a word of introduction

Hello friends!

Today's post (actually, this entire blog) is brought to you by 20-time. What is 20-time? It's a concept that's been around since the 1950s, when the company 3M gave employees 15% of their time to pursue personal projects. Among other things, the world got Post-it notes and masking tape out of it, which is a pretty good deal in my eyes. More recently, Google picked up the idea, calling it the 20% project. This iteration of 20-time gave us many features of the Google we know today like Gmail and AdSense. Other companies followed suit with their own versions of the project and today, under the name of 20-time, teachers are putting it to use in schools to give students a chance to explore and develop their own passions! Basically, we get time in school to do something we're personally interested in that we wouldn't otherwise have time for. In class. It's awesome and I'm incredibly excited about it.

So now that you know what 20-time is. . . what is this blog in particular even about? WHY AM I HERE? Learning 2D animation! Ever since I was a little girl watching classic Disney movies, I've been fascinated by the idea of drawings that move and tell stories. It's always seemed so magical to me and I really want to learn to tell stories like that myself. Animation is such an incredible artform and I'm really excited to figure it out. This blog will help me document my progress and share what I'm working on! My final goal (other than learning to animate) is to create a 15 second long animated piece. I know, I know, that doesn't seem like much of a goal-but what it actually entails is quite a lot. I know from the few attempts I've made to animate before how difficult and time consuming it is to create even a few drawings, and to make a 15 second at the standard frame rate of 24 fps means I'll be making 360 separate drawings for just the final animation, not even counting all the practice and drafts on the way to getting there. "Real" fully animated feature films have teams of professional animators working on them for years, and I have just myself and only a semester to work in. So my current goal should keep me pretty busy!

To end, here's some cool stuff from my favorite animator, Glen Keane, to give you an idea of what I'm aiming for. The pieces I'm embedding are more of a rough, "pencil test" style, which is more of what I have in mind for my final product. Besides the fact that I don't really have the technology or resources to produce a more finished style, I absolutely love the organic feel of it and the way you can tell it's a drawing, So it works out well! :) This week I'll mainly be working on getting my materials together and hopefully throwing together some practice animations as I continue teaching myself how to do this thing. My goals include getting a steady source of paper (I'll need a lot!), finding a feasible way to photograph my drawings to turn them into animations (there are some apps I've been looking into that I'm going to test during our next class work session), as well as finding reference for and starting work on some practice animations  Next week I'll put up some of my own animations-the "before"! I'm only going to let the internet see them because it will strongly motivate me to get better. Haha. Have a great week, everyone! Good luck on your 20-time projects, for those of you who are here for that. And to everyone in general, thanks for reading! I hope you'll stick around and maybe even leave a comment :) See you next week.

This is about some more cutting-edge animation technology, which I definitely don't have the resources for! But it's super cool.

This scene from Beauty and the Beast has always been one of my favorites, and this scene in particular is one I could watch and analyze forever. I may or may not have forced my parents to watch this with me once and given a too-detailed commentary on it (this is how you can tell that they really love me, because they listen to me freak out about nerdy artsy animation things:) )

This and the next one are two short films by Glen Keane and I love both of them forever to the moon and back.

ALSO! If you want to see some of my  other art, check out my other blog here.