Dear Diary: I is ANIMATE!

I've been attempting animation for a few weeks now.  Something about thinking of animating a funny little 2 minute cartoon just gets me all excited.  Seeing characters come to life as you animate them isn't bad either, and I haven't even gotten into the juicy bits of creating my own character, with his own little traits and quirks.

I got the Animator's Survival Kit book, and I've been reading it a lot.  The videos have been quite useful too.

• Started with the bouncing ball.  Squash and stretch!  Timing and spacing!  Easing in, easing out?  The ball bouncing off into the distance maybe should have slowed down, but I really really wanted it to bounce off into the distance!

It'll be nice to be able to animate silly little things I think of. Countless times I've been listening to a conversation when someone would say something completely normal, and I'd just burst out laughing.  My verbal skills aren't up to par, so it was impossible to explain just exactly why I was laughing randomly.  I'm not insane. This is how my mind works. You talk about bumping into your friend down the street, and I picture you actually bumping into some guy in a street and knocking him over.

• Next I moved onto overlapping action, as suggested by some friends.  I struggled with it a bit, and maybe it could be better.  Practice practice practice!

Also, animation just seems like the best way to go about making some kind of living as an artist.  Animation can help with game development, web cartoons, storyboarding/drawing comics.  And it's about time I focus on just one thing, even though I feel everything I've worked on to now has strengthened a skill I needed to get to this point.

• There was a point where I was working on another animation and I wasn't sure how to go about coloring it.  Really put a damper on my mood, but in the meantime I attempted some sketches of flour sacks with emotion. Then I did this sack falling off a window sill.

• Decided to work on some head turns and a running animation loop!  Lots of Ren and Stimpy, and remembering how the dumb Ed from Ed, Edd, and Eddy ran with his back bending and his tongue waving in the wind. lol  Plan to add a little bobbing at some point.

• The last few days I've been watching the Animation Survival Kit dvds and taking notes. I'm up to the inventing walks section. This animation is basically one straight out of the book.

• One day during all of these exercises, I randomly started sketching easter bunny poses.. and I decided to make a quick easter animation. lol  Maybe a bit grotesque.. but this is how life works!  Easter bunnies fart, eggs come out, chocolate is born.

I'm hoping I can make content like the video above for my youtube channel. Except longer, and better.   A series of funny shorts, something consistent.  One to two minutes long.  It could be purely animation, or I could even do a live action Roger Rabbit style cartoon with my Canon T2i.

Up to this point I've just uploaded videos of me painting over the years, maybe a few "funny" videos with some friends, and a game or two.

If you want to subscribe, I'd appreciate it! I'm really going to try to get some interesting content up in the future.

http://www.youtube.com/joshb81959

I recently organized all of my videos into playlists because they were so scatterbrained, and while I was at it, I piled all of my favorite animations into a playlist too:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=8A97B57C65213226

This could be just an excuse to watch all of these old and new cartoons without feeling like an overgrown child.. but I'm enjoying it so much so far.

What are your favorite cartoons?  Ren and Stimpy, the George Liquor program, Adventure Time?  If anyone actually reads this blog, or in the future when I look back at this to see how much I've progressed, what animations do you like? :o  New, old, it doesn't matter!