Animating Appeal & Entertainment by David Blais & Mitch Yager

This advanced AnimSchool course pushes you past technical animation into the territory where characters actually feel alive. You’ll learn how to make better acting choices, refine your polish, and create performances that hold an audience’s attention. Taught by veteran animators David Blais and Mitch Yager, the course focuses on the creative decisions that separate forgettable animation from genuinely entertaining work.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Make specific, character-driven acting choices instead of generic movements
• Use subtext to animate what a character is thinking, not just what they say
• Create strong, appealing poses with clear silhouettes and readable emotions
• Apply rhythm and timing variation to build personality and comedic or dramatic tension
• Refine animation from blocking to spline without losing performance intent
• Polish facial animation, eye movement, and lip sync to professional standards

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Completion of AnimSchool’s Facial Performance course or equivalent experience with character acting, body mechanics, and dialogue animation
• Tools: Autodesk Maya, familiarity with animation rigs and the graph editor
• Hardware: Computer capable of running Maya smoothly for character animation work

📝 Description

This course tackles the hardest part of animation: making a performance genuinely entertaining. You already know how to make a character move. Now you need to figure out why they’re moving, what they’re thinking, and how to make an audience care. That’s where most animators get stuck, and that’s exactly what this class addresses.

The curriculum is built around the idea that technical correctness is just the starting point. A character can have perfect mechanics, clean curves, and accurate lip sync, yet still feel flat and forgettable. The real magic happens in the choices you make: when to hold a pose, where to direct the eyes, how to time a reaction, and what the character is thinking underneath the dialogue. The course breaks down these decisions through dedicated lectures on subtext, posing, rhythm and timing, and facial performance.

What makes this archive particularly valuable is the heavy emphasis on critique. You’re not just watching polished demos. You’re following students through the messy middle of the animation process, seeing what gets flagged, what gets fixed, and how experienced animators think through problems. The David Blais section alternates lectures with critique sessions throughout the entire term, so you get a realistic view of how professional-quality work actually comes together through iteration.

The second half of the archive features Mitch Yager’s classes, offering a different perspective on the same challenges. Having two instructors is a huge advantage at this level because acting doesn’t have a single correct answer. Comparing their approaches helps you understand how different professionals analyze staging, timing, appeal, and polish.

By the end, you’ll have a much clearer sense of how to push your own work from technically correct to genuinely watchable. The course covers the full workflow from initial acting idea through blocking, spline, facial polish, and final critique, so you can see how all the pieces fit together in a production context.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Animators who understand mechanics and acting fundamentals but want their characters to feel more alive and expressive
• Artists preparing demo reels who need professional-level polish and stronger acting shots
• Students who have completed intermediate animation courses and want to specialize in character performance

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

David Blais and Mitch Yager are veteran character animators who have taught at AnimSchool, one of the leading online animation schools. Both bring years of industry experience to their teaching, with a focus on the creative and performance aspects of animation rather than just the technical side. Their combined expertise covers acting choices, facial animation, timing, and the polish required for professional demo-reel work.

🏁 Final Result

• A portfolio-ready acting shot that demonstrates advanced appeal, clear storytelling, and professional polish
• A refined understanding of how to evaluate and improve your own animation through self-critique
• A stronger demo reel with material that shows you can create entertaining, character-driven performances

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.