Harvey Newman

I’m Harvey. I’ve animated games for a living for over twenty years, and I run Animworks.

Most of that career has been gameplay animation: locomotion, combat, the movement nobody comments on because it feels right in your hands. I’ve spent a lot of it on the hiring side too, watching showreels and building teams, which is where most of what I teach comes from. Knowing what a studio looks for in a reel turns out to be a completely different skill from making the animation in it.

The work

Games I’ve worked on include Star Wars Battlefront II, Battlefield V, Horizon Zero Dawn and Dune Awakening, at studios including Eurocom, Crytek, Lionhead, Axis Animation, Sega, DICE, Funcom and Rekindled. The full credit list is on IMDb.

Why Animworks exists

It started from a simple frustration. The rigs and tools you need are scattered across forums, dead websites and paywalled communities, and finding what works is harder than it should be. So we built one place for professional rigs, plugins, courses and tutorials, documented properly, compatibility tested, and made by people who use this stuff in production.

It took over a year of late nights and more back and forth than I care to admit. It runs on the creators who contribute to it far more than it runs on me, which is the part I am proudest of.

Working with me

If you want feedback on your own work, I do one-to-one sessions covering gameplay animation, combat, showreel reviews and the career side of things. Every session is recorded, so you can go back to the notes while you fix the shot instead of trying to remember what I said.

If you would rather go at your own pace, both of my courses are listed here as well, and so are the two things I have written that people seem to pass around the most.