When you were 15 years old, were you interested at animation at the time?, did u make any animations at the time?, how much better was your stuff then mine? (refer to my signature), (D.I.R.T) came first
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My newgrounds movie--->http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/247657
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/251906
Don't take this personally, but why ask a question like that? The only real competition that works in a field like this is with yourself, and from -there- if you choose you take it out among other people. I don't care if some gal comes on here and says she was four years old and doing stuff that made Tony White look like a hack -- it hardly affects your own development. Unless you're trying to light a fire under your butt, or depress yourself as a way of motivating yourself to do better :D
In all honesty from as long as I watched the second link, you can complete a thought...that says a great deal. You see something, however small or inexperienced, to a finish. Carry that as an asset and let it take you places!
I agree with the above. The question doesn't really have a purpose. If you aren't pleased by your animation then you either need to improve for yourself or something else is wrong. It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing or has done. Trust me, you'll get plenty of positive AND negative (sometimes VERY negative) feedback as you show your stuff around the net. One forum loves your stuff and the next tears it to shreds. That's the way it goes.
Now I'm rambling. Anyway, just keep animating and showing your stuff. That's the only thing that really matters. :)
"There's nothing in the world, like being fifteen
Your pockets are empty, but your head is full of dreams
Of girls to be loved, of places to see
It's the best, and the worst, just my friends and me
And we're anything we want to be
And it's good to be alive
Feel the wind in your face, see the blue in the sky
It's days like this I realize
What a gift it is
It's good to be alive."
- Geoff Moore and the Distance.
I think gabe wants a point of reference to gage himself.
Sure, you young'n's probably think it's about competition:)
I was a closet animation lover. In primary school I wore my heart on my sleeve for cartoons and was always the class artist and that wasn't too cool by high school. I was into the drama club. Funny, the way I wound up in the drama club (13 going on 14) was that they advertised if anyone was interested in doing film or video and skits to meet after school. Well they never did persue film or video but stage (becasue it was cheaper and accessible. Remember video meant a B&W reel to reel deal) but becasue those sophisticated grade 13 babes(Yes, we had grade 13! Hi chihuahua!...university material!) would call me "honey" and "dear" I hung around and got into it. What little theatre knowledge I do have would sometimes come into play when I animated.
Doing animation back then required deep pockets...my dad didn't have a super 8mm camera. The turnaround was long. I did a few flip books,
I drew alot of cartoons original and copying styles. I drew for the school newspaper...which were articles and stuff in a display case LOL! I really hit a rough patch when I got to college and realised I never really knew how to draw. I understood cartoons but that was the cart before the horse. Wished I had drawn more from life. But at 18 I was still young by my second year I was okay.
If my scanner was working I might show you what I was doing at 14/15. My cartooning wasn't half bad. I'd been mimicking TV characters since I was 6. You are probably a better animator because I had never really animated. You have the advantage of accessibilty an immediacy. You will not have to wait for your film to come back a month later and find mistakes and have to live with it. You can correct immediately and thus learn immmediately. You have the entire world to give you feedback. So embrace this time you're in. And if I had the technology there is now, who knows...maybe I would have been a better animator.
I always wanted to be an animator, and two of the three main reasons (apart from my love of animation) that pushed me in the right direction were: the fact that I was lucky enough to catch all of the Vasco Granja's animation programmes, he was a big animation buff here in portugal and one of my idols, sure he couldn't draw to save his life, but he knew all of the animation greats and his shows were filled with a huge variety of styles from, Yuri Norstein to Warner brother, funnily enough he very rarely showed disney films. Let's just say that he saved me from saturday morning cartoons!
Also, when I was fourteen I had an Art teacher (and now a very good friend of mine), who took a selected group of his student to his house, gave us a big bucket of plasticine, a video camera and said "animate"!
In three hours we did 10 seconds of very very rough animation, my colleagues gave up saying that it was far too much hassle, but I was just fascinated! There it was, my very first animation!!! I keep on watching it mesmerised, they literally had to take the remote from my hands and drag me out of the house.
From then on I just carried on animating...
so relax and enjoy! think of it this way, you're just 15, experiment with animation, this is the time for you to make mistakes and above all to have fun!
"check it out, you know it makes sense!" http://miaumau.blogspot.com/
I'm only a year older than you and I've been intrested in animation since I was maybe 13 or 14 :D I never really got started doing much until I was 15.
Spoooze!
Well, you are way more accomplished at animation than I ever was at your age, and several years after. When I was your age I liked animation, but I didn't really know I wanted to be an animator till I saw The Little Mermaid when I was 16. I didn't actually animate anything till I was 20 in college. There was no Flash or even an internet when I was your age. If you wanted to animate something, you needed to buy a camcorder the size the news crews use, or something simular. So at that age, animation seemed so far away, esspecially for a kid in Hawaii. But I stuck with it over the years and now I animate for a living. So it is possible. Might not happen over night, or it just might. You just have to stick with it and keep wanting to get better at it.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
I have a similar (although even more delayed) experience to Animated Ape's. The internet, let alone Flash, didn't exist in a graphical form until I was 22 or so. And even then it took forever to download a picture. Director was hot but even that was pretty new (ie. clunky to work with).
I didn't really start animating until about 5-6 years ago when I was mumbledy twenty mumbledy. I'm doing all right for myself, but I definitely wish I had the start that you have got going.
Keep working at it and we all might be asking you for work down the road!
Producing solidily ok animation since 2001.
www.galaxy12.com
Now with more doodling!
www.galaxy12.com/latenight
At 15, I didn't want to be an animator.
Having spent 20+ years in the animation business--and sometimes animating--I still don't.
I never got bitten by the animation bug--not even a nibble.
I wanted to be a comic book artist.
I still do to a small degree. Animation is something I always felt I was pushed towards, and never really got "into".
I reconcille it in that I'm a cartoonist--a much more all-encompassing title than mere animator or comic-book artist.
The animation biz has been my bread and butter for a long time, and storyboarding for most of that time too. In a way, I kind of found the symbiotic centre between the two, as storyboarding has elements of both comics and animation.
As for being better or worse........only you can gauge that.
Professionally speaking, I've been paid for some of the most shamefully WORST drawing of my life, and create the best images I was capable of without earning a cent. Its all about doing the best you can in the moments you have.
"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)
I have been into cartoons ever since I could watch TV. My interest in animation is more as a tool, to build thing of interest to me.
well, by the time I left my country and went to study in the UK at 18, people where already using computer, but I was allergic to them :D and was able to completely avoid them until 2000. I never had to use one of those big camcorders but, I did use some nifty little numbers like a Russian 8mm 1945 model camera with a wind up mechanism (with instructions in Russian and Mandarin), a QAR (bizarre fridge like computer) connected to a surveillance camera, an amiga again connected to a surveillance camera with take 2 and a beatiful rostrum with a 16mm camera (again with a wind up mechanism).
I do realise that I wasn't able to find a job for awhile due to the fact that I was using old style Lotte Reininger animation techniques and also because I thought that computers were overgrown type writers... But, I do feel blessed for having the chance to work with actual film stock!!!
Now, I'm a 3d character animator, doesn't everything change quickly?
and I'm still allergic to computers...
"check it out, you know it makes sense!" http://miaumau.blogspot.com/
THE QAR? I did use the QAR (quick action recoder)...even before the Lyon Lamb video recorder!
I remember the more black (i.e it was strictly black or white not grey or anti aliasing) rough lines you had the more memory it would use...so if you had a really rough scene you might not make through shooting...or forget bg, just character. It was a step up from film pencil tests; you could go in after and change the timing or order. I remember the instructional video narrated in broken english!
Wasn't the QAR a lot of fun, though? Looked like a fridge, sounded like one too, and if it wasn't for the fact that once in a while you could fry an egg on it.... well, I'm sure that you could get chilled drinks out of it too!
Also, the tutorials we're so much fun, I'd be there all blurry eyed after doing loads and loads of work, just to try and explain to my tutor that that pixellated picture was actually a cat.
I was actually quite sad when they took it away and replaced it for an amiga.
"check it out, you know it makes sense!" http://miaumau.blogspot.com/
I think absolutely the first thing I ever animated on the computer was in Director, and that was before Flash hit the scene. If you've never worked in Director, it's an experience with it's own jargon and method of reusing elements. Read that as pain in the butt. Flash made things so much easier. I don't think I've openned Director in three years.
Sprites,cast members, and lingo (director programming language) what a pain in the *ss.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
Frankly I didn't even have a consept of animation.It was like something natually happend...thats why it shocked me when I realize the amount of work that the animators do,and the whole process of makeing a animation.
When I was fifteen, personal computers weren't even thought of in the back of popular science magazines. As to animation, I was into painting at the time. It wasn't until I got my own pc in 1999, and they came out with Flash that I even gave it a thought. My paintings were pretty good though.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.