How To Find Good Animation Reference!

All right. Let's talk reference. Hey friends, welcome back to this channel. In this  video, I want to briefly talk about reference and I want to mention some cool resources on where  you get quality videos as well as information to use while animating. First of all I have to say at  least briefly that reference is really important always, but especially when you're starting  out. As many of you probably already know I rely heavily on reference especially in the first  stages of my workflow. I be

lieve the reference gives you a guide to follow and an understanding  of how things happen in the real world while you're studying it and of course it gives  you animation instant believability. But remember that reference isn't just for copying it it's more  of like a stepping stone to start building from and as an artist then you can personally choose  to ignore push or exaggerate things to best deliver the point across with your animation.  I would recommend that even if you can't find the re

ference you want, you still take the time to  record yourself or at least act out the action to understand it better yourself. What are the body  parts doing? you know what leads what follows? It's easier to get that feeling this way. Now,  where do you go to find videos if you can't record them yourself and if you think that you  can find something more suiting online? So let's get into it. I want to start by mentioning that  usually companies have libraries of content that you can look at but

that's not something anyone  should worry about starting out. I thought that having an access to a good library will make me a  better animator but it all comes down to studying. I was desperate and I was screen recording  rented documentaries at the time so I bought a subscription for rhinohouse as a student which  will be the only paid resource I'm gonna mention. This was a good resource when I was first learning  about animal locomotion and doing my first tests. They also have student price p

lan but honestly  if you can save your money that's the best. Nowadays we're lucky because the internet  makes everything more accessible than ever. So let's talk about free resources. The  first most obvious place is here on youtube you can type whatever you want and try to search  through the results. So you can go through endless amount of videos trying to find the perfect tiger  reference for example. But that's not ideal. You can create and save playlists from others...  you can find one in

my channel for example. Where I save various videos that I find  interesting feel free to take a look but even better you can follow channels dedicated  to uploading reference useful content regularly channels like global zoo for example. Here you can  find a big library of animal reference videos and you can even make your search more specific by  using the search function inside this channel to find exactly what you're looking for.  Next up I would like to mention a channel that specializes o

n horse references five-minute  horse lessons and as the name obviously gives away, they have a lot of reference on horses.  walks, trots, runs you can find everything. Next up I want to mention ultra slow. This  is a very good channel that has slow motion footage and it's great especially for  beginners who want to study the movement. They have great footage of birds that you might  want to take a look at. I use a lot of these references when I want to study bird flying, the  bird liftoff and t

he bird landing for example. Next up is a channel that I'm not even  gonna dare to try to name or spell but I will put the link in the description below.  They have a good library of animal references here and most of the videos are high quality as  well. Make sure to check the definition here on youtube. Here's another great channel  that I'm not gonna try to name but they have great references especially for gorillas and  chimpanzees. As I mentioned before I used to try to record documentaries

but nowadays all the  companies making the documentaries they have their own youtube page so bbc earth is a channel you  can follow. bbc earth unplugged is another one that I follow and in the series of this kind  of companies making their own youtube videos national geographic have a great youtube channel  with a very big library of animal references. And don't forget that with the youtube search  function, within the channel, it's like we're going through their library and we're free  to take

whatever we want as inspiration. And next up, I'm gonna mention  Africa geographic as well. I've only used reference from this channel  once but I think it's worth mentioning. Here is another channel I'm not gonna try  to name with a library of extreme actions it could use reference when animating animals  and creatures it also makes sense to look for references for something extreme like fighting  and parkour etc. Because not all of us can be physically talented. I would never record myself  d

oing these things. Especially this accurately! Next up is a channel I used a few times when I  worked in games earlier in my career. Wushu kicks. just looking through the thumbnails  you can see potential idle and kicks. But of course, I'm going to try and talk about  other places where you can find reference because youtube is kind of obvious today. Okay so let's  move on. I want to talk about greenscreen animals. That is probably one page that I've used  a lot for a few years trying to study r

eference they have a big, big library with  many species that you can just search through. Once you find what you like  you can just open the page... I want to also share with you  that because we'll never use that exact footage anywhere we don't have to buy it. We  can just use the previews and study the reference. There are many options to go through  and check if it matches what you wanted. In most websites that are similar to this you can  just press play and once the video is cached or load

ed and it's playing, you can right-click and  save as... to save the preview of this video. But keep in mind that this is just for us not to sell  or redistribute. Usually, the previews come with a watermark but in most cases, that's not a big  deal. On a side note, this is more information, not 100 reference related. Some cool information  while animating and breaking down animal movement and gates can be found on this Wikipedia  page called gait... this information can be really useful especia

lly when you're  analyzing the creature you're animating. So while you're gathering reference you  might want to take a look at this page and go through this text and yeah... see what you  can learn. Another similar page is actually the veterinary anatomy page and the website  starts with v anat for veterinary anatomy. This is a very interesting page it's not  exactly reference but it's good to refer to before jumping into animation. Here you can  read a lot about gaits and patterns of movement

you can check the frames in the illustrations  and study the diagrams on the left here. It's good to spend time and  study all this stuff it will show only the animation. I really wanted  to share these two pages on gaits because they really helped me but before wasting  too much time on this I want to jump back to other resources for reference. So next up I  want to talk about some stock footage pages. They are a lot and probably there's more than  I'm going to name one of these pages is videvo

. And again you use the same process. Finding  the footage you like and saving the preview... next up is pexels another similar website  here we can just search for footage as always. Try to find something we like and  then save after we play the preview. In some pages like this... this would be  free for example. Let's move on next one is Istockphoto which is owned by  getty images we'll get to that later. istock is one of the great ones you will  find a lot of high-quality footage here. yeah j

ust keep in mind save the  video. That's it pretty simple. remember there is no limit because it's just the  preview. oop, this is a good one! Let's save it! Next up is a page that I haven't really used  that much but I recently came upon this one. It's called videesy or I don't know I pronounced  that right but you can see it's spelled remember there is a lot of  these stock footage pages so it's impossible to know them all. But the  process is the same. Moving on one of my favorites and one of

the best ones is gettyimages.  There is a lot of quality footage here and even the previews can usually be in hd mode  which is great for us. That's it with the stock footage pages recommendations. I hope this really  helps on your search for quality reference videos. And as an animator you have to always  keep your eyes peeled for you know, the great reference video. Sometimes videos come  from anywhere they become viral... like in this case of this video made by a stop-motion  animator, i bel

ieve... 100 ways to walk! That's a video you save instantly as an animator  who studies character and motion and emotion. I think that these are my main sources  of reference and here are some other good ones that I believe that are still worth  mentioning. You can find this one on vimeo this group named aniref. It's a group with  almost 5 000 members and almost 500 videos. Another one on vimeo is acting reference  it's a group with almost a thousand members and on the same subject if you love g

reat  acting performances you might want to check Kyle Kenworthy's blogspot. Here you will find a  cool collection of acting performances created by a great animator. Along with his notes on the  scenes which is very educational and there is many many posts to go through.. ooofff... that's a  lot and before I forget I just want to mention two more resources. Back at youtube endless reference  is a great resource for beginners especially and lastly because I'm getting really tired I want  to ment

ion this website called bodies in motion which is an amazing website that you can study  gesture, that you can study line of action... but most of all they have a lot of Eadweard Muybridge  photographs that are combined frame to frame and you can see the motion you can study keyframes,  basically. So you might want to check it out. It is good for drawing 2d and 3d animation. I'm  sure that I probably missed some good resources but I just wanted to list some of  the ones that I've used so far. Th

at's it for now! Like and subscribe and leave  a comment to let me know what you think of this video. Once again, thanks for watching!  Stay safe, stay creative and keep animating!