Weight Lift Animation by Anthoni Zakheos

Creating a believable sense of weight and balance is one of the hardest skills to acquire as an animator. After all, unlike stop-motion animation, our digital creations have no real weight at all: they are just collections of pixels moving around on a screen. The weight that the audience sees must be entirely simulated; the animator must maintain the illusion convincingly and plausibly throughout the shot.  One of our first year students, Anthoni Zakheos, recently competed an excellent piece of work showing a complete understanding of the tricks needed to pull of the illusion of weight.


This is a piece of work that is now demo-reel ready. An animator's demo reel is their shopfront, their demonstration of talent. The secret of a great animation reel is simple - it must be completely free of mistakes. As Aardman animator Matt Rees puts it: "you are only as good as the worst thing on your reel".

Anthoni is well on his way to building a great demo reel - the secret to finding work in our industry.

For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days, take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK. Find out why we're giving free laptops to all our students, and why we give all our students free access to videos at Lynda.com. Also, see what financial assistance might be available to you. Learn which is better for animation, a PC or a Mac? Get hold of a copy of a map so you can find your way around campus, and learn aboutmotion capture at Bucks.