ANgiE tAYLoR 🧷

Tag: art school

  • Character Animation Courses

    Learn how to bring your artwork to life with Angie Taylor’s character animation courses at Creative Cabin.

    • Discover methods for setting up artwork for animating in Adobe’s new Character Animator software.
    • Learn the principles of animation and how to apply them to your characters.
    • Learn useful scripts and add ons for Adobe After Effects, including DUIK, Puppet Toolsand Head Rig.
    • Find out how to compose a scene and a storyboard and get hundreds of tips and tricks for making compelling and enjoyable character animations.
    • Enjoy focussed attention from our trainer on our unique, one-to-one character animation courses.

    Book now to hold your place at the special introductory price of £249.95 per day.

    More about character animation courses at Creative Cabin

    At the Creative Cabin guests can enjoy custom, one-to-one, Adobe software training from a professional industry expert.

    In this indyllic location near Brighton – Angie Taylor creates her own motion graphic designs and animations from her studio in the Creative Cabin.

    Creative Cabin

    In between freelance jobs she offers this lovely self-contained studio/ apartment to other designers, editors and artists who need a quiet, inspiring place to work, learn and relax.

    Benefits of one-to-one character animation courses

    Angie Taylor’s courses are one-to-one and totally unique. There’s only you and Angie in the Cabin so you get her complete attention for the entire course – unlike corporate training courses where you often have to share the training with several other delegates.

    Employers!

    You can have employees trained individually for less than the cost of a group training course at a dedicated training centre – making sure they learn exactly what the techniques they need. It’s more cost-effective than you may expect.

    No need for all of your designers or editors to be out of the office on the same day, leaving you short-staffed. Send them to the Cabin one-at-a-time for the individual training they need.

    Go at your own speed

    With a one-to-one training course at the Creative Cabin you can explore the software at your own speed while Angie guides you and suggests best practices with the software.

    Work on meaningful projects and files

    Angie provides well-designed, structured training exercises for you to follow that will get you up to speed in no time. If you prefer you can bring along your own projects so you and Angie can work on those together.

    Solve problems and come up with solutions

    Problem-solving and coming up with new ideas is Angie’s speciality – she loves to suggest ways to improve and refine your workflow to get the very best from your software.

    Be trained by a working designer and author

    Angie only offers training for a few days every month. When the Cabin is not being used for training Angie creates motion graphic and animation projects from the Cabin for her own clients who she works for on a freelance basis.

    Over the past 20 years Angie has trained hundreds of motion graphic designers, video editors and artists on software applications such as; Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator and Maxon Cinema 4D.

    Angie is a published author with five books published on the subjects of Adobe After Effects and motion graphic design. She is also an author of training courses at Lynda.com.

    Make your training a vacation

    The Creative Cabin is situated in an idyllic spot near Brighton in the UK with panoramic views across the English Channel.

    All training packages include accommodation in the private, comfortable self-contained studio apartment – this is yours for the duration of your stay. Kick back and relax when you’re not training, enjoy some home-cooked food while watching movies on the HDTV or playing Playstation games. The more adventurous guests may want to take a trip into the centre of Brighton to unwind in style.

    Accommodation

    Designers and Artists can rent the Cabin for as little as £99.95 per night. It is a completely self-contained studio apartment with sleeping area, shower room, kitchen and work area. Find out more about the facilities here.

    Training packages

    At the Cabin Angie offers customised, one-to-one training courses, tailored to suit each individual’s needs. Previous clients include designers from BSkyB, ITV and Barton Willmore.  Find out more about these affordable courses near Brighton and to view course outlines, please visit the Training page.

    Booking the Cabin

    Please use the Contact page to contact Angie for more details about course content and availability. If you’re interested in booking the cabin accommodation,  training or a package that includes both, please book here.

  • The Influence of Punk 02

    The Influence of Punk 02

    In the first article in this three-part series, I spoke about the influence of punk in motion graphic design, the Punk rock revolution in the UK and how inspiring it was to young people like me. Today I’ll talk about some of the great designers who emerged from that scene. I’ll start by looking at two of the key players who defined the style of the Punk Rock movement in the UK.

    There’s not one person responsible for the style of Punk, it was a coming together of minds and styles. A collective, group activity gained momentum, and as a result, the various styles of the people involved merged into an established fashion. But the pivotal people were the ones who recognized the elements that would excite and brought them together with style, panache and, of course an eye for design.

    The punk movement grew out of a disillusionment, with the establishment, the music scene, fashion, the media. What better way to show your dissatisfaction than to tear it all up and start again? That’s exactly what punks did. Essays on design refer to this as Deconstruction. This wasn’t a new concept, post-modern art movements like the Dadaists and, ironically, the Constructivists used techniques of disassembly and reassembly to shake up the status quo and embrace a new way of looking at things.

    In New York in the early seventies, bands like the New York Dolls would dress up in womens clothes in an attempt to shock away the apathy that existed in the music scene. Richard Hell was the one who became a blueprint for thousands of young punks, defining the spikey hair and ripped t-shirt look before anyone else. But it was really Vivienne Westwood who took the look and developed it into a recognizable style. Now one of our top designers, she started off with a small clothes shop on the Kings Road in London. She and Malcolm McClaren owned Let it Rock, a shop selling biker gear and teddy boy clothes. In 1974 this was revamped and renamed SEX, catering to the S&M scene and positioning itself nicely to shock the nation and take punk rock to the headlines.

    The Sex Pistols hung out in the shop and that’s where the whole thing took off, the band formed, McClaren became the manager, and Vivienne designed clothes for them under the label, Seditionaries – it was a symbiotic relationship. At Art School Malcolm McClaren met Jamie Reid, a political activist and Situationist who was producing a radical magazine called Suburban Press. He used a cut and paste style of graphics in this magazine, and it was then that he defined his trade-mark ransom-note lettering that was made famous by the Sex Pistols first album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

    In the next installment we’ll take a look at the designers who emerged from, or were directly influenced by the Punk movement.

    Patti Smith – Smells Like Teen Spirit, listen free on Last FM

    Read Part 03
  • The influence of Punk

    The influence of Punk

    I was asked on Twitter to write a blog about the early days of Punk in the UK and the influence of Punk on the world of motion graphic design. I am influenced heavily by the punk movement that started in the seventies in New York and London. I was 12 when it all started to kick off in the UK with the Sex Pistols and their entourage, the Bromley Contingent causing joyful havoc in the UK media.

    Before the punk scene things had become very sterile and safe. Politically, the UK was in a mess with regular strikes and power cuts disrupting everyday life. The music scene was drowning in boring “prog rock” and endless, indulgent guitar solos. Something had to give!

    Then along came the idea that you didn’t have to put up with what you were being spoon-fed. The disillusioned youth of Great Britain realized they could make their own music, art, magazines and fashion. Using the influence of the New York underground music scene (Patti Smith, The New York Dolls, Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground, The Ramones) the kids of the UK took it upon themselves to create a whole new genre and to revolutionize a complete culture in a way that had never been done before (or has ever been done since).

    As you can imagine, this was a really exciting time for a teenager to grow up. It wasn’t really till 1977 that I got hooked into the Punk scene. I loved it! Before then I was an awkward, funny-looking, scruffy, Tom-boyish kid with glasses who didn’t really fit in. I survived at school by being the class clown, and that way avoided any physical abuse from my fellow classmates, but I was regularly ridiculed for being “the outsider”. Suddenly with the Punk scene I could belong! It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the movement that purported to be all about being different, and not caring what other folks thought, became a lifeline of acceptance to kids who didn’t fit in anywhere else. It wasn’t that we wanted to be different, and didn’t care, it’s that we cared and desperately wanted to belong to anyone who’d have us. It’s human nature to want to feel like part of a gang, or a movement.

    Anyway, inevitably, the vultures descended, and what started as a revolutionary, do-it-yourself, creative movement turned into just yet another fashion. Mainstream media quickly gobbled it up and spat it out as a kind of bastardized version of what it one was, and things have never been quite the same again.

    However, the marks and influences of the punk movement are still alive and kicking today. Next week I’ll look at some of the deigns of today that were influenced by this movement.

    Angie’s Punk shuffle Track of the day – Anarchy in the UK – The Sex Pistols, listen free on Last FM

    Part 02