Animation 101

It is my second semester back in school. After last semester's class in Flash, I could use another semester of it to really nail it down but the class has been moved to the middle of the day while I'm only good for night classes. My alien creature from the final last semester wasn't animated the way I thought he should be so I decided to enroll in a beginning animation class. Animation 101 for me (really Artdm 165) but it is something I've never really tackled before. I also wanted a class that got me drawing again and, with a little luck, this class might be as hardcore as the animation courses from my old school San Jose State.

As it turns out, the class is. Thankfully so. It is forcing me to be much more creative. A good blend of lots of drawing in the sketchbook and some good basic animation lessons in Flash. I wasn't an animation major back in my old SJSU days, having opted for being an Illustration Major instead, but I always admired my fellow students that did take the animation route. Most of them seem to be still working too.

I still don't think I care to be an animator but, at this point, I'm not going to rule out any creative opportunities out there. And having some animation skills under my belt can't hurt either. In many ways, like good representational art, it really is the study of life and how things move. And I'm finding it a challenge to learn to simplify my style as I tend to go into my cartooning/comic book mode rather than an abbreviated-for-animation style.

I enjoy a lot of animation and have a chunk of it in my DVD collection but I was never really a "Toon-Head" like other artists can be. But I am getting into it more lately that I expected I would. We are getting a mini history lesson of Animation as we move through the semester, which I love. Combine Art with History and you got my attention. And I find I like the older animation much more from the Fleischer Brothers works of Popeye, Betty Boop, and Superman to the early Disney works.

It turns out that early animation style that I like is called "Firehose" Animation. While Disney and the Fleischer Superman cartoons were taking it to a new level of realism with rotoscoping, studying film and life, and just mastering their craft, I do love the real Firehose shorts before that. What they lacked in realism, they more than made up for in creativity. You could do anything that your imagination could dream up. Today's mainstream animation lacks that whacked-out creativity.

Featured in this post are some of the earliest drawings in the semester. Some basic head lessons and how to tweak the formula. Good practice.