#3

                As a kid I had no interest in cartoons at all. Sitting there by myself watching tv seemed awful. The only way to get me to sit there and watch something is if my two sisters (we’re triplets by the way) both wanted to also sit there and stare at the screen. My oldest memory of watching a cartoon is being very annoyed when road runner was on. I thought it was dumb and wanted to play outside. I didn’t dig blue’s clues or little bear but if it was the majority’s vote to sit there like little zombies staring at the tv screen then that’s what I did. Although as a group we worshiped Sailor Moon.

                As I got older watching tv after school didn’t seem so bad. Hey Arnold could hold my attention, that was probably the first cartoon that I learned to appreciate but I hated watching reruns. Staying home from school by myself with nothing to do but play with beanie babies or watch cartoon was hell. In middle school I learned that Sponge Bob was awesome. I really enjoyed the character personalities and how the ocean was brought to life in a ridiculous manner. With Sponge Bob reruns became tolerable because there’s so much attention to detail in those episodes that I felt like I would catch something new if I watched it over a few times.  The episodes did seem to get old fast though. I liked South Park too but that was probably for the violence.

                In high school I really loved Family Guy. It was entertaining stuff with reruns that I would watch but I still didn’t like to watch it by myself. It was just really funny, everyone thought that. I was going with the flow and falling under Stewie’s popularity among kids around my age. As of now I’ll watch American Dad a lot, alone or with others. I think that the writing on that show is great. The writing seems to go a bit further than Family Guy’s.

                To sum things up as a kid my relationship with cartoons was little to none. Before I sat down to update this blog I spent a lot of time thinking about my childhood and cartoons just had a very minor role. I think that I possibly had ADHD and still maybe do if I have/had trouble sitting there watching cartoons or anything else for that matter. It just felt pointless to spend the day watching tv when I could be outside. Now I have the understanding of animation as an art form to entertain the masses and I wonder if I missed out on anything good by not having an anime phase when I was a preteen.

#2.

                Turning my flip book into digital form was a pretty interesting process since I’ve never used an animation program before. The first step was scanning the index cards; I thought that was going to take forever so I was pretty pessimistic about it. My roommate has a wireless printer/scanner that he recently bought so out of the convenience of the scanner being there in my kitchen I decided to use it. Once I figured out which way the cards should go in and that I could set the scanner to only scan a 3 by 5 inches area then the whole process went pretty quickly, if you consider a little over an hour to be a quick process.  After about twenty index cards were scanned I was smart enough to put the scanner beside my computer instead of walking back and forth between the scanner and computer each time that I wanted to scan a new card.

                Once all of my cards were in a folder I felt like a huge noob. I had no idea what program to use to put all of my cards on a timeline. After deep thought I decided to put adobe premiere on my laptop even though I desired after effects. I haven’t ever used either of these programs but I have a Compaq laptop (the C on the top of it stands for crappy) and I wanted the convenience of working from home again. I ended up with adobe flash and as of 12 noon Saturday I hate it. It was confusing and annoying. I put my cards into frames pretty quickly but then I faced the task of changing the speed of the fps. I was pretty proud of myself for coming to the conclusion of putting the cards into two different layers  pretty quickly but having two layers didn’t allow me to have different frame rates for each one. I’m not sure if that was the programs fault or my own but I deleted a layer and exported mov files with different frame rates. I then had to face the issue of putting those mov files together with their different frame rates. I handled that issue by downloading some movie editing program that let me put the mov files together on a time line. It worked out pretty well.

                This assignment taught me that I really need to start looking at animation demos and reading the book for the class. I also need to do my next project in the mcmaster lab to use after effects or something instead of adobe. On a positive note I started my work early, I scanned my index cards on Thursday and starting my digitizing process on Friday. I finished on Saturday. I spent a whole 3 days on a project a few days before it was due instead of just waiting til the last minute and I leard a few things from it, so congrats to me.

Blog assignment #1

             Hello future me, it must feel good to be in April. Remember back in January when it was cold and you were shivering? Well now when you’re reading this it’s really hot outside and you can wear shorts. That’s a little off topic though, how are you doing in animation? Hopefully you haven’t been in labs all night chugging red bulls because as you remember when you burb after drinking a red bull it tastes awful. It’s really difficult for you not to procrastinate but I hope that you managed to plan ahead and spent multiple nights in the mcmaster labs working on projects a little bit at a time. Also don’t ever panic, I know that you have good ideas in your head because as the you from the past I know what goes on in your mind. Just takes a deep breath and come up with an awesome idea. You’ve done it a million times before.

You have a smart phone, you should use its calendar and alarm functions to help you remember important dates and deadlines. The worst thing you can do with a project is forget about it. That will just totally mess up grades and jobs. If you mess up your grades and jobs you will have to move back in with your parents and you won’t have access to a cool animation lab. I wonder if the sponge bob guy had good grades…maybe future me has googled that by now. Oh here is more advice, don’t believe everything that you google. Anyone can post a misleading website. Although as far as animation goes I bet google helps out a lot. Maybe you read the amination text book for this class and learned a lot of cool stuff without google, if so keep up the good work. Apply your knowledge and make many animated shorts that entertain normal people.

                Right now you’re feeling curious and eager to learn about new tools and animation programs. I hope future me hasn’t lost that spark. You did good working on your flip book, hopefully you did well on all of the weekly projects due every Tuesday, otherwise your Mondays probably sucked while you spent hours doing the animation assignment. The you from the past really doesn’t want to spend hours every Monday doing a project to turn in on Tuesday so that works out in your favor towards breaking the habit of procrastinating. I guess we will have to just wait until April to see how things went.  

Sincerely the past you.