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Age/Gender: 29, Male
Location: Philly
Job: NG artist
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Entry #9
How I got into animation / recording audio part 2
I never had any intention of ever animating a damn thing.
I drew with a #2 pencil up until college, where I was forced to use different media, like paint and colored pencils. I resisted at first, but I eventually took a liking to oil paint. (more on that later).
I really never thought much about my career in art, but Kutztown University was recommended for its "art" program. I even had to take an art/design test to get in. Some 9/10s of people were apparently turned away. Here, I'll break down what the art program there is really all about: Kutztown has an amazing design/advertising program. If you want to be a graphic designer, go there. Kutztown also has a very comprehensive "fine art" program. If you want to learn to paint or build really cool furniture, go there.You'll still be poor as shit, but that's another topic for another day. If you want to be an "Illustrator", as in a guy who draws what people tell him to and you get paid for it, Kutztown's illustration program is a really half-assed mess. You don't learn a damn about the business end of it...a VERY important part.
Sadly, that was the category I fell into. The way the program is set up, all future illustrators/designers take the same basic intro to art and design classes. THEN you can decide where you want to focus more on your remaining 3 yrs. (or 5 if you're a really lazy asshole).
By my third year I was thinking I'd be one of these caricaturists that draws big stupid faces for magazines like Time and Entertainment Weekly - basically all your popular news and entertainment magazines, and thusly dropped all my remaining design classes. When I had to layout a newspaper for an assignment, I pretty much decided design was not my deal.
Here's some of my oil paintings from a few years ago...sadly, they're probably the last I'll ever do. (i think my humor is also painfully out of date on these)
Ok, long setup so far. NOW, one teacher in the art building conned the dept. into allowing him to teach a single, one semester animation class. Needless to say, a friend and I missed it our second year and got in our third.
It was a totally crackpot class and I loved it. Professor Shantz pretty much allowed us to do whatever we wanted. We only had to do 7 animations that semester and minimum time for each was 10 seconds. A few of us went totally overboard and made 6 minute animations WITH voices and music.
Now, before you roll your eyes at that statement, just know this was a time way before I we had flash at our disposal. I believe this was the year Tom made Pico's School. (I never even knew about flash at this point, let alone could afford it.) The only animation equipment we had at our disposal were two old pencil test machines in this weird windowless little room in the art building. I swear, you'd never even find this room is you weren't told exactly where it was. Anyways, wether we were doing stop motion, or hand drawn stuff, we had to shoot it frame by frame, in order, no mistakes. All in one sitting. It was regularly 85-90 degrees in this room and a typical 5 minute animation took easily 6 hours to shoot. The professor even had the balls to put one of those bed pans out in the hallway (yes the ones old people shit in when they don't want to get out of bed). I shot late at night, so I could run down and piss on the side of the building if i had to. The machines only had a 2 minute pause on them...if you didn't make it back in time it began recording like a typical vcr, and you were totally fucked.
It was truly a grueling test of endurance just to make a damn cartoon, but in the end it was worth it. We had our classmates rolling, something my illustrations could never do.
As for the sound - we didn't even have a real guide, we had to figure it out ourselves. In the end, we managed to rig a tv, 2 VCRs, and an 8-track tape mixer together. We'd first watch the animation on the tv, and record our audio live into the tape recorder so it synced up. Then, we'd feed the video from the one vcr into the other and the sound from the 8-track into the vcr as well. Here's a crappy diagram.
Here's the first animation I ever made with a voiceover. I won't make any excuses, I was totally inspired by Bill Plympton and it doesn't make a god damn bit of sense. It's also the ONLY semi-serious one I made for that class. I hate it.
After college, because of Professor Shantz, and the fun time I had in that class I tought myself flash and after a few rough years under my belt, here I am. (drawing simple little black and white dudes that tell dick jokes what)
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