Using video for background reference

Some animators say using video reference is cheating. Don't be fooled by that. Since the days of the Nine Old Men—the core pioneer animators of Walt Disney Productions who created classics such as Snow White and Pinocchio, which helped define the art of animation as we know it—animators have studied and used video reference. The main difference is that today it's much easier and more accessible for us to do that.

Reference is something extremely important for animators to get inspiration from and understand the essence, physics, and motivation behind movements. From video reference you can get good visual ideas to apply to your animations, especially for acting subtleties, secondary actions and timing.

Blender allows us to easily insert videos or image sequences on the 3D View background to use as reference, and we're going to see how to do it. For this recipe, an excerpt video is used from a public domain movie called WILLIAM BENDIX IN RILEY, SAVINGS BONDS...