House of Cat

All things artful and curious

The Bald Eagle – A Hero for our Times (or Fifty Bucks and a Little Luck)

Posted on | April 10, 2009 | No Comments

by Brian Andersen

As I write this on April 7th 2009 it is exactly one year minus one day since I bought a little program called Anime Studio 5 for fifty bucks at Target. I know this because I just found the receipt as I was going through old papers. My band was broken up and I was seeking some kind of creative outlet that I could do quietly in the wee hours of the morning which is, for some reason, when I’m most inspired.

After experimenting a little with animating characters created using the drawing tools in the software, I finally decided to try animating some of my own hand drawings. I thought a perfect vehicle for this experiment would be an animated intro for a nonexistent cartoon series. I really wanted to do an intro reminiscent of the animated intro for the 1960s Adam West Batman series.

After watching the intro to the Colbert Report too many times, and hearing the Bald Eagle cry at the beginning (actually the cry of an Alaskan Red Tailed Hawk, but for dramatic purposes has come to be known as the cry of the Bald Eagle in film and television), I decided to revive a character from my childhood comic drawing days and use the Bald Eagle.

I created the intro, presented here, and found that I laughed at it, my friends laughed at it, even my parents liked it. I thought “I’ll just make a little three minute episode to go with the intro.” Six months and fifteen animated minutes later, after many long breaks and frustrating editing software problems, the Bald Eagle Episode 1 was complete.

The funny part of the story is that I found out my childhood friend, who I used to draw comics with when we were kids, started learning animation at the same time I did, completely independently of me. Two grown men in their thirties producing superhero cartoons alone seemed silly, so we did the right thing and decided to collaborate. Watch for more Bald Eagle and friends in our upcoming Power Squad series, this time using the much more versatile Toon Boom software.

Since finishing the Bald Eagle I have worked on more animation projects and have a short cartoon in the finals of the Xavier Renegade Angel animation contest on Adult Swim. I also got my first freelance animation job doing a couple of short in-between animations for an upcoming relationship chat show called the Sandie Luv Show, that I’m told is being considered for Nick Cannon’s new network.

Wish me luck gang! And if you’re interested in this stuff, a great way to get started is to go drop the fifty bucks at Target and get going on Anime Studio 5. The tutorials are clear and easy to do and it is a great precursor to learning more complicated softeware. If you want to get more complex I recommend getting some good editing software like Sony Vegas for PC or Final Cut for Mac. I tried using Windows Movie Maker for a while but found that it didn’t quite cut the mustard when it comes to layering music and sound effects. The midgrade 100 dollar version of Vegas worked great for me until I made the jump to Mac. If y’all have any questions link to my youtube account from the video and drop me a line! Cheers!

For Bald Eagle episodes and more, check out Brian’s YouTube Channel

Category: Animation, Art, Culture
Tags: > > >

Comments

Leave a Reply






Overheard at the Record Store
Wordage: The Shameless Pursuit of More



House of Cat RSS Feed

Links