Today is Tuesday. We met once more outside the Tan’s place at 8:50 and walked to the studio. JA has a Wacom tablet which his dad bought for him. He hasn’t used it before, but we set it up on his laptop along with the open source animation software ‘pencil 2d’. He did just fine, but working on the computer is not his favourite so we returned to the land of paper and crayon. I just wanted to make sure he had the software installed and a handle on how to use it should he decide to give it a go when I’m not there.
We looked through JA’s sketch book and he picked a drawing he would like to animate. A penguin on a rocky beach. He looked at a video on his camera as reference and animated the penguin flap and look up. Once he was happy with the penguin animation he drew a rocky background and traced it on to each frame. He then coloured each picture and after that photographed them with the animation app. we worked without a break for about 3 and a half hours. Jeanne told me the next day that usually they’ll do about 2 hours with a half hour break in the middle so this is a pretty prolonged and intense period of concentration. JA got a headache and we called it a day and went for lunch. on the way he introduced me to the person who makes paint in the paint shop. They make incredible acrylics.