such as James Baxter (Road to El Dorado), Andreas Deja (Lion King), Duncan Marjoribanks (Pocahontas) and also Glen Keane, whose notes on planning animation I still refer to today.  But mentorship is, in each and every case, very much what you make of it.

A Chuck Jones Animation Tutorial

In this excellent 13 minute animation tutorial, actor and director Ron Howard introduces the work of animation legend Chuck Jones, the creative master behing the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny. There are other great voices here too - such as Disney animation stars Glen Keane and Eric Goldberg (the latter the author of the excellent "Character Animation Crash Course" - one of the books on our student reading list).  The video is a great introduction to the basic principles of animation, such as anticipation, squash and stretch, secondary action and overlapping action. We're recommending it to all our students.

Glen Keene and The Secret of Animation - It's All in the Planning

Glen Keane. Wikimedia

The secret of great animation is in the planning. Open up a copy of Autodesk Maya, the leading 3D software, and you just get a blank screen.  With CG animation (or indeed any animation) you get nothing for free. So how do you fill this blank space with creative, entertaining animation?

The answer is - you need to learn to thumbnail. That is to say, you must learn to plan out your work with sketches and scribbles, which create a kind of visual road map of where you want to go.

In the video below, animation tutor Alex Williams analyses Glen Keane's approach to thumbnail skteches and shows how Glen uses them to create beautiful animation. 

Nephtali - Glen Keane's Latest Masterpiece

Ever wondered what master animator Glen Keane has been up to since he left Disney back in 2012? "Nephtali" is what.  In this beautiful short film combining live action with animation, Glen shows why he is regarded as one of the best animators alive.  I was lucky enough to have worked with him on "Pocahontas" back in 1993, and his animation notes for newbies like me are still among the most valuable training materials I use in the classroom. In this film, Glen shows us why traditional 2D animation still matters.