Suzie has been working entirely with FOSS tools – Free and Open-Source Software. She has detailed every part of her process, including many of the planning stages I also emphasize. You can see her script, storyboards, animatic, production cels, timing notes, and the final.

You have one more chance to see me at the Watson-Guptill table at the SDCC.

The “Get Animated!” book tour is about to launch. We’re traveling up the Pacific Coast to do a few events in major cities along the way. Is yours among them? Come visit and say hello!

I find this worth mentioning because it is a pet theory of mine that many American animation studios miscast their voices because they do not understand how to do it properly. With the emphasis clearly on “star” talent rather than interesting voices, many cartoons end up with boring characters.

I’ll be doing a signing at Meltdown Comics and Collectibles in June!

I was defending anime to a colleague once and I was telling him that I thought most anime shows were brilliantly timed. If you do not have the time, energy, or budget for full animation – as in the case with all television and most of our personal projects – then this kind of timing would be good to know.

Practices which would seem perfectly reasonable are routinely bypassed to cut costs. Planning is eschewed in favor of miscommunication, mishandling, and misappropriation of resources and funds. Most of this confusion can be traced to one single vector: a proliferation of MBAs, middle-level managers and “executives.”

One point I emphasize in the “Get Animated!” book is that the traditional screenplay format is not only unnecessary for good animation, it probably hurts the process. This is not an original view on the subject! In fact most people who know something about animation tend to agree.

Raggedy Ann just didn’t look right, and certainly didn’t move right, and the results were entirely unacceptable. No matter what software you use, computers aren’t good at giving drawings that human touch.