Pink and Ain't

So tomorrow morning I’m going to substitute-teach an animation class. It’s a little scary but it’s something I’ve been interested in trying for a long time. You see, I have this crazy notion of maybe becoming a teacher or a professor someday. That’s one of the major reasons I’m still working on my MFA (fingers crossed, finishing my thesis one year from this week).

Two questions come up re teaching: will I enjoy it, and will I be any good at it? I want the answer to both questions to be “yes,” but life doesn’t always turn out as we’d like. I have some experience from tutoring in college, though that didn’t go as well as I would have liked. I enjoyed it but I often found that I had a really hard time understanding why my students didn’t understand the subject we were studying. I like to think of myself as empathetic but in some cases I just had a really hard time getting past the difference in ways of thinking between myself and my pupils. When you’ve gone over a concept all the ways that you can think to and they still don’t get it, where do you go next?

Well, we’ll see how his class goes, but I’m hopeful that things will go swimmingly. Maybe this I my first step into a larger world?

Today I’m going to introduce you to a tool I developed a while ago that I finally got ready for public release.  It’s a modification of the concept of the V-Cam, a tool that’s been around for a while in the Flash world.

“V-Cam” stands for “virtual camera.”  It’s a tool that lets you define the viewport of your Flash movie with a rectangular “viewfinder”, rather than just with the location of your subject on the stage.  This means that you can leave your drawing in one location on the stage, then animate the V-Cam all over the place, including rotation, skewing, etc, and that view will be the one you see in the final product.  It’s a very useful tool, making framing much more intuitive. (more…)