These last days I have listened to two awesome podcasts:

First I listened to a great interview with the Master Richard Williams, done by Spline Doctors' crew at Pixar. It's always fantastic to listen to a guy like him telling about his stories with Chuck Jones, Ken Hariss, Art Babbit... There's so many things to learn from someone like him, and a single podcast suddenly becomes a great source of information.

He also talks a bit about his new DVDs box set from his Animator's Survival Kit lectures, and his work to animate 2 hours (TWO HOURS!) of examples of his classes. I think it is also worth to mention how great voice he have, which makes the interview even more pleasing to listen. :)

The second podcast was the second part of Eric Goldberg's interview, by Animation Podcast. I also went to listen the first part again to the complete interview.

Eric talks about a lot of things, like his career beginnings, when he went to work with Richard Williams, his time on Disney animating the Genie (with Robin Williams' great voice performance) for Alladin, his direction work for Pocahontas and also about his recently released book Character Animation Crash Course.

I am fortunate to have the two books: Animator's Survival Kit and Character Animation Crash Course. I am still finishing the reading of the second, and I've already read the Williams' book. Both are wonderful resources, and I can't recommend them enough. They are those kind of books you have to read more than once and keep them close to yourself to take another look every now and then.

The Animator's Survival Kit is more on the "Motorcycle Manual" line, like Williams states on his interview. It brings us a step-by-step to the understanding of the essence of movements and how we can achieve that. Goldberg's book, on the other hand, is a great companion to the first since it goes further and tell us "why" the movement is there, what are the psychological factors that precedes every movement, how we can identify the personality of our characters and how we can apply those important elements on our animations.

Lots of information... a lot to learn from these guys... :)