 I moved to New York with $500 bucks and a sketch pad. In retrospect, that was really crazy and dumb, and I feel lucky to be alive to tell the tale :-). I moved in with a bunch of actor friends, and got a job temping. Which sucked, but allowed me to buy a drawing desk, paints, and some continuing education class time while I searched for cartoon and design work.
How did I get my start in animation? Ha, I feel like illustrators are like migrant workers, moving from field to field depending on where the paying gigs are. Like, I started out in traditional studio work, painting, then learned comic book illustration, then kind of fell into cel animation and eventually Web animation.
I was taking some comic book illustration classes in New York after majoring in art in college, and had been shopping my pencil work around at conventions but with little success. Then one day, I was in line outside the Ziegfield Theater for tickets to the re-release of Star Wars, and the guy next to me and I started up a conversation. It turned out he was recruiting a storyboard artist for some friends of his who were interested in producing an animated TV commercial, and like any good freelancer, I said, Oh, sure, I could totally do that. No problem!
That was the beginning of about a year of freelance artwork I did with the Philadelphia-based company C-Traze Studios. Fun stuff. Lot of hiphop graphics: record label designs, a couple of 30 second animated commercials. Our big breakthrough was pitching and selling a show called Station Zero to MTV Animation. It covered hip hop music videos, and had a really unique look, layered and graffitiied and wild, but we got a tough time slot and not much promotion and the show eventually got canned.
The producer, luckily, thought my rendering and color work was pretty good, and called me up for her next project, the children's show Noggin on Nickelodeon. After that project, I leapfrogged into animating props and special f/x for MTV's Head Trip. All in all, I spent just over a year at that studio, learning from all the excellent and talented people around me.
While I was applying for a spot on the design team for MTV's Spy Groove, an old college buddy of mine named Chris Kalb called me up. He asked if I would be interested in learning this Web animation platform called Flash in order to co-animate the super-heroine Breakup Girl with him for the newly-formed company, Oxygen Media. He sold me on how much potential online entertainment presented, and I signed on.
Although I was painfully sleep-deprived, working on Breakup Girl, in Chris' unique and classic cartoon style, while surrounded by the brilliant and glamorous women at Oxygen Media, was one of the best years of my life! After that first month of Flash boot camp under Chris, I was starting realize how powerful the program could be. I could do an entire team's work solo: sound editing, lip synching, illustrating, animating, and editing. Good stuff :-)
When our first BG animation season was coming to a close, I was taking a class in stop-motion animation on the weekends with an eccentric teacher named Voltaire. He mentioned that he was looking for a Flash animator for a project he had going with the Cartoon Network's website, and I volunteered.
I spent two months working on Vampires from Outer Space in Voltaire's basement studio while waiting for my own computer to arrive. I am going to kidnap his super-cute son Mars someday. Oh wait, did we record that?
By the time Vampires was finished, Voltaire was already getting Chi-Chian fired up for production at SCIFI.COM, and he tapped me to Flash animate. After the first episode or two, we realized that there was way too much work for me to handle the series alone, so we brought on Flash wizard Dan Govar. He and I communicate daily on IM and through email, fixing tech difficulties on the fly, and again, teaching each other great stuff as we go along.
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