I applied to CalArts for Character Animation on November 30th and one of the requirements was 20 life drawings, so I have a few that I'll post now and I'll probably add more later. I was really surprised how much shit was required, I had to convert all my drawings into film slides and then buy a slide carousel (some weird specific model they needed) and load 'em in and label with all this other shit. Anyway, it was annoying but I'm glad I actually ended up applying since I didn't start most of my drawings until a week or two before the deadline (I actually did a good chunk during our Thanksgiving dinner at my Grandma's house).

# 1 - 6-8 minutes each (my dad/brother)
# 2 - quick 1-2 minute sketches of brother
# 3 - more quick sketches of my brother
# 4 - 8 minutes, my brother again
# 5 - 2-4 minutes, my dad
# 6 - 6 minutes, my dad

One thing that was really annoying though was how hard they made it to submit digital files, for instance, all the animations I made which I figured would make up a good part of my supplement. But all the requirements for each field were different and they discouraged sending in CD's so I just had to put one of my better animations on a DVD at school and I printed off a bunch of screenshots from a lot of my unfinished, better looking animations and sent 'em in. I know they mostly base their decision off the life drawings, but it was still kind of counting on sending in a digital portfolio or something. Oh well.

Another part of my portfolio that I sent in was a traditional animation I made this summer at Columbia College in Chicago. It was a pretty interesting class and I managed to make some pretty decent looking stuff for my first time at hand drawn animation. We had roughly 5 class days at about 3 hours each to make these and I only recently got off my ass (with the help of a friend) to put in on YouTube, which is located here. I was very pleased with a lot of those drawings, I'll try to post some more up, but here are my favorite frames:

# 1 - standing proud
# 2 - mid-run
# 3 - also mid-run

I was also pretty impressed with myself (I'm so smug I know) for doing that whole door animation without using a ruler. I'd love to do more but it's not something I can just do around the house so I'll probably have to wait until next Summer or even College before I can sit down and make a more developed one. I wish everyone here who's all into Flash and everything could try their hand at a traditional animation, it's a world away from Flash but it's not in a huge sense. It's more the little stuff, like if you draw the character a few millimeters away from where you need it, you can't just select it and inch it over, you have to redraw the whole thing to get it in the right place. It forces you to plan everything out ahead of time or else it'll get screwed up, so it really helps you out if you're not the best with the planning stages that go into an animation. For example, I don't think my character has enough impact with the ground when he's running up to the camera, something that could be easily fixed in Flash with a few nudges downward, but can't really be fixed here.

Wireframes are really important too, I did the majority of that short animation without them, I just kept drawing the next frames (which isn't the smartest thing to do) but I got lucky and it ended up looking pretty fluid. But wireframes are necessary because you have to go into a completely different room to "pencil test", which just means putting each piece of paper under a camera and scanning it into a "lunchbox" - basically a big external hard-drive that holds tons of frames and has playback options on the outside. Sure you can flip the pages back and forth while you're at the light table but that only works for really obvious mistakes, it was hard to get used to after just being able to quickly view your animation in Flash.

Traditional animation has a much more natural feel than Flash does, it's weird, even if they're not the greatest drawings, just the fact that it's done traditionally will automatically make it look better. Flash seems a little more hard-cut and people expect things to look better because it's much easier to edit and get the look you desire. I highly suggest at least trying it once, it's a lot of fun, where Flash seems like work a lot of the time, this seemed like a vacation almost. Whatever, that was a gay analogy but I hope you get the point.