It's Alive!!!

What do you know... I made my very first animation!
Granted, it's only six seconds long, which was the required length for the class I took. Sounds like it should have been easy, right? Wrong... It took more hours than I care to think about to create the character and the rig to move and position it. The environment took quite a long time as well. To create the frames for the movement itself took six hours! Even adding color took quite a few hours. The easiest part of this was creating the series of frames to create this little six second movie and that was because I just had to make a few choices and click a button... So the next time you go see a computer animated movie or TV show with 3D characters, remember all the time it took for a student to create a six second animation of one of the required storyboard scenes It was literally a month long process (and I'm estimating over 100 hours) worth of work that made me want to rip my hair out. Animators certainly work harder than you think, though the pay off is worth more than you can imagine. I'm incredibly proud of my little animation! I got a 100% on this video and passed the class I feared I would bomb with a final grade of 96.4%. Not too shabby...

"Submitted for your approval..."

 In all honesty, I'm rather surprised I'm doing so well in college. I hated school when I was in high school... It's not that I wasn't intelligent; I knew I had the ability to do rather well. But school bored me and I hated the social aspects of it. I would have rather had a hot poker shoved up my ass sideways than to have to go to that awful place. I never applied myself and took so many personal days that my teachers would seem surprised when I actually showed up and would tell me how nice it was to see me again. In some ways, my attending college and doing so well is very surreal... I sometimes expect Rod Serling to show up out of nowhere and start his diatribe, foreshadowing some kind of ironical gloom and doom that's about to befall me... in The Twilight Zone...

"Tuesday's Wednesday..."

This month is another drawing class... It can sometimes be difficult to be inspired on command because you know your grade depends on it. In fact, it can sometimes be downright impossible... This isn't Xanadu and my name isn't Sonny Malone. My chances that the nine muses are going to come to life and walk out of a mural painted on the side of a building are zero and even less that one of them will come inspire me to draw something good and interesting for my art class.

"Modern Day Muses"

Although, the muses did inspire me to create a funny little parody of the muses and how their inspirational styles would change based on today's day and age. I drew it several years ago and, though not meant to be fine art or even good art, for that matter, I did get a lot of good feedback on it. I suppose that's good for something...
But I suppose it's a good thing I don't have a muse. I don't know that I could open a roller skating nightclub. I'm terribly uncoordinated on skates...

I'll Tell Ya What I Want, What I Really, Really Want...Back t

A drawing done for my website...

I start my classes exactly a week from today... In the month or two since I started the process of enrolling in school, every time I've mentioned to someone that I'm going for a bachelor's in computer animation, I've gotten the same question... "What kind of animation are you wanting to do...?"
Years ago (back when I originally wanted to go to college), computer animation was still in its infancy, for the most part. That was fine by me... The type of animation I wanted to make involved animation cells, background paintings and taking pictures of the two together. I also wanted to make animation that was more "old school", so to speak, with more muted colors and dull black lines, unlike the blinding colors that were used at the time.
But... the times they are changing... And so I must change with them. At this point, I believe all animation is done digitally on computers. In this high tech age, it's not surprising... It makes one wonder what else will be computerized in the future...

You will continue to watch Hypnotoad....

Now back to the original question... What kind of animation do I want to make...?

One choice is the basic cartoon type, such as Bugs Bunny, The Simpsons, Futurama... The drawings are very simplistic, which I would assume would make the job of animating the characters incredibly easy. They're meant to be comically entertaining without too terribly much going on for your eyes. Its main purpose is to entertain you without you having to put a lot of thought or attention to detail into them. Is this the type of animation I would like to someday create...?

Awesome sword action...

Another choice is the 3D animation used in such movies as Epic, Frozen, How To Train Your Dragon... This style packs a fairly good amount of realism with the slightly unrealistic looking characters. But for all that, there's still not si much realism that you can't realize you're watching something animated. After all, isn't that the purpose of watching something animated, to know you're watching something that's animated...?

BOOM....!!!

Which brings us to the next type of animation... realism...
Movies such as Transformers give you the largest example of this, though there are more movies than you think that add animation without you realizing (movies like Inception). This type of animation can be so true to life that your eyes literally can't fathom that what you're watching is animation and not something that truly happened... Granted, it looks fantastic on the big screen, but is this the type of animation I want to create...?

Oh, the flamboyance...

And then there's the Japanese animation... anime...
I won't lie; this is the type of animation that always held an incredible fascination for me over the years. I've watched it grow and change and always it remained a cut or two above the rest in comparison to other types of non-3D animation. Anime, in this day and age, contains a lot of detail both in the backgrounds and the characters themselves (though they are not exactly realistic in appearance in all cases). And here is a culture that isn't afraid to use light and shadow to get the correct feel of a scene and to make things seem as realistic as possible. Even the gestures of the characters, though sometimes a bit flamboyant like LeLouch here, are incredibly detailed.

You can feel his pain...

Expressions are also something in anime that nothing else can rival... Anime series (for teens and adults) seem to be a bit... angst filled... And where your story line contains so much angst, there's going to be a need for a fantastic, realistic (sometimes over-exaggerated) facial or bodily expression. The Japanese seem to have this down to a science in their work...

Stupid non-sexy Flanders...

But none of this answers the question as to what kind of animation I would like to create... I'm actually quite confused on this point myself. I've always had a dream of owning my own company that produces anime here in the US (anime that looks like anime, not the American wannabe version of said animation). Will this be the route I choose...? More than likely, yes...
The wonderful thing about the college I chose is that they don't just teach one style of animation. I'll actually learn all these (with the exception of anime) and a few others besides. Animation has really come a long way over the years and is used in places I never dreamed, such as simulations for military installations. Perhaps, after learning all the various types of animation, I'll find something completely different that I like, or I'll find I'm best at one I would not have chosen otherwise. Who knows what the future holds...?

This is what I call breakfast...

It holds coffee... Lots and lots of coffee...