A few weeks ago, a nice fellow interviewed me for a project in one of his animation classes.  I thought I would publish my answers here, too.

How did
you get involved with animation?

In fourth
grade a few friends and I started making flip books.  Usually involving stick figures, guns,
defecation and the occasional rocketship. 
Years later, in college, I made some animated gifs.  That was before Flash came out.  After university, I got my hands on Flash 5,
and soon realized I couldn’t live without it.

Now, I
should point out that I didn’t study animation or art (although I wish I
had).  I have a degree in music.  So I was doing some teaching and gigging on
the side when I started learning Flash. 
I started taking on freelance animation and illustration jobs after
that.  That went on for maybe 5 or 7
years.  It’s really only been in the last
two years or so that I’ve made a concerted effort to earn a living solely with
animation.  I can’t say  that I’ve “arrived” yet, but my perseverance
has certainly paid off.

How did
you get your first job in animation and what it was like?

I
convinced my boss to pay me to make a cartoony website for the school.  It won some kind of local website award, and
so he was willing to hire me again to make some animated Ecards and banner ads
etc.

Do you
have any advice or tips for university graduates on how to get involved and be
successful in the animation industry?

As trite
as it sounds: stick with it.

Would you
recommend working freelance rather than directly in a company?

I’ve
always worked freelance.  It’s probably
pretty nice to work for a company if you can find one who will hire you.

Which
computer programmes do you use most often?

Flash,
Photoshop, Cubase,  various sound editing
software, Illustrator

What
equipment and materials for characters and sets are used most often in your
animations?

Paper,
pencil, and Wacom

Could you
tell me roughly how expensive equipment, materials and programmes for graduates
who wish to be freelance animators will cost?

I don’t
have a light table.  I wish I did.  But I have a tablet.  A graphire 2, and recently I bought a bamboo,
which was less expensive but just as good if not better.  I’ve worked on the larger intuos tablets and
I don’t find the larger drawing space to be advantageous.  So I’d say go with the bamboo for 50 EUR
roughly. 

Flash is
something like 200 or 300 bucks, I can’t remember exactly.  Some programs come with hardware — I got an
LT version of photoshop which came with my graphire, also music software came
with my midi keyboard.

Do you
have any advice for finding work and meeting deadlines?

You’ll
need a demo reel, and a webpage.  Even
one of those free blog pages will suffice to show off your work.  Even when you are starting out, never take on
any work that doesn’t compensate you fairly. 
If they try to persuade you with promises of  “exposure” or the like, politely run for your
life.

I think
that good planning is the key to meeting deadlines.    And metaphorically speaking, start with the
brush possible.

What was
the hardest job you have taken and what do you find as animator is generally
the hardest part of any job you undertake?

The job
I’m working on at the time is always the hardest, for some reason.  

And I’d
say the hardest part is good planning.  
Sometimes, I’ll have panels in the storyboard which are really vague and
I tell myself, “ah, I’ll deal with it when I get to it in Flash”.  It always comes back to bite me in the ass.

What do
you enjoy most about your work and animations you create?

Working
in Flash, most of my animations rely on “cutout” type animating.  Occasionally I find an excuse to do some
traditional animating; I get a real kick out of the times when it  turns out good.

As corny
as it sounds, the most rewarding thing is the rare occasion when my work  causes 
a genuine emotional response from the viewer. 

I almost fell for this one, and I wasn’t born yesterday. Thanks to ole Thunderbird for watching my back. What’s the word?
Phishing is particularly dangerous because 1) it is possible to fake a return email address and 2)it is possible to use misleading links.

I haven’t a clue how it’s done, but steps can be taken to make a maligned email appear to come from a legit sender, like pictured here.

Secondly, you can make a link go to a false address by changing the href tag .  Like this:  http://www.yahoo.com if you click on that link you’ll see it does not go where it would appear that it should.   Or just look down below in the status bar when rolling over said link.

If you look at the status bar before clicking, be sure to take a good look, too.  Domain names are always the last thing before the first single slash:
For example:  a url says:  http://www.google.com  — that’s google.  http://maps.google.com — still google, pointing to the subdomain maps.  Subdomains go to the left.  But http://www.google.com.seezen.net is not google, it’s seezen.net, with a subdomain called “com” and a sub-subdomain “google”.  So the ruse is to use a legit sounding subdomain in your evil webaddress to throw off the scent.  You wouldn’t click on http://www.iamavirus.com, but you might fall for http://www.google.com.iamavirus.com, which is basically what the one I got today does.

The final ingredient for a phish scam is to cause some false alarm, for example, a fake message from ebay saying that your account has been hacked.  However, that kind of thing has already been widely written about to the point that it would raise an automatic red flag.  This message is particularly insidious because it lacks that kind of drama and goes instead for a nagging “gotta get that done” kind of message.

Here’s a video from some footage I took back in March. That water was cold. Julie went swimming anyway. The bécasseau (calidrid) went on with their game of cat and mouse with the tide. From the top of the lighthouse, the ground looked like a miniature. Then a helicopter exploded.

Some backgrounds for an upcoming one…

Hardly a real hack, but life improving nonetheless.  I like using Mozilla Thunderbird very much, but it has been getting to me how often I miss  the “get mail” button and hit “write” instead.  Then you have to close that new window, click “do not save”, and try again.  Finally it occured to me that you can move the buttons around.  I added a space between those two, and problem solved.

and


Minimize to tray is a groovy little add-on for Thunderbird for those of us who like to leave the email client running but hate the cluttered taskbar.

I still know a few people out there who don’t get why firefox is rad.  It’s the add-ons, man.  But which ones to get? So some brainiac has bundled a couple together to get one started based on his or her needs.  (Warning, exclamation mark überdosis)
Fashion Your Firefox

The good folks at Trick or Script have released a new freebie plugin, which brought me to think about all the little things one can do to juice up productivity in Flash. (more…)

On the home stretch of her PHD, Julie has completed writing and is now revising and doing the finishing touches. It is a race against the clock, and tensions are high. Sleep cycles are stretched and completely out of sync with the rotation of the earth. Tempers flair, and dishes are washed on a less than daily basis. It’s like living with meth addicts.
Finding time to be good to oneself is very important in days like these. Yesterday, I took her to lunch at the Sushi place on the corner — there are at least four in the neighborhood. Going for a daily walk is also nice, although unlike Frank, we never bring any furniture we find on the street home with us.

And this weekend is the famous Fete de la Musique, which is a veritable orgy of busking and free concerts.

Meanwhile, Julie has enlisted her little mom to help with the proofreading, which has been an ordeal of itself. Although a very literate woman, things like copy and paste, or the fine difference between “save” and “save as” are a complete mystery to her. This is compounded by the fact that she is dealing with a computer with a German language operating system.

Fortunately, there is logmein. Although I had thought about doing it before, I could absolutely kick myself for not finding a solution like it earlier on. You install it on your mother-in-law’s computer with a password, and then you can access and control it remotely via a web browser. Amazing. Totally cool. Logmein.com

Our young birdies don’t come to the flowerbox anymore, although we see them around still. We’ve populated all the pots and boxes with shishkebab skewers to discourage anymore flower box romance taking place, cause Brother, we don’t need the hassle. However, with the warm weather and the windows open all day, we’ve had a damn pigeon fly into the flat three times in the last four days. Not cool. We are getting a cat.

Julie gets this message quite often while working on her thesis. “There are too many spelling or grammatical errors”. Therefore your paper won’t be able to run the automatic spell checker.

This problem seems to be complicated by writing a work in multiple languages. What we did to fix the problem was first select the entire text, then double click on the language down at the bottom, select the language, deselect automatic language detection. The kicker is you have to do this once selecting the main text, and then again selecting the footnotes.

That Firefox 3 Release Candidate makes me so excited. Woooh hoo! Most of my add-ons are compatible now.
20 top add-ons that are ready for Firefox 3
…And there has been much rejoicing.
9 that ain’t
…boo hoo.
The one that I am missing most? FireFTP is a handy little thing if you have your own website.