M dot Strange's blog

Every once in awhile someone emails me asking me for advice on animation and/or filmmaking- I figured I should start sharing my answers publicly as it could be useful for some peeps out there- Here's a recent answer I gave to someone- Animation/Filmmaking advice for a 12 year old animator/filmmaker In my experience the best way to learn anything is out of necessity- I've learned most everything I have through personal projects- with animation- like you I started with a bunch of experiments but then I started getting confused as to what to learn next- as there's SO MUCH to learn- So then I starting making really short animated film things- like 1-3 minute long stuff- I made up stories for them- and what happened in the stories dictated to me what I had to learn next- for example if the beginning of the film had a character walking across a desert then I knew I had to learn how to make a desert, how to make a character and how to make them walk across a scene- that

I'm working alone in the middle of the night like I have for years but now instead of setting up shots and animating them for a film I'm working out different ways to parse data to make the creation and management of this big game easier- On the subject of film- HSM lives- or I should say it hasn't really come alive yet- but someday it will- So the same person that made this a few years ago.... Is now super excited about hash tables- you've got just to follow the excitement- the intrigue- I got into filmmaking after seeing films like those made by David Lynch which seemed like magic to me- the more I made films the more the magic faded away- I guess things seem magical when you don't know much about them... So game development now has that magic for me- its all magic so I'm having a lot of fun trying to figure out all these tricks en route to making my first big game project- My excitement has been kept at bay most of the time because of the