Nyx Cat

To those of you who have siblings:

Whether you’re best friends

And you never go anywhere without each other

Or you fight all the time

Or don’t know each other that well

Or even at all

Even when they annoy you

Or take your stuff

You have someone who you were born to love

And someone who was born to love you

You have someone who would probably die for you

Even if they wouldn’t admit it

So tell your sibling that you love them today

Even if they look at you weird

Cuz you’ll never know how lucky you are

Until you don’t have them.

With Love, 

When I was in school and wanted to work in animation, there was very little information about how cartoons are actually made. Even my professors at college knew very little about the industry as it is today. I’m sure it would’ve been better to study somewhere in California (like CalArts) to be better informed about this stuff, but I didn’t have that opportunity.

Nowadays, many kids in school have a dream career that they don’t really know much about. There’s a lot of missing bits of information and a lot of straight up lies that get circulated as fact as people try to scramble to put the pieces together on how cartoons for television are actually made.

I’ve been storyboarding for television for a while now, and there still aren’t clear resources for those wanting to get into the industry. I wanted to make the basics available to everyone, so here’s a quick rundown through the TV pipeline. Please note: all studios and productions are different. Even cartoons made within the same studio could have wildly different production guidelines. This is not a concrete explanation of how every cartoon is made; this is simply a generalized look at the “typical” television pipeline.

**DISCLAIMER** All images in this post have been sourced from blogs, twitters, scribd and flickr pages are publicly available, and no internal studio materials have been used that have not been already published publicly online. This post is influenced heavily by my own individual experience, as well as friends’. 

With that said, this might be a lengthy read, so let’s go!

Muscular women of modern animation.

I began to notice that there are more and more buff female characters appearing in modern cartoons.

I usually walk everywhere with my headphones on, but I had them in my bag and I was reading a book on my phone instead (I do that when the foot traffic is light).  A young Latina was coming down the street as I was coming up the avenue, and when she got to the corner a few paces ahead of me, she turned to walk in the direction I was going.  We were traveling at the same speed, but since she was like ten paces ahead and it’s bright outside in the middle of the day, I didn’t feel the need to fall back or slow down to give her more space. At night, I try not to walk too close behind women just so they don’t feel like I’m any sort of threat.

We got to a corner and this dude standing outside of the bodega was like, “Slow down mama where you goin? You don’t have to work today, you can stop and speak.”

She didn’t break her stride. “I’m going to the gym.”  The Walk sign was on, so I didn’t break mine either.  

A block later, a young guy was coming toward us on the sidewalk riding his bike.

“What’s good shorty?”

She didn’t respond.

“Well you was lookin, you can say something, stuck up bitch.”

We kept walking.

In the middle of the next block, an older man was walking toward us and he put on a friendly smile and said, “Smile young lady, it’s a beautiful day.”

I don’t know if she smiled, but we kept walking. She went into the gym and I kept on toward where I was going thinking about how that was just five minutes of her day.  How many other blocks of five minutes are just like that?  

Only one of them was truly aggressive. The other two guys seemed nice enough and it felt more like a pleasant compliment. It felt like the kind of thing a guy says who argues with women online about catcalling. “We’re not all bad guys. We can’t even compliment women? We can’t even say something nice?”

No.  You really can’t.  I was annoyed in that five minutes and I just happened to be walking behind her with no headphones on.  Can you imagine those five minutes over and over every day of your life?  Nobody wants to be spoken to by strangers day in and day out forever regardless of what they’re saying.  

If Steven wouldn’t do it to Connie,

If Ruby wouldn’t do it to Sapphire,

If Steve wouldn’t do it to Bucky,

If Tony wouldn’t do it to Pepper,

If Aang wouldn’t do it to Katara,

If Rory wouldn’t do it to Amy,

If the Doctor wouldn’t do it to Rose,

If Merlin wouldn’t do it to Arthur,

If Phil wouldn’t do it to Dan,

If Tyler wouldn’t do it to Jenna,

If Josh wouldn’t do it to Tyler,

If Connor wouldn’t do it to Troye,

If Percy wouldn’t do it to Annabeth,

If Will wouldn’t do it to Nico,

If Finnick wouldn’t do it to Annie,

If Peeta wouldn’t do it to Katniss,

If Harry wouldn’t do it to Ginny,

If Charming wouldn’t do it to Snow,

If Kristoff wouldn’t do it to Anna,

If Jack wouldn’t do it to Elsa,

If Fitz wouldn’t do it to Simmons,

If Lincoln wouldn’t do it to Daisy,

If Patton wouldn’t do it to Logan,

If Virgil wouldn’t do it to Roman,

marinette: helped an old man cross the street

adrien: helped an old man get up off the ground

alya: earned marinette’s trust

chloe: accident?