 I guess I really first got into animation in college. My major was Imaging and Digital Art and they made us take a slew of interdisciplinary courses, which we got to choose from. I took three film courses and three animation courses, as well as an interpretive dance (just kidding), as well as a theatre course. I sucked hard at the theatre course - I kept forgetting my lines. The film and animation courses I LOVED though. They were completely fresh. I think in hindsight I took to those because they had similar qualities to programs I was familiar with at the time and was fairly proficient at. Things like Director and Alias, and Premiere, and even PhotoShop to a degree. The animation we did in those classes ranged from stop-motion, cel, to rotoscoping. It really ran the gamut as far as introducing the different forms. I think those years I made a total of four animated films on 16 mm, and about 12 computer generated animations. All of them didn't run very long. The longest, I think, was about four minutes and it was a hand drawn/live action animation which used a bit of rotocoping and was a music video for "Born of Frustration" by James.
The next leap or progression to get to where I am now, came from my last real job before becoming a freelancer for good. That was working at a private school that actually had their own multimedia division. It was called the Calvert School, and we produced CD-ROMs and Web sites. I was a programmer/animator/project leader over about 3 years, and produced 2 CD-ROMS and an astronomy Web site. The first year there was where I was introduced to Flash (I think at the time it was version 2), I had heard about it before, but I think it was actually two separate programs or called something different like Future Splash. It was a bit awkward, but had some interesting features which put it in a category all it's own. We used it for developing just about anything Web related. If anyone started to mention "why don't we do this in Director", a co-worker and I, who had become Flash addicts, would go back to our computers and figure a way to do it in Flash. By version 4, we had converted our department into a Flash sanctum. The other programmers had all started dabbling in Flash for their own projects.
Then came the day I came across Barbarian Moron on SCIFI.COM. I have always been a die-hard sci-fi fan. (Farscape has got to be the most creative series I've seen in a long while) I kept thinking, "why don't they do a bit more serious animated series? Between Astro-chimp and Barbarian Moron, and I'm still not quite sure what category I would put Dystopia in, there were no serious series. Ha!
I showed a friend of mine who I illustrated comics with for a while, and happened to work on movies, Russell Wicks, the stuff that was currently up there, and said he would be interested in developing something with me to pitch to Scioriginals, as it was called then. We roughed out a plot and did a short first episode, and sent it on its way. A short while later I was contacted by SCIFI.COM that they were interested in doing a series with us. We began working very closely with the producer Laurissa James and Rachel Gibbs, to refine the storyline and make it a bit more episodic and a better "read" in general. And from that Eclipse came to be.
I was brought on to Chi-Chian originally to help Mike [Lee] out with loaders, credits, and solving the file size/bitmap issues the series had. We hammered out the kinks our process for crunching the files and getting great looking imagery, and I was asked to stay on with the series. And well, I guess that's it!
http://www.danielgovar.com
http://12.110.100.100/services/Astronom/astro1.htm
http://www.scifi.com/eclipse
http://www.scifi.com/chichian
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