Finally getting animated!

Yesterday, I performed my first successful animation test with the Toon Boom Studio program at school.

It is a ball bouncing--that was the idea at least--and with nine actual drawings and sixteen total "cels" at 24 fps, it looks OK. It's a start. When I return to school, I'll import it onto my Youtube account--why not?--to save my progress as I do more tests. Hopefully each one is more sophisticated than the next.

In the mean time, under the indirect influence of Michael Barrier, I freely downloaded and read through Acting: the First Six Lessons by Richard Boleslavsky, the book utilized by the great Disney animator Bill Tytla. Now on a second read, I find the book absolutely fascinating, its lessons and advice building within me a much more performance-conscious mind as far as acting and writing goes. A particularly brilliant analogy of how art is like a tree has made the writing/filmmaking process a lot clearer. I can't wait to go through the book again, anymore than I can wait to start training, learning, and applying that knowledge to future animations. I've already gotten a first marginal success--though to be honest, the ball doesn't look like it's bouncing so much as being dragged up and down by some invisible force--now I need to busy if I want to make some kind of career out of animation when I leave college. In addition to many personal problems being resolved (I should really write about them), I am much more hopeful for the future.