Systematizing My Process for Teaching Myself Animation

Principles of animation notes, November 23, 2021

When I was a senior in high school, I wanted to make my own cartoon. It was a daunting task, but I was obsessed with the idea of being able to create my own characters and backdrops and tell a wider swath of stories than I could with a camera.

By the summer after graduation (July 2021), I had three fully-animated videos, totaling 13 minutes and five seconds. I created my own system for brainstorming, storyboarding, animating, in both Procreate and After Effects, compiling in Premiere, sound designing, and recording dialogue. The animation section alone took 120 hours total. However, before I could create that system, I had to learn a lot about animation. Before November of 2020, my animation experience was limited to a week long stop motion animation camp when I was eight.

From January to March 2021, I doubled down on researching animation tools, downloading free trials and open source versions, and figuring out what might work to make the cartoon I was envisioning.

One of the first tools I tried was Opentoonz, an open source 2D animation software. This is what the basic Opentoonz interface looks like.

Because the project was completely self directed and I didn’t have much experience in animation, I had to spend a lot of time figuring out what kinds of things to focus on. For example, in mid March I was learning Adobe Character Animator and trying to figure out how to rig a puppet named Teacher, an early version of the “Teacher” character in my Kid Dreamer episode about a boy who feels out of place at school and is visited by a magical lightbulb. It was a frustrating process. I followed a tutorial to rig the puppet, but my Teacher puppet, with exaggeratedly long limbs, torso and head, was proportionally different from the puppet used in the tutorial, which had a compact body. This lead to troubleshooting, but I wasn’t familiar enough yet with Character Animator to know what types of things might be wrong. This is where the iterative system comes in.

Each day, I set up tasks of what I’d need to do in order to reach my goal of finding and learning an animation software that would allow me to make my cartoon.

An example of some of my tasks from March 2021, including homework from my high school classes.

For each of these tasks, I took careful notes about what I was able to accomplish plus what worked and didn’t work, not only in terms of my progress with the animation software but with the parameters of the task itself.

From my evaluation, I would make a task for the next day that was more relevant and productively defined:

An example task evaluation from March 12, 2021, “Rig Teacher. Finish the Teacher puppet.”

The next day, I would repeat the process, again noting what did and didn’t work about the task I had assigned myself that day.

Evaluation of my Character Animator troubleshooting tasks, March 12, 2021

I applied this system from my initial research in November 2020 into the principles of animation all the way through to the final edits for my third episode at the end of July 2021. It allowed me to go from knowing virtually nothing about animation to producing three episodes of my own cartoon in eight months. It all came down to taking concrete action each day and looking for ways to take incrementally better steps the next day than I had the last. The payoff of being able to turn the stories, images and characters that had originally been only in my head into a video anyone could watch showed me the immense power of compounded iteration. If you’ve got an idea for something you want to create, don’t let your lack of current knowledge stop you. Instead, think long term, make progress each day, and prepare to explore.

Completing the tasks I set up for myself to troubleshoot the Teacher puppet, March 15, 2021

Fixing the problems I had identified the day before, specifically addressing the arm attachment issue, March 16, 2021

Check out Kid Dreamer, the first episode in my animated series:

Kid Dreamer is an animated story about a musician who doesn’t fit in at school.