Ever since I can remember, I've been intrigued by animation. I loved to draw and watch cartoons, as most kids do. I even remember waking up early in the mornings when we lived in a trailer and going to sit in my beanbag to watch cartoons before school. We only had one TV at the time with a tower antenna outside attached to the side of our house. There were a few times I'd wake up too early and the station was off-air, so I'd just sit and look at the colorful bars and wait for he signal to click on.
I remember my parents taking us on a tour of a studio (PBS?) that detailed how cartoons were made. We later bought a video camera that supported stop motion animation, which I spent a good deal of time experimenting with making my Matchbox cars race around in circles and crash into each other.
Then I began to have more and more responsibilities handed to me and I had less time to play around with it. The fascination resurfaced with the birth of thepokerstrips.com, but then my brief infatuation with poker died and so my practice was again cast to the side.
Lately, thanks to Turner, we've been spending quite a bit of time watching cartoons. And now the urge is creeping back in. It thrills me to see Turner light up when he sees Woody or Buzz on the screen, or see Handy Manny fixing stuff with his tools. It's giving me the craving to animate something, so I've been studying trying to find the best and most efficient way to go about it.
For some reason, I started tooling around with 3d animation. I'm honestly not sure if it will be harder or easier than 2d animation in the long run, but I can say for sure that it's starting off a lot harder. This humble model of Turner the screwdriver has taken me a week of studying and several hours of modeling to get this far. I likely could've had a short sequence completed if I'd just started working with 2d flash animation.
Turner is on a huge Toy Story kick right now. We recently went to see Toy Story 3 in the theater and I found it deeply saddening because it dealt with a kid growing up and losing the interest and need for his toys. Right now, Woody and Buzz are real to Turner, but I know the day will come when they are no longer real and no longer make him laugh and giggle when he sees them. But while they are still real I want to try and make that experience as awesome as possible.