More!

Over the weekend and today my thoughts were near obsessive on this blog--and I haven't even really started it yet! I have no idea why. I started thinking about why I was doing it, what did I want it to be? I immediately thought about trying to teach what I know about animation through it, but I feel I'm still too inexperienced to offer much more than an honest critique to friends who ask. Besides, how many other places can you go online already to read great tutorials and lessons, that are far better than I could ever write? Someday I do want to teach animation, but there's still too much for me to learn. So I thought, why not use my blog as a forum, or place, where any readers and I can learn *together* about animation? Rather than pretending I know everything about the craft, I would rather share the learning experience with other people. Though I'm sure at some time I'll post some personal opinions about what I've learned so far, I hope to do it in a way of sharing rather than lecturing.

By organizing various links that I find interesting into categories on my blog, I hope to make a sort of online resource of where you can find information about animation in other places, but not so long of a list that you don't know where to start, or how to read it. I've organized my links section in the right column based on the categories of "Watch", "Talk, "Learn", and "Blog". Under "Watch more" are places you can go to watch cool animation (and a shameless self promo of my website). Under "Talk more" you can go to a couple of my favorite animation forums and podcasts, where you can listen, respond, and converse with the online animation community. Under "Learn more" I have posted some of the best places I know of to read some great lessons on animation. And finally under "Blog more" you can find some cool blogs of other animators. Of course some of these sites can fit under more than one category--Spline Doctors and Keith Lango's blogs have some great lessons and tutorials that would fit well under "Learn more". Maybe I'll do some re-arranging later, but I ended up just choosing which I thought fit best at this time.

So what am I contributing to this blog, besides organizing links? Well, I plan on posting my own opinions and personal responses to anything animation, of course! As I keep posting more content, I plan on utilizing the "labels" feature to organize my posts into categories much like my links. The two categories I most look forward to are "WATCH about animation" and "INTERVIEWS about animation". That way if you're up for seeing some cool animation, just click on the "WATCH about animation" label and see all of my posts of videos, links to videos, etc. "INTERVIEWS about animation" will have my responses and links to the awesome interviews at The Animation Podcast and Spline Doctors, as well as links to interviews I find online, so you can easily find reading material from some of our favorite artists. "LEARN about animation" will consist of posts where I (and you through comments) can discuss and learn about the craft we love. As I add more content, these labels will start popping up in the right column.

SO...yeah, that's my plan :) In all honesty it's a big experiment for me, but basically I wanted to make something worthwhile, that contributed to the animation community in some small way. My previous attempts at starting a blog failed miserably, but with these goals I hope this one gets off to a good start.

Enjoy!