How long have you been animating?:D

[kaylactsm]

We are very interested! Let us know!

[Greenlaw]

I started animating when I was about 7 years old. I had seen somebody create a flip book animation of a bouncing ball on TV, so that was the first thing I tried. My second flip book was more ambitious: the Pink Panther walk. Those were the first of many, many flip book 'epics' to come. Those flip books are long, long gone but they probably weren't very good anyway.

When I was in junior high, my dad lent me his 8mm film camera so I could create stop motion animations, which I continued doing throughout high school. I started out making the usual dinosaur battles, space battles, robot battles, little sister vs breakfast battles, and even some hand drawn cel animations. I still have a lot of that stuff but, sigh, they're not very good either.

I think it was the late eighties when I started creating animations on a computer, and in 1998 I got a job creating visual fx for b-movies, which included a lot of 3D animation. That gradually paved the way to working on many commercials, feature films, and video game cinematics. These days I'm working at Dreamworks Animation making 2D cartoons and I still enjoy making my own animated shorts, which I now create with my wife and daughter.

I think my current work is actually better than my old flip book animations too.

G.

[Greenlaw]

BTW, my daughter has a huge head start over my humble beginnings. When she was around 5, I watched her draw a series of sequential images of animals walking and in flight. That totally blew me away and I don't think she even realized she was drawing animations.

Then last year, we took a long road trip and to help keep her occupied, I let her use my iPad and I showed her how to use a simple frame by frame animation program. She was 7 at the time and ever since that day she's created literally hundreds of mini-shorts, including a couple of series she calls 'Dumb Dawg' and 'Clumsy Cat'. Jeez, I wish I could be so prolific! One of these days I'm going to have to compile some of her cartoons and post them on the website.

Soon I'll show her how to use Anime Studio. I wonder what she'll do with that.

G.

[Dalv]

I started out like many kids do: with flipbooks on post-its, corners of notebooks, whatever I could find. I wasn't very good at it since I'd run out of paper sooner than I'd run out of ideas. I also made little comic strips that were terrible, but I was younger so it was all good fun.

A few years passed and I watched some stick figure .GIFs and naturally wondered how they were made. I found Paint Shop Pro by Jasc at a computer expo and their companion product was Animation Shop Pro. I made my own animations, self hosted them on my website and filled my afternoons and summers with painstakingly making frame by frame animations one .JPG at a time.

Gave up on GIFs when Flash came about. I saw Frog in a Blender and knew GIFs wouldn't cut it anymore and Newgrounds was a sensation among all my friends.

They offered tutorials on Newgrounds but as a hobbyist I could never afford Flash and I couldn't make sense of it the limited time I was able to try it. I was pretty lousy with frame by frame anyway and I gave up for several years as life had other plans for my focus and attention.

I voted 10 years+ but I am no master animator. I will say that it's allowed me to pick up where I left off and I have to think back to when I started how much easier it would have been to keep with it if I had a product with this power with a decent price tag. I'm not quite as prolific as I was back then but these days I find spare time in low supply.

[3deeguy]

I grew up watching Hanna Barbera and only got as far as flipping two pages. Eventhough I've loved drawing since I was a toddler I never gave animation a serious thought as a kid because I knew so much work was involved.
I only started animating because I saw "Debut" in an office store in 2011. The idea of bringing artwork to life was too tempting to pass up. After about two or three days I upgraded to AS Pro. I absolutely loved it!
And the folks on this forum have always been 'beyond' amazing!

[mtbuck24]

A little over one year.

I have always drawn my whole life but I never took any art classes to actually learn techniques and skills so I did it just for a hobby. One day I came home from school and my dad told me 'he got something for me'. Threw down a DVD sleeve on the table with AS PRO 7 written on the front (that he had bought from Amazon). I was immediately confused and looked at my dad and said "dad, you know I don't like Anime, what is this?"

He looked at me and rolled his eyes and said "you are welcome" then walked out of the room.

Still confused as to why my dad got me 'Anime Something' I didn't even bother opening it till later that evening. After home work I took it out of the sleeve and popped it in my dads computer. After installing and seeing the UI and trying to even draw something with it, I was immediately turned off and shelved it for about 2 years (unfortunately).

At the time of Anime Studio version 9 I had a free summer from college and wanted to teach myself a new skill. So I bought version 9 of Anime Studio (because I had lost Anime Studio 7) and started working. My goal before the end of the summer was to animate something to as close as the South Park animation as I could. By the time the summer was finishing up Version 9.5 came out, which I then upgraded to. Starting my Dr. Cure character who I animated for my College Professor Dr. S, who wanted to use my animations for his own personal work, but that never worked out.

Than these last couple of months I have had a YouTube channel that grew a lot more than I even thought. Didn't even think I would get subscribers in the first place. And have been trying to learn and practice not only the technicalities of AS but learn the principles of Animation.

So still kinda new, but would have started a lot sooner if I knew ANIME STUDIO was ANIMATION!?! lol. I didn't even know or want to know about the software this whole time it's been called Anime Studio, because I can't stand Anime. Just a suggestion for maybe a strategy to market to Animators, change the name to something other than Anime....

Thanks

-McCoy

[dueyftw]

I have been doing this for about 10 years.
My very first animation took 3 days to render.


Switch to 2d because I didn't want to do all the work required to animate in 3d.

The funny thing is that I don't draw very well. So I search for an animation program that would help the non artist make animation. So I tried almost everything from Alice to Zen Cub 3d. For a long time I used Poser and got tired of using the same 3d objects everyone else was using. Then I found Moho and fought with it. But I could do animation with Moho so I stayed with it.

Dale

[3deeguy]

I have been doing this for about 10 years.
My very first animation took 3 days to render.

Switch to 2d because I didn't want to do all the work required to animate in 3d.
Dale

Three days, wow! I decided to let my 7:20 minute animation render while I slept. When I woke up I saw it needed edits. I don't catch everything right away. I have to render many times.
I decided not to try 3D animation until I've mastered 2D. There's still a lot to learn.

[sbtamu]

My very 1st animation was in 1981 on a Apple 2c I believe. It was done in BASIC. I was a Jr in HS and I looked at the lines(codes) in an accounting program and noticed that I could make lines move over time. So I just used that as an example to make a stick man walk across the screen.

The teacher was impressed but was quick to remind me that this was a computer class and not for wasting time on the computer.

[dueyftw]

I have been doing this for about 10 years.
My very first animation took 3 days to render.

Switch to 2d because I didn't want to do all the work required to animate in 3d.
Dale

Three days, wow! I decided to let my 7:20 minute animation render while I slept. When I woke up I saw it needed edits. I don't catch everything right away. I have to render many times.
I decided not to try 3D animation until I've mastered 2D. There's still a lot to learn.

You never worked with Bryce. A full h-d frame with almost nothing in it will take 3 to 5 minutes at high quality.

Dale

[3deeguy]

You never worked with Bryce. A full h-d frame with almost nothing in it will take 3 to 5 minutes at high quality.

Dale

You're right. I didn't discover animation until 2011. The animation I just finished was 10,296 frames. I rendered it H.264 Quicktime. I set compression to "good" and went to bed.

[heiseman]

Speaking of Bryce, here is something I did back in 2001. Yeah I've been animating since Bryce and Flash 4. At least 14 or 15 years now.

[img]http://i59.tinypic.com/ru8ufk.jpg[/img]

[kaylactsm]

Thanks for the replies everyone! It's interesting to see the time span of how long you have all been animating!

[Furpuss]

I did my first animation when I was 15 years old. That was in 1956.