Welp,

I’ve finished up the first class of the Character Animation Program at Animation Mentor. It’s awesome! I love it. Did you know you can spend hours animating a bouncing ball and still not get it right? It’s true. I always knew there was this mythical race of humans out there called “animators”; weird creatures… I always thought I might be one but couldn’t be sure, ’cause I’d never encountered one in the wild.

Well now I’ve met hundreds of them. It’s crazy. It’s like discovering you’re part of an underground society… In this case the society is a bunch of arm-chair-physicists that geek out over cartoons.

Anyway, if you’re curious to see what I’ve been losing sleep over for the last three months, this is my first collection of efforts at learning how to be a real animator. Like, for real.

Let’s enjoy!

Animation Mentor Class 1 Progress Reel SP11 from Adam Singer on Vimeo.

And in case you’re wondering what you’re looking at, these assignments are shown in reverse-chronological order… The whole basis of class one is learning to key into the concepts of timing, spacing, arcs, creating a sense of weight with an unreal, weightless image, and posing characters with minimal features in order to encourage clear and instantly readable body language, as well as making a weightless figure with ridiculous proportions look like an actual living creature that has to stay balanced on his/her feet, et cetera. It’s freaking hard! I used to think that when I had to go in and key stuff on every frame to make it work, I was going too far. Now I am learning that’s supposed to be part of the job. Talk about validation!

My mom & stepdad recently received the finished copies of their new album, “A Deep Oasis” in the mail. I had the privilege of providing the album art.
All of the album art (with the exception of the inside photo-collage) was made by hand out of cut craft paper and then color-corrected in Photoshop. Special thanks to my sister Lilli for helping cut out the paper leaves! It was so nice to spend a good long time making art away from the compooter. Oasis did a fabulous job with the printing. Check it out!

Here’s the cover, what do you think the big round thing is? So far we’ve had a lot of different suggestions…

Inside detail:

… And the finished product (not given proper justice by my madd phone-camera-skillz):

“The making of” (mouse over see detail):

March, 2011

“I’ve Gotta Get Back to Wondaland”

“The Mothership”

“The Purple One”

“Drawing Exercise – Hands”

“The View from your Window”

“The Color RED – Show us what you see”

February, 2011

“The Thing in the Sky – Manipulate provided photo”

“Great Structures”

“Valkyrie – in the style of Gustav Klimt”

“Cruel Intentions”

It’s official.

I’m enrolled in the character animation program with Animation Mentor. I can’t quite put into words how exciting this is for me. I’m posting about it here as a kickoff to what will hopefully be many more entertaining updates about how it all goes.

A little background:

I was a skinny little bizarre eleven-year-old in the wood-paneled basement of a 1970s condo in Lafayette, CO. (This was actually the early nineties but the construction was deliciously retro). I ordered a kids book about how to make your own animation. Now for you spring chickens out there, this was back in the stone ages where computers were mysterious contraptions that most people had never seen with their own eyes. That’s a slight exaggeration but the point is that I would have been likely to interpret the phrase, “point and click” as the name of a trendy new dance. If, as a child, you wanted to make animation, you had to make animation. With your hands.

So I took the dangerously thin glass out of an old picture frame, drew some guiding rectangles on it in magic marker, propped it up on some stacks of thick tattered books, and shoved an old reading lamp underneath. Voila, a light table. Don’t press too hard son, you’ll slice an artery. I drew hundreds of frames, and I loved it.

What I’m getting at is this has been a very long time coming. I heard about Animation Mentor when it was first announced back in 2004. I was immediately sold, but I didn’t enroll because I’d just started a steady job in motion graphics at a porn company (which was incredibly awkward at times but generally entertaining most of the time) and for chrissakes, I’d just graduated with a bachelor’s degree and had a fresh pile of load dept to eat.

Fast forward eight years, and here I am, a self-employed motion graphics artist. It’s been going well, and I’m grateful for all I’ve learned and the connections I’ve made. I hope to continue to pay the bills with motion graphics part-time while I’m in school. But as a long-term career? No thanks, I’m spent. Burnt to a crisp on design, compositing, technical troubleshooting, and several other things I won’t mention until I’m safely severed from the field.

I took a three month sabbatical to work on organic farms for trade in Hawaii last year. I expected to return creatively refreshed and ready to get back to work. But something else happened… I came back and realized I can’t deal with this anymore, and that if I’m going to get serious about character animation, it’s not going to happen in the background of the demanding motion graphics world.

Wish me luck. I hope to tickle your eyeballs and maybe even, dare I say it, produce something that emotionally resonates as I move along in this training.

Finally!

I have to admit, I didn’t expect WordPress to be such a beast. Anyway, I now have two count em TWO websites! Why on earth would I go and do a thing like that? Well I’ll tell you why. I’ve always felt kind of bad for personal work on professional portfolio sites. Poor little personal work, relegated to a cold dark page in the corner. Nobody’s ever gonna click on it. It just wastes away there all by itself, with all of its soul power (to borrow a phrase from Kevin Barnes) shining to an audience consisting purely of people in the frame of mind to judge, if to anyone. Meanwhile the hydrogenated, homogenized, vanilla flavored commercial work is the only thing injected into the collective consciousness. Nobody wins. Sometimes the personal work isn’t invited to the party at all because it doesn’t mesh well with professional sensibilities. And a blog, you can forget it. You’d only put a (personal) blog on your commercial website if you enjoy scaring away potential clients. A commercial portfolio is basically a glorified business card, and you wouldn’t write “Justin Bieber is a big glob of hunk-salad and I think abortions are just great!” on your business card, would you?

With that in mind, I decided to make a whole entire website for my personal work. I figured it would also serve as a good spot for a blog. I’ve never been one to blog, but every once in a while I do something, and sometimes people want to hear about it (well aren’t I special?) so a blog comes in handy.

I don’t care much if my personal ramblings and opinions are written so near to my personal work (be careful or you might find them in the work, too!), because there is a specific intention at play. It goes a little bit like this:
ADAMSINGER.TV is the commercial portfolio. I only put commercial work there. If I took instruction on how to alter my ideas for money, it goes there. It’s really only there for potential clients to see. Nothing more.
THE IMAGINARY OLYMPICS is purely personal. My goal is never to allow myself to think in terms of “how is this going to appeal to…” when I’m doing my personal work. It’s the stuff I do that supposedly allows me to call myself an artist, right? Settle down, let’s not get into a big debate about the definition of “artist.” Please. So the rule is, nothing is allowed on this site if it was made with the conscious intent of appealing to an audience.

But wait… then why would I even put it online in the first place? Well that’s a clever question, isn’t it. Whether you think it’s waterproof reasoning or not, I’m putting it up in case anyone does want to see it. So roll those semantics around in your head if you want. You may decide, “this guy is a hypocrite and an ass!” and that you will not waste another of your precious internet-minutes here. And that’s fine. I’ve never been good at sticking to my own rules, and I’m okay with that.

Oh, and one more thing…

Why “The Imaginary Olympics”? That’s such a childish name.

You’re right! It is a childish name. I thought of it when I was a child. I thought if my goal was to put up a body of uninhibited work, it would make sense to give it an uninhibited name. It’s brazenly silly, just like I used to be before I became self-conscious of that kind of thing. When I was wee, I used to draw big sprawling collages of nonsense on my dad’s giant pads of grid-paper he would use for building designs. They were always called “The Imaginary Olympics.” I decided to draw a new one for the header of this site. It was a good time.

So that’s the story of these websites. Thanks for reading, and have a super day.

the first imaginary olympics

My cousin Eddie and my lovely friend Emily were married on October 12th, 2009! It was such a beautiful cerimony and a wonderful time. I made this wedding video for them. October 12th is the auspicious anniversary of the drafting of the original Gohonzon of Nichiren Buddhism. Enjoy!

No video? Click here.