Blink and You’ll Miss Mark’s First Steps

Okay, this isn’t my first animated walk, but it’s one of the first that didn’t make use of limited animation techniques, such as the puppet rigging system in Anime Studio Pro.  I did this one the new old fashioned way, frame by frame in Photoshop. (And then to hammer home the old-fashiondness, I added some cheapo fakery to make it look like a real pencil test; see here for some examples.)

In studying animation over the last few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to do traditional animation. I got to know Anime Studio pretty well, but I still found myself struggling to work around the inherently stiff look of cutout characters. To my possible detriment, I have my heart set on creating cartoons that look more like Bugs Bunny and less like South Park.

Luckily technology will still work in my favor. Disney needed an army of young women to ink and paint his toons on thousands of sheets of celluloid; computers have sped up that process (and have coincidentally prevented me from meeting an army of young women). I don’t have to max out my credit cards buying film and equipment, and I don’t have to pray for distribution; there’s always YouTube.

My hunch is, once I become more confident in traditional animation, I’ll be able to find ways of sneaking limited animation into my workflow without sacrificing the old-fashioned zaniness I’m looking for. But I think this is definitely the best way to get started. If nothing else, it gave me some motivation to improve my drawing skills, which is why this site exists.