I've always wanted to become an animator, or a comic book creator. However, despite what you may believe, this was not born out of a love for anime. No, these desires where extant many years before I had been properly introduced to the world of anime.
I grew up watching many cartoons, especially the ones on Nickelodeon at the time. Ren & Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters... these shows all had an effect on me, and to this day still influence the style of art that I produce.
I began trying my hand at making comics in the 6th grade. The year was 1999, I was old enough to understand things well enough, but still young enough to be wild, crazy, and full of energy. The comic series I made at that time reflected a lot of this, and despite the fact that they consisted of a bunch of scribbled doodles on a page... I still look back on them and feel like I'll never be able to capture the pure, childlike insanity. Not just in terms of the art, but also the amount of insanity that I put into my writing. It was the kind of thing that somebody would read and it would simultaneously make them go "what the fuck?" and make them laugh their ass off. Anybody I showed it to absolutely loved it, even if they didn't fully understand it.
From there, I entered Jr. High and continued creating comics. However, I also started experimenting with animation. I had made flipbooks before, but I feel like my true first foray into something approaching professional-level animation was when I started to attempt to draw different frames in MS Paint on my computer and string them all together in Windows Movie Maker. I actually got one scene done, complete with sound effects that I recorded with my mouth. Understandably... this didn't go on for much longer... thankfully, in part, because I was able to obtain a copy of Macromedia Flash, and also eventually got introduced to Newgrounds.com
That was the bastion of my existence in that day and age. All throughout High School, I was a rabid fan of Newgrounds, visiting it every day, watching different animations, and attempting to create my own. I was so motivated by what other people on the site had been doing that I managed to actually complete some animations and release them, even getting them past the judgement period and preventing them from getting "blammed" (or deleted, as it were). However, my skills as an animator were still self-taught, and I was not progressing very much.
By the time I left High School, I got a real job, and with less free time, my art slowly faded to the sidelines.
I've grown since then... as both an artist and as a person, and my plan is to still hopefully turn my passion into a career one day. However, with the advent of 3D animation and the slow, decaying death of 2D (at least in North America) I feel like my dream may never come to pass.
So, in recent years, I've set a new goal for myself: To make enough money doing something else to support my own life, and to do art & animation on my own time. Not as a career, but as a kind of hobby, a kind of lifelong diversion that I would use to express my complete and utter joy with the artform. |