I was 17 years old, always knew I wanted to do something in art but never had any drive, didn’t have a computer, never took an art class. One day I was sitting at the kitchen table, bored, thinking of what I could do that day. Friends were all busy or doing something with their friends, then my dad came into the house with a small package in his hand and laid it on the table saying “I got something for you”.
Entitled, stupid, thinks-he-knows-all, me, eagerly took the package from the table and ripped it open. Only to find a small sleeve holding a CD with artwork, on the front of the sleeve was a drawing of a yellow haired boy and a title that said ‘Anime Studio Pro 7’. Immediately after reading the name ‘Anime’ I threw down the cd sleeve in disgust saying “dad, you know I don’t like anime”. Walking away my dad said something along the lines of “Oh McCoy, when will you ever grow up”….
I heard that sentence and many others similar, “When will you pull your head out of your butt?” “What do you want to be five years from now?” “What do you want to accomplish this year?” “What do you/what did you want to accomplish this week, day, moment…. (and the worst) what are you going to do with your life?”. I hated each one of those questions, they didn’t make sense to me. Unfortunately at the time I took those wise words into my ear and let it go right out the other. My response, “I’m just a kid, I don’t know. I don’t want to think about that right now”, “just leave me alone”. Truth is…I didn’t know, I wasn’t only scared I was unprepared. I felt like I literally had no direction in life and the truth is I didn’t. I wasn’t really just a kid, a year later I would ‘legally’ become an adult. But I was so scared of the thought of even being responsible for more than my part time job and I even struggled with that!
At this moment in my life, the story wasn’t about Anime Studio (though it plays the most important role). The story was, I had no direction, I was lost, confused, and mostly immature. While my friends in highschool were thinking about where they were going to college their senior year, I was thinking of how I could drop out, or avoid school and not do assignments just enough without failing. Well in 2007 I graduated, didn’t mean much to me. I was happy to be done with highschool, hated every moment of it. I was weak mentally and physically and people took advantage of that. Though I graduated, I didn’t feel successful. My mom and dad pushed me constantly, without them I probably wouldn’t have finished high school. I was still the weak minded person I was before, no direction.
Going back to the CD. My dad let me install it on one of his computers that night. The only thing I remember, was my dad was in the same room looking over my shoulder at the program, and me pretending to be interested in the movable character Anime Studio loaded by default and pretending to be amused. After he left the room, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand any of it. This bar with numbers on the side at the bottom of the screen? Layers? A pallette with a bunch of different colors? This was stupid (my response for almost everything at the time). I quickly ejected the CD, put it in the case and tossed it aside and began playing games on the internet. Problem was, I wasn’t scared, I was….stupid. Just didn’t think, didn’t think about anything, anyone, not even myself, nor my future, nor my future family of wife and kids that would be affected by my past decisions.
Well couple years passed. Got kicked out of the house, lived with my brother for half a year, moved back in with my parents, couple months later moved out and then lived in a third world country for two years. Came back home to the states, lived with my parents for another 3 months then moved out on my own again. Nothing changed. I was working full time at a hardware store, and going to college with the thought of “once I have my degree I can do what I want to do”, “college will teach me what I need to know to be good!” Did it…? Not only no, but hell no. Only thing college did was waste my time, money, and energy. Didn’t learn a darn thing about animation and that is what I was going to school for…
One day I was going through boxes that I still never unpacked from the move two years before and found that sleeve with that ‘stupid’ name ‘Anime Studio Pro 7’. But then a thought came to my head (now thinking a little more maturely 4 years later) “McCoy, your dad bought this for you, why? He probably knew you wouldn’t use it, like when he bought you that dremel tool kit, or guitar, or piano, or”….my brain kept listing things. Than I thought “what is Anime Studio?”. At this time I didn’t have a desktop, I had a dinosaur laptop with 250 mb of ram and was built I think before internet was invented, because it couldn’t run anything online worth a crap. But I took that computer and got on youtube and searched ‘Anime Studio Pro….’ and before I could even push the number 7, version 9 showed up in the search. So I clicked it, and turns out it was the same software with the same confusing interface (had no prior animation software experience mind you) and was almost again immediately turned off. But found that the animations, weren’t anime, it was kinda more cartoony looking. Than I saw a promo video for 9 showing off the cool ‘new features’ and though intrigued, understood nothing.
At the moment something in my mind went off, don’t know how or why but it made sense why my dad bought me this software. Even though he didn’t think I would even try, there had to of been a .00001% chance he thought I could. And if he thought I could, than that gave me enough to believe that, I COULD. So I took a risk. The version 9 software was $200.00 at the time, and I was barely making enough to pay rent, heck I didn’t even have a computer to run the dang thing, the laptop I had, didn’t have a CD tray. I knew there wouldn’t be any return on it for me, I wouldn’t make money on the software. I probably would fail miserably at it. But you know what, I was going to try. So I bought it, $200.00 straight from Amazon. I remember waiting for it to come in the mail. During the time I told my dad all about it and asked him if he would let me use his laptop, because mine couldn’t even run it. He said, “under one condition will I let you use my computer, you make it worth it”. I gave him my word, excitedly opened the new CD put it in the tray and installed the software. and…there it was, almost the exact same thing that laid in the box, in my closet. The same bar with numbers at the bottom, the palette with colors, layers. The sickly feeling came back to me, “You can’t do this, you don’t know how”. I remember just staring at my computer feeling like a failure, the only problem was, I hadn’t even started how could I fail?! But I did, because in my mind I already believed I did. I “tried” for about 15 min to “figure out” the interface but gave up, ejected the disc, and inserted a computer game disc into the computer to install.
I gave my dad ‘my word’, I told him I wouldn’t use it for games. So what the heck was I doing? Well…I was doing what I do best. Giving up. Before I even try, I would run away or give up.
At the time it was difficult to stay focused on anything, I lived in a house with 4 other roommates and we would mostly jam out on Rockband every night, watch movies or go out to eat. Meanwhile all of us went to school, they all had direction, they all knew what they wanted to do and how to get there. One guy was going to be a dentist, the other a bio-engineer, the other a civil engineer and then there was me, I want to be an animator. How? Don’t know, What kind?…Don’t know… Well a year passed, way before then when my dad asked how the progress went I told him I didn’t try and gave him back his computer and went back to using my ‘dinosaur’, by this time it was more like a fossil. About a year passed, Anime Studio 9.5 came out, saw the new ‘smart bone’ features and got super pumped like last time. Same thing went to my dad, “Hey dad, Anime Studio 9.5 is coming out it looks sooo cool! Can I use your computer to work it on?” My dad knew what he was going to say before I even asked the question, “no”.
Well a couple months past and while out with my dad working, one of his clients were giving away old computers for free to make room for the new up to date computers, and knowing my dad and his love for computers, willingly gave them all to him. I remember begging my dad to have one of those computers, because he would just strip them for their parts and throw them away. Same answer, along with the same feeling of disappoint that I would again, not do anything with the computer but play video games. But my dad, has always in a way had faith in me. While at my parents house later that night, he calls me over to his computer and says “look”. He shows me a computer’s video card and asks what the software requirements are for Anime Studio 9.5, excitedly I hurry and read off what it requires. He says this should do it, buys the graphics card, prints out the order form and walks away. “My dad, bought this for me?” “Why…?” Now I wasn’t thinking like the entitled brat I was 5 years ago, now I truly wondered why my dad would do this.
Month later got the used (new) computer at my house that I shared with my roommates and during that time, my own roommate was moving out to go back to his parents house. I had the room all to myself for a month before the next guy moved in.
Summer started, school ended, couldn’t afford another semester and didn’t want to do summer classes anyway. Other than my full time job, I had all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted besides homework for once. What would I do? I forgot all about the computer, it just sat on a desk in the room, never turned it on, Anime Studio 9.5 was already bought but never opened. I was again wasting away my life. You know how people have those “aha!” moments, I had a “you better get your crap together moments”, I kinda all happened when the girl I was head over heels for broke up with me and my best friend moved away with his newly married wife to another state…”what was I going to do?” I only had one month left of the summer before fall semester of school began. It was somewhere at the beginning of that month that I said, “I will learn Anime Studio” I remember it being pretty dramatic and it had to be. I boxed up my xbox 360 and removed any other distractions and left nothing but Anime Studio on my computer. And then I slowly went through tutorial after tutorial, it slowly started to make sense, then after tutorials I tried applying what I learned, going back to tutorials, the Anime Studio manual, back to youtube tutorials, posting on the lostmarble forum. I did this for two weeks everyday, but still felt like I was making little to no progress. Than I heard one of my roommates laughing in the other room to an episode of South Park. “SOUTH PARK?!” “I have to be able to animate South Park, their stuff is so crappy and simple looking” By the end of that month (of hard work) I had a short clip of about 12 seconds, showed it to my roommate and asked his thoughts, he told me it looked exactly like South Park. I did it, at that moment I knew I made a breakthrough and it was all uphill from there lol. You probably thought I was going to say downhill. It was still learning curve after all, they don’t call it a ‘learning descending slope’.
So after many tutorials, I was able to make my own channel. After making my own channel of youtube videos for just me, one of the members on the Lost Marble saw my Dr. Cure lip sync Animation and asked me to do a tutorial. What?! Someone asking me for a tutorial, little did the person asking know, I only had been using ASP for about 3 months and he probably knew way more than me. But the tutorial was popularly received and I began to make more tutorials for other from others who requested them, up until the point my channel began to grow, steadily but unexpectedly with subscribers.
To be continued….
Anime studio Pros 