The Animation Process (my humble beginnings)

To talk about the way I work, I have to tell you first where I come from.

I am from Puerto Rico, the small Caribbean island just bellow Dominican Republic and an American territory. 

I graduated from high school in 1989 without a clue of what to do with my life. I knew I liked movies and cartoons, but here in P.R. there is no industry of them both. I enrolled in a cartoons class at a local art school with the idea of becoming a comic strip artist and there I found out something truly amazing. A classmate told me that there was an animation studio in P.R. 

Well, not quite an studio, more likely a little workshop. But hey, It was good enough. I showed up with my cartoons portfolio asking for recommendations for animation schools and instead was offered a job as an assistant animator. Great! Now I had a job!

But... how is animation done? Remember, this is 1989. Just a year after Roger Rabbit hit the big screen and The Simpsons were making waves on t.v. And the animation workshop that hired me was build the old way. Everything was done first on paper and then traced on cells and photographed frame by frame under a camera. Easy right?

So that's the way I have been doing things since, on paper first and coloring each drawing one by one. Only I substituted cells with a digital process, using at first a software  called "AXA" which latter became "Flipbook" and coloring my backgrounds on Photoshop. I learned the process of timing and posing by the hand of my best friend and tutor, the late Mr. Hector Virella, who at the time was the head (and only) animator of this workshop and by reading, or may I say, engulfing books like "The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation"By Frank & Ollie and the Preston Blair collection. Actually, my first animation book was "The Animators Workshop."

But the book that any serious animator student should really have and study hard is "The Animator's Survival Kit" By Richard Williams. This book helped me a great deal and the lessons are so good that I felt as a novice when I read it for the first time, and I had already a 10 years of experience on my back.

So there you have it, my little and pathetic biography of how I became a cartoons animator.

More on how I work latter. So keep in touch!

See ya!