Samples from Latest Custom Children's Book

AAU Fall '07 (Semester 4 of 7)

It's been a while since I wrote about my ongoing schooling at the Academy of Art (AAU) in San Francisco. I'm studying to be a Story Artist in the Animation Program. Below my take on the courses I took in the Fall of last year...

Advanced Storyboarding
This class was a little frustrating in that the instructor didn’t have much structure to the semester as I would have liked. Most classes were spent listening to him talk about his experiences and opinions. Some days we didn’t have any homework assignments or exercises. It was useful but could have been better.

Every storyboarding class is completely dependent on the instructor and there’s no higher or lower level of instruction to a course. Next semester’s Storyboarding class would prove to be entirely different than the previous two.

Clothed Figure 1
This was an interesting class. The illustration courses have on the whole been stronger than the animation courses if just for the structure and curriculum of the semester.

Learned to recognize and draw different kinds of folds that wrap around and define the body underneath it. Very difficult to do. It’s like learning to have x-ray vision, to see through the clothing in order to know how to draw body and the clothing’s reaction to it.

Acting for Animators
In feature film animation, the real actors are not the people who give voice to the characters but those who make the characters PHYSICALLY MOVE to those voices – the animators. Animators study acting and take acting classes, like this one.

There were days when I thought we could have done more and the instructor was distracte. But it was a lot fo fun, and there were a few very valuable things I took away from the class.

The first thing was make it physical: touch, punch, shove, pull. Once you do that it’s easier for your acting partner (or other character in the scene you’re working on) to react. The second was reading the book “Impro” by Keith Johnstone – the entire book is a must for any storyteller. The book "Acting for Animators" by Ed Hooks is also highly recommended.

The Vegetarian Redux

I'm rethinking a storyboard I'd created a while ago called "The Vegetarian" where a little girl is a heroine of the title name, who saves livestock from being eaten.

The bad guy in the first version was a chef about to cook a crab, but now I've made it a butcher about to chop up a chicken. He also loves his lone decoration in his butcher shop, a leafy green plant.

"Milo's Train" and the Auction

Our oldest son's preschool had an annual fundraising event where there is a live auction during dinner. The auction items are things parents have volunteered whether it's their summer home in the wine country, a package trip to san diego or box seats at Giants stadium. A parent who knew I was in school to become an animator suggested that I auction off my ability to make a cartoon. I thought, "No way."

But she was persistent and my wife got into the idea, so I figured why not. I said I would make an animatic starring the child as the protagonist of their very own story. In other words, whoever won my auction item, I'd go over their house, get to know their kid, take a few pictures, recordings, sketches and go back and make a story with their child as the hero, a story that would reflect the child's interest, a little snapshot of their mind at age 4.

But some people were still a little confused as to what an animatic was so I decided to make one for my son, Milo, and showcase that at the live auction event. In addition I printed out a color copy of the storyboards and bound it like a small children's book so people could flip through a hard copy.

The parent who was running the auction event asked me what the item price should be so they could estimate a starting bid. I replied I had no idea since I'd never done anything like this before and I didn't even know what story artists make. So we guesstimated the best we could and came up value of $1000 and a starting bid of $600.

When the bidding started, a number of parents raised their numbered paddles immediately. The bid quickly rose to over $1000. When it hit $1500 the number of bidders dwindled down to three. Then it became a bidding war between two families who happened to be sitting at the same table, right next to me. I was too shocked and embarrassed to look, I just kept my head down. The winning bid was $2000. It was the highest selling item of the night.

Below is the animatic I made for Milo called "Milo's Train".