Do your parents have a strong understanding of what you do for a living?

My mum has no idea - my dad has a bit more of an understanding because it’s sort of related to his first job as an adult, but not really. I think my mum was happier when I was a perma-broke musician with substance abuse issues.

My mum also told me, when I wanted to drop out of uni because of relentless stress and poverty, that I’d peaked at my GCSEs. We should form some sort of group.

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my wife doesn’t have a clear understanding of what i do for a living.

most of the people in my office don’t have a clear understanding of what I do for a living.

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surely “white van man” isn’t that hard to get to grips with?

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take it to the secret identities thread

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i try to explain it to my mam, i put stuff on the website and develop new stuff and add bits when theres new bits. so she says ooh if i have a look at the website will i see your work? and i say yeah here you go, heres a bit that i spent the last few months working on. and she;ll go so you wrote this did you? and i’ll go no i dont write it i just put the web page together. and she’ll go right so this bit is what you wrote? and i go no mam i dont write it, i just put it together and make it look nice and work properly. and she goes ok i’ll show your gran what youve written :man_shrugging:

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I guess this isn’t your job but did you do animation or something?

If you did do you know of anything that I could get someone for their 7th birthday who currently (this week) thinks he would like to be an animator? I have seen some of those claymation kits but he would prefer ‘cartoons’.

In fact he asked if we could turn his bedroom into an animation studio, invite his mates over and they would knock out a fully formed cartoon in a couple of hours (I was to voice the hero) but I explained that this was not possible.

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Not sure.

There was a point where dad thought I did service desk type IT stuff and kept pushing me to do more of it elsewhere. Yeah. Nope.

Yes.

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that was my degree, yeah. i was big into my stop motion, it was a lot more exciting to me seeing stuff that id made and moved with my hands coming to life onscreen than doing lots and lots and lots and lots of drawings, which is also fun but i found more difficult, and doing CGI stuff which is less fun and way more fiddly. for a 7 year old, dunno really.

claymation kit thing sounds like good fun, but if theyre more into drawing stuff then maybe loads of drawing stuff? maybe a lightbox so they can put two sheets of paper over it and see the previous frame through the current one theyre working on, to make the movement from one to the other a bit smoother. or flickbooks! flickbooks are great but i guess you can use anything to make them.

knocking out a fully formed cartoon in a couple of hours puts terrible strain on the animators wrist

Cheers, yeah stop motion stuff seems a far better option to me. Might have to watch a load of Aardman/Laika over the next few weeks to get him back on that.

The problem is he may well be into something completely different this afternoon let alone in a couple of months.

Plus we have chromebook, iPad and that sort of stuff but no real ‘computer’.

Yes, I work in a shop.

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And your parents have been to shops before?

you/your child into the trap door?

As in Don’t you open that Trapdoor? We have watched some but not recently.

yeah, that’s the one. it ruled as far as I remember!!! I mostly bring it up because as a child it inspired me/my brothers to make some stop-motiony stuff. still have a few models lying around at my parents’ house somewhere I think

Yeah I used to love the song.

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think theres prob bits of software that you can use to put together summat at a relatively low framerate, so not yer 24 frames per second that the pros use(d when i was doing my degree) but summat that you can play with to get a feel for making smoothish transitions and stuff. you might be able to do it in something like imovie, if you can import lots of photos and play them at a decent framerate? i have no idea tho tbh. @chris-budget might, hes done more animation in the past 10 years than i have (ie some).

but yeah just watch loads of aardman, harryhausen, gerry anderson (not really animation but still mint). wracking my brains for more stuff but drawing a blank and i cant check my dvds coz theyre all boxed up to move house

teaching was the only job they understood. explained multiple (this is putting it lightly) times to them that despite working in academic publishing, I neither proof read books for mistakes or designed book covers for a living.

cosgrove hall stuff! did some work experience there, if you can find the postman pat episodes (i think they were called) The Grand Vehicle Race and Football Crazy, i painted and dressed the sets for them. painted them a slightly wrong shade of green at first, it was too blue and not yellow enough so i had to re-mix the paint and re-paint them, and then i dried them with one of those heat guns and then burnt my fingerprints off by accidentally touching the end of the thing. hurt like fuck to change gears when i drove home later

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holy shit yes!

about 20 mins is the set i dressed, put all them flowers and that down

and 5 and half mins into this

this is brilliant

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