Justin Cook started Seen Creative in the summer of 2004 after years of working in design studios.
The lack of hand drawn illustration based work in studios inspired Justin to go out and get the kinds of projects he craved most. He soon gained a reputation as the ‘go to guy’ for all things cartoony. Since going freelance his projects have included character design for TV, storyboarding for film, toy design, animation, and more. Justin also teaches Toon Boom Animate via video tutorials at his site www.seencreative.co.uk
On Toon Boom Animate…
“I started like most people, creating little animations in Flash and trying to come up with cool ideas and character designs that I could get moving. Being a one man production team it took a lot of time and effort to create something on my own and meet deadlines while having to skip between programs and find shortcuts to deliver a quality final product.
A year or so ago I tried Animate. I couldn’t believe it. I had found a program that just seemed to be catered for my every need. I could design a character, background and props using the drawing tools, ink it all up, color it, rig it, and get animating all within one program. No more flipping between programs to design, ink and animate. It’s all there in Animate.
What really blew me away were the cameras and z depth. Actually being able to fly through a scene and pan around, and then using the z depth on symbols within a character is just brilliant.
The drawing substitutions is something I really love. Just swiping through that little window to change the drawings rather than having to go in and swap symbols manually is a great time saver and just such a cool feature.
One of the things that makes Animate so great for me are the drawing tools. The brush tool is superb and alongside using a Wacom Tablet I can produce some beautiful lines. I can’t remember the last time I used my previous drawing software for character design. Even if it’s a static design for the portfolio I use Animate, the added bonus being that if I decide to, I could animate it right there at any time.
Animating is just so easy now. With the amount of features at hand in this program I can actually animate all those books of crazy ideas I have!”
Justin has developed several excellent video tutorials for Animate. Check out his web site, Vimeo or YouTube channel.
