I probably got the most pre-college animation experience through a little program I bought called "Klik & Play," which was a program that let you make your own computer games. It blew my mind at the time. They had a huge library of pre-existing sprites you could use, but about 90% of the games I made, I made using my own sprites. Even at this point, animation as a career never even occurred to me.
And it didn't when I started college either. I went to UMass Dartmouth as a computer science major, but quickly switched to Liberal Arts. I wanted to take some art classes, but after getting a work-study job in the Design department, I discovered Electronic Imaging as a major. Basically a conglomeration of all things "digital art" related. Animation played a huge role in this major, but there were many other factors to it as well. Towards the end of my college career, I focused mostly on 3D animation. I was fortunate to have my work shown in 3 UMass Dartmouth Electronic Imaging festivals (so far?). Unfortunately, I've gots no website anymore, so once I get that back up and running I'll be sure to post them all.
Back in October, before I started working at EMC, came the highest point in my life as an animator (until I got my first real animation job). I created a 3D animation in the style of "Zelda: The Wind Waker" for a very unofficial contest. I spent about a month from start to finish on it (I only gave myself about a week and a half to do the actual animation though... gulp!). Long story short, I didn't win... I got around 3rd place or something, which was still pretty cool. But what was even cooler was that somehow, word got out about it, and it was featured in some very popular gaming blogs (including GoNintendo.com and Kotaku.com, sites I visit daily). I uploaded it to Google Video, and it recently hit the half-million views mark... which BLOWS MY MIND. The Youtube version of it was uploaded a little later, and "only" has about 160,000 views, but it gets a lot more comments. I love reading the comments. :)
So it's kind of funny that after all this, I got a job as a 2D flash animator. But the thing is, if you know animation in any form, you pretty much know animation as a whole. I was able to take everything I learned from my time as a 3D animator, and apply it to character animation in Flash. It's just the software that gets in the way (but I picked up on that quickly as well).
And so now we come to the present day. A few weeks ago, I started to dabble in frame-by-frame flash animation. It started out as retaliation to an email debate between me, and my 7 siblings over how to pronounce the word "integral." I was the only one pronouncing it "in TEG ral," while everyone else pronounced it "IN te gral" (turns out both are right). Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. Here's what resulted from that
debate, on my side.My sister said I went against the grain, and warned me that if they ever cross a bridge without jumping, she'd bring a rope with her- just in case I decided to be different and jump.
My other sister tried making a fool out of me in front of everyone. This is me getting my revenge, in stick figure abuse form.
It ended around this note, in which my brother said it would be scary if we all had group therapy. I thought it would go something like this.So these are just stupid little things I did in about 10-15 minutes each, and realized that it's a great stress reliever, since I don't have to worry about precision... the excess energy I have almost flows right through the pen. Yeah, I'm weird, I know. That's my abstract comment for the day. Anyway, my doodles usually suck too much for me to want to post them, but I thought maybe people would get a kick out of my doodle-mations.
And so this blog was born. Next time I'll post the other short animations I've done since these, and then I'll continue posting the new ones I make, as I make them.
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