Storytime!!

So once upon a time I was this little three-or-so-year-old kid who had an older brother who was (I thought) really amazing at art, and whether it was one of those "I wanna be just like you" things, I don't know, but I liked to copy whatever he drew, even though at first that consisted of silly things like superhero symbols. Over and over. And over.

That eventually evolved into copying the spaceships and stuff he got into drawing. All this time, though, I never really proactively pursued art as something you actually did. Just never crossed my mind, I guess. In time, tho, I stopped copying my brother and decided to be a paleontologist, then a "businessman"—whatever that meant. Money, I guess. Wonder where that came from. I mean. Our dad only gave us quarters for every 100% we got in school, and he'd have us pick the dandelions in our yard for a penny each. I was the richest of us three, and eventually even had enough to buy a Super Nintendo from my friend for 20 bucks. I was pleased as peanuts. I could finally quit losing friends for going to their places to play video games and start not making any at all! My life as a nerd had begun.

In seventh grade I started collecting Pokémon cards and pretty much everything Pokémon that I could get my hands on without spending too much money and thus getting into trouble with my dad; he was never too keen on nonfiction stuff, much less "cartoons." I hadn't quite yet gotten much into drawing, actually. I was an avid reader, swallowing about 500 pages a week of Star Wars novels. I read everywhere. In class, on the bus, in the library at lunch. Didn't have many friends, but I was okay with that. I seemed to get good grades more out of passive habit than out of personal effort, and the year went by with me just doing my regular read-in-class until it was over and pass tests and stuff and go home and do homework if I couldn't get away with playing Pokémon. But for some reason everything changed the day seventh grade ended.

Going home the summer of 2000 was completely the usual, except, you know, that half-surreal feeling you get when it's warm outside, you have zero obligations for at least 90 days, your friends are busy and all you have to do for the rest of the day is exist. I went home and for no reason I can yet think of just felt like drawing. So I did. The characters weren't very original (terribly obvious ripoffs of Chrono Trigger's Crono, Marle, and Magus), and really it started off quite slowly, but it grew over the following year like a fat kid with diabetes. That Christmas, I think, I received a copy of the The Official Pokémon Handbook as a gift and by my brother's suggestion started copying the pictures, one by one. I traced at first, but that felt like cheating, so I went to just eyeballing it, and that's where things really took off.

it was a slow project, and I never really got past Sandslash or something or thereabouts, but by March 2001 I had gotten into Dragonball Z (Of course) and was drawing furiously. All the time. On everything. I didn't have a sketchbook, so I kept an old dinosaur book with me wherever I went—under one cover I would keep a stack of blank sheets of paper; beneath the other I would arrange chronologically each completed piece, dated under a terrible pen name. Homework, too, was often my canvas, and when I really liked what I'd drawn, I'd tear off the piece of paper I'd drawn it on when it had been graded and returned, sign it, and stick it in a folder alongside the other drawings.

I made tremendous progress rather quickly; like most people who are obsessed with and draw DBZ things nonstop, I kind of got better at drawing it than the people who drew it. Ish. As my skills improved I started making comics. Silly things with a spur-of-the-moment plot, really. I was a quasi-fan of 8-Bit Theater and figured I could start a webcomic, too, and get famous that way. So I taught myself HTML and built me one heckuva of a website so I could blow the world away or something. As a side note, I had in effect designed and programmed my own independent blog using nothing but Photoshop and raw HTML tables (lol. Tables). I even had my own mini-template files I could modify per need and plug into the code to make sure nothing would go awry when I updated; I was probably something of a genius.

It was about when I started art classes in high school that the Naruto manga hit American shelves. I was always poor and something of a leech; in the third grade I would always borrow my friends' Goosebumps books so I could enjoy them without having to pay or bother my parents, and it was about the same here. My Pokémon cards had been stolen/lost in 7th grade, and I'd gotten in trouble for spending $20 on a 2nd Edition starter pack; I'd also gotten busted for hoarding video game systems and games (I'd spent almost $200 collecting NES, Genesis, N64, Dreamcast, and PlayStation consoles), and my dad had made me sell them back for the peanuts prices used game stores pay. So. In addition to being a mooch, I wasn't about to get caught spending on something like Manga.

So I borrowed my friend's Naruto graphic novels as he got new ones, and I fell in love with it instantly. It was so unique and new with the quasi-anachronisms and with how the art broke the manga norms and was beautiful and the lines had character and the characters had character (as opposed to now, where the lines are uniform and boring and the story drags), and I was convinced that I wanted to do that, too. I wanted to fascinate and inspire and tell stories and break rules and change the world.

This was also about the time that I had learned a bit how the industry worked a little, and realized that continuing the DBZ series wasn't exactly a possibility (don't laugh at me). I was getting tired of idolizing Toriyama and his style, anyway, and had been straining against the limitations having copied it for years: Naruto had shattered in a good way everything I wanted to be. I was going to be a mangaka! Whatever that meant.

Anyway. That's more or less the story of my addiction to art.

Here comes the fun bit:

My very first animation ever was for an assignment in my Multimedia Design class. It was simply an exercise in tweening in Flash, primarily to help us get acquainted with the software:

As an example of animation, it didn't exactly fascinate me because I guess I was kind of just doing what I was told and moving along with the program. I was kind of big on the following orders thing. It wasn't until I saw one Xiao Xiao's stick fight sequences that I was inspired to play with making things move a bit, myself. He kind of pioneered the genre and his stuff is pretty primitive when you look at what's coming out of the Stickpage nowadays, but I was amazed at how you could do so much with something so simple. I tried emulating the basic idea, making my own stick fight scene, but I was stopped by my multimedia teacher, who when she caught me a third time threatened to kick me out of the class if I kept messing around.

After that, I more or less never gave it much of a thought until a year or so later when I decided to see what it would take to actually animate something. I drew a picture and started by taping the consecutive sheets down so they wouldn't move (without a lightboard or anything). It was tedious and annoying since it was hard to see the layer underneath, and I only got three frames done. It wasn't a big enough deal to me that I felt to grind in and improvise something, and I was still all dedicated to the whole going to Japan and becoming a mangaka thing, anyway (no joke), so I kind of gave up again. It would be years before I seriously considered it again.

For the most part art wasn't the most.. encouraged vocational choice in my home. My dad was frequently telling me to get a real job, make real money; that cartoons were no way to make a living and support a family and so on. I guess I kind of let all that "real world" stuff get to me once I graduated high school and got back from my LDS mission so I focused my first years of college toward graphic design, it being artsy but "practical," as if it were somehow a happy medium between the dream and the reality. Since I knew HTML, I was able to land a steady web design job and get a commission or two, but the process of working with clients and artistically-ignorant CoD-on-the-job 


bosses was aggravating and cold and demeaning and I got fed up with it once they fired me for not meeting their expectations. I admit I probably wasn't as skilled as they needed, but in all honesty I was taking too much pride in the work and I couldn't settle for too-ugly design, and that slowed me down a lot.. My end goal was still to make comics, but for the time being and for the "practicality" of it, I stuck with the graphic design path. 

When I'd moved out, my sister became my voice of reason (I'm pretty stubborn and she's right about a lot of things. haha.. ), encouraging me to go into IT or software engineering, since she, too had gone into the design field, but it was proving much less than what she'd hoped. I might have had an edge because of my programming knowledge, but honestly it's not like you can get very far with just a bit of HTML/CSS (I don't even know Javascript) in today's world, and it's probably never quite been enough to go all-out professional. And she was probably right again—only that whole world was getting to be completely dead to me, and I knew doing that would definitely make me miserable.. Nevertheless, I really didn't know where to go if I were to jump the design ship, and the easy decision was to just keep on trucking. So I did.

Then in November 2011, during my third year at USU I was messing around with Flipnote on a nephew's DS. I made a simple and not-so-great bouncing ball animation, and then a hand that just opened in like three or four frames, but it may as well have been a gateway drug. The following Sunday I started doodling a storyboard in church of Mario kicking all sorts of butt in a more 3D version of world 1-1 of the first game. I went home and downloaded a 30-Day trial of Adobe Flash and started actually working on it. I'd had no idea what the "12 Principles" were, but I just drew things until they looked and felt right when they moved and I was absolutely hooked.

I was just doing it out of hobby at first, I think. One of those "have-a-pastime-you-love-while-you-do-something-you-hate sorts of things, but that love kept growing—similar to how I had started drawing that day all those years ago. Each animation project I started was like a new toy—I itched to figure out how to make it work and do what I wanted and feel natural and smooth. I walked around and skipped and jumped and fell down, trying to get an idea in  my head of what it looked like so I could accurately recreate it. I'm sure I looked like an idiot, but it was fun—and I began to realize that I enjoyed this far too much to leave it alone. Mostly this only served to solidify my long-term wish to tell stories through comics and animation—that is, until the girl who lived above me introduced me to her brother, who was going into Brigham Young's animation program—one of the best programs in the United States. And affordable. Like. Really affordable.

My life in a relative instant was hurled upside-down. I had found love but to pursue it would have to face terribly unfamiliar fears: I was terrified to make the change, to take the leap; I would be moving away from everything I knew. Away from family and friends and familiar terrain; I may have been caught up in a false sense of security, at least it was convincing—I would be moving int a place that was certain to be insecure and foreign. USU reputedly hates BYU, so it was hard to get past the fear of being surrounded by the extremely-perpetuated notion of an overly-saturated and extreme "Mormon culture" (I am LDS, by the way, but there is quite a line between the LDS Faith and the Mormon Culture). This was a bigger decision for me than going on a mission. That had been easy. This was something that would place me far enough away from everything that made me feel safe that if I were to fall short and fail, there would be nobody to blame except myself.

And being the youngest of a million, that was not a responsibility I was accustomed to. I have to admit I was probably being kind of a baby about it.

So naturally I forestalled the decision as long as humanly reasonable, and sent in my application effectively last-minute before the deadline. It got through and I was accepted. I was able to transfer almost all of my credits, which was an enormous blessing; I wouldn't have to repeat any classes and waste another year finishing generals I'd taken care of long ago. The place isn't a cesspool of overzealous bigots. I live in a social hole, so to speak, but I've taken all the classes I need to apply for the major, and I feel pretty good about this.. Now I actually have to qualify. Hah.

I'll be honest. I'm tired of writing this. I'm going to stop.

Anyway. Live the dream. 

Whatever that means.