Hey Campers, welcome to the first Jing post on tonyteach. Jing is a FREE screencasting software for videos under 5 minutes. So, for those emailed questions I get, if its something I can answer in 5 minutes or under, I’ll Jing it for ya, and get it posted a lot quicker than a full-blown tutorial.
First up for the tonyteach Jing, facebook etiquette: Stop telling ALL of Facebook ALL of your business…

I believe that we all are the sum of both the positive and negative experiences, and people, in our past and present lives. As an instructor, I know that both my good teachers and bad teachers helped to shape my teaching styles and methods. In some cases, one of my teachers would do or say something, and I would think, wow, I gotta use that when I teach! Other teachers, I would make a note to do the exact opposite.

It is with this in mind that I would like to publicly share what I feel was the defining moment in my style of giving direct, brutally honest, critiques.
It was my senior year at the Atlanta College of Art, and as custom before graduation I had to have several members of the faculty, as well as my department head, give final critiques (an exit review), of my portfolio. My reviews were going well, and if memory serves me correctly, I only had one review left, my department head. I had this gentleman as an instructor once or twice, and to be fair, I was not a fan of his teaching, or his lack of knowledge on what he was teaching, either that, or I was a typical, arrogant, slack student at the time, aspiring to be a professor—anyway, back to the review.

I presented my work, and his critiques and suggestions for improvement were good, better than good, they were awesome! So much so that it led me to say to this gentleman…
“I would like to thank you, this has been one of the best critiques you’ve ever given me.”

He replied, “Well it’s a lot easier to critique you now, because you’re not a student in my class. I mean, lets face it, you’re a big guy.”

As a side note, my department head was an average height, average build kind of guy, I on the other hand, am 6 foot 4, 300+ pounds.

It then occurred to me that this gentleman had never given me an honest critique before because he was afraid of me. Ironically, I had never wished to cause this man any bodily harm, until he had uttered those words.

I would like to take you now years later, to my 1st day of class opening lecture.
“I am going to call roll now, this will be the last time you hear your name from me until you’ve earned it. If by the end of the semester I am not calling you by name, it’s not that I’m bad with names, it’s that your work sucked, it’s not my fault. At times I may appear friendly, but I am not here to be your friend, I am here to teach you. In fact if you can’t stand me, it makes grading you a lot easier. If you ask for a critique from me, I may ask you for “permission to be blunt”, if you feel that is something you can not handle, do not give me permission… We will now take a 30 minute break so those of you that feel you need to drop this class may do so.”

So this is all to say that telling someone that their work is OK, when you really think its sub par, or even worse, utter crap, it does more harm than good.

Equally, if the work is good, even if you hate it, especially if you hate it – even if you hate the fact that the very sight of the work singes your cornea, and sucks your will to live! If it’s good, tell them its good!

I believe it is far better to simply be honest, or be simply quiet.

The response on this post has been great! Please keep the comments coming. I also encourage everyone to read the responses from the Creative COW business forum where I placed the same post.
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/17/860161

Thanks, Tony Ross

From time to time when doing freelance work, I have encountered potential clients that have projects, ideas or concepts that are much greater than their budgets. Now, the type of client I speak of is the client that never mentions their budget. Usually during the course of our initial conversation, whether from experience or intuition, I get the feeling that my rates may place this client into irreversible sticker shock. So, I insert the following: “Wow, that sounds great, did you have a budget in mind?”

The response is usually along the lines of, “Well I don’t know what something like this would cost”. Now, this statement is probably true, but it also throws up a red flag in my book. I usually will negotiate for a few more minutes searching for the ever illusive “potential client budget“, then I will succumb to their request, and submit a proposal/ estimate. For me, my initial red flag has already told me, this is the last I will hear from them. Oh well, no harm no foul. However, I am an educator first and foremost, so I am writing this post in hopes to initiate healthy conversation, and educate both the client and the artist.

I have purposefully sent this post via email to a few of my past “potential clients”, as well as current clients, and colleagues. I invite you all to leave your comments and thoughts on this matter. So with that, I will start.

I believe when a PC (potential client) says “Well I don’t know what something like this would cost”, it is most likely true. However what is also true is the client usually knows the amount they will or can spend. Over my freelance career (2 decades plus) I have been blessed to have worked with budgets ranging from $25 to $25,000.00. So from this experience I have seen an even wider range of possibilities.

For Example:
Client A: “I need a 20 page web site with log in privileges one week from today, my budget is $200.00″.

My Response: “A project of this magnitude and turnaround time would require a starting budget of at least $1000.00, and that is before adding in the database for log in privileges. If your budget isn’t flexible, but your timeline is, and you are willing to get your hands dirty, allow me to suggest a few books and web sites that can show you how to build this yourself. To tell you the truth, my wife and I learned how to build web sites so we could hold onto some cash for important stuff, you know like going to Disney, and Godiva chocolates, lol. Anyway, here are some links that might help, blah, blah, blah.

Client B: “I need a 20 page web site with log in privileges one week from today, my budget is $20,000.00″.

My Response: “Sounds good. To meet your deadline we will need all of your content, images, and information by close of business tomorrow. Once we have received all content, in 3 days you will receive test links to your new web site for review. This will give us 4 days to make any corrections, if needed. How does that work for you?”

So, there are my thoughts. Again feel free to chime in.
Thanks Tony Ross

I think time has passed enough that I can share a story from my teaching experience. A funny story (now) of when circumstances stopped being a coincidence, and, even from the outside looking in, seemed to have the hand of God involved.

OK, so here goes. A few years back I was teaching at ACA. One of my former students asked if I would teach him in what was called an Independent Study, a one-on-one course of a unique curriculum not offered in a normal class. The assignment was simple, take the entire semester (14 weeks) and create 1 3D/2D animated video 30 seconds to 1 minute long. I requested that by the end of this project I wanted to be blown away by the result, this piece alone should be strong enough for them to get a job.

As the semester progressed, the student presented storyboards, rough sketches, and screen shots, and we discussed possible directions for the piece. The student even discussed with me how their grandmother would handcraft puppets to be mixed in with CG animated parts of the video.

The semester was drawing to a close and the student was almost done with the project. They felt it didn’t need sound, my response was “even silent movies were presented with sound, add some music or something, maybe sound effects”. The student complied.

The last day of the class was here, and I brought my colleagues over to help me critique the piece. We all agreed, it was a stellar piece, well worthy of the A I turned in for their grade.

One week after the grades are turned in, a rather supernatural turn of events occurs:

Friday:
My friend and mentor, the late & great Lou Hertz, was telling me a former ACA student, M., was working at ILM on the Yoda team.

Saturday:
I was telling a friend of mine, K. – another ACA grad and Star Wars geek, the news about M.

Sunday:
K. sends me a text saying ” Hey I think I found M. on IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base).

I think, “I wonder is MN., another grad that worked at ILM, on IMDB.” So I look him up, no luck. I then go to MN.’s web site to see what he is up to, but the site is under construction. I decide to click around the front page to find a way into the site. A small button hidden on the page lets me in to the old site. I went to the site’s Links page and found a curiously named site called Massive Black. Thinking it was MN. joking about his size and stature, I decide to investigate the site. I find that Massive Black is a portfolio site for the entertainment industry.

It is on this site that I found my student’s final video that was turned in. Upon further investigation (only 7 days) I found that the video was taken from part of a larger music video, from the Australian group 1200 Techniques , that had one the ARIA Award for best music video 2 years prior. The video was worked by several artists and studios. Ironically, the song is called Karma.

The artist that worked on the section turned in by my student was, at that moment, unreachable because he had just finished working on Lord of the Rings, and was now busy working on King Kong.

I reported the matter to the proper channels at ACA, alas, the student transferred before any administrative action could be taken. I wonder if karma caught up with them anyway.

OK, first and foremost I am not obsessed with money. Trust me if the things I wanted were 5¢ each, I would be one happy camper! Lately everything has been floating around $2,500 to $3,000.
To start, the base computer I want (from Apple of course, love who your with) the Apple MacPro–
drool, $2500.

I have a monitor, I have a Wacom Tablet, what I would love to have is fusion of the two… Cintiq Monitor–
$2500.

I would also like to take this time to thank Adobe for putting ALL of their Mac software in one delicious bundle, Adobe Master Collection [Mac]–
$2500.

The latest in this trend, at $3000, and the reason I was up at 3 am looking at demos and tutorials, is an incredible piece of software from Toon Boom called Digital Pro.

Time, and time again I have jumped from program to program just to get the animation results I wanted, all while working on the same project. No more. Toon Boom got it right, this software isn’t about building web pages, or motion graphics, it’s animation software, that’s right, pure unadulterated animation. You can do cut-out or traditional, add sound, color, auto lip-sync, and a true 3D, multi-plane camera!

Now, the good news. If you want to check out this sweet piece of software, and can’t currently spare the $3000, Toon Boom has created a PLE (Personal Learning Edition) that is FREE! The limitations of this version are: don’t use it to make money, you can’t make the size over 540×540, and you get a watermark. Toon Boom also created video tutorials that you can download. I watched the Cut-Out tutorial (at 3 am mind you) and trust me Digital Pro is a powerful program. Check out the links, download the PLE and let me know what you think.

Ok so if you’ve been keeping count, it’s not $3,000 I need, it’s closer to $12,000… getting 1,200 people to donate $10, priceless (see PayPal donate Button to the right)!
(see tonyteach dream studio)

I have a concern. Once upon a time, in the heyday of Bugs Bunny, Mickey and the like, there were great stories, voice work, music, foley and sound effects, and awesome animation. These works took entire studios to produce.
Now, with todays technology, animations and even movies can be created by a small group, or even one person with one computer. Somehow with all this power came this tired excuse of It’s all about the story. Maybe so, but is there any reason I should sit through poorly drawn, barely animated (more like motion graphics with pseudo lip-sync) cartoons? If it’s only about the story, why make it move at all? To the best of my knowledge, Farside originally was not animated, but simple one panel stories, that were brilliant.
Maybe budgets, and/or time constaints are an issue. Maybe the people directing the project. Maybe I’m not the target audience. Maybe I should just say thank you to a few of my favorite animators (in no particular order) :

Bernard Derriman

Andrew Phillips

Michael Gagne

Ghostbot: Alan Lau, Roque Ballesteros, and Brad Rau

Bill Plympton

I will be adding on to this as I go along, feel free to add your two cents.