Blog Posts

Animation Studios in Long Island Part 2

I’ve said in my previous blog that “Art/Animation is a medium I have the utmost respect for.” And I still stand by that. I am writing a 2nd part to this blog because I will make it my mission to convince you the viewer and the populace to open various animation studios on Long Island and give animators & storyboarding artists young & old job opportunities.

If you didn’t read it yet, here is Part 1 of the previous blog: Animation Studios in Long Island

There is plenty of empty buildings to rent out, next to a local barber shop or a convenience store. And when you do find the right building to open your animation studio, you’ll need a layout of how the office SHOULD look.

I am by no means an architect and it depends on how big or small the building itself is. But when first starting out, it’s important to keep the layout of the office simple. Even if it means having 2-4 cubicles, computers, drawing tablets, etc.

This image is from Santa Monica Animation Studio based in California Keep in mind that there are some things. Santa Monica Animation studio has been around for a long time and has significant changes to their office layouts. I know I said, it’s important to keep it simple but I used this as an example to give you an idea of how an animation office should look. But you are free to customize it to your likeness.

I would like to use another animation studio office layout as an example. This one is based in Tokyo Japan. Eastern offices have a completely different layout than in the west. But after taking a glimpse of the inside of Studio Mappa’s office, you could surely sprout ideas to your liking.

MAPPA Studio: a look inside the office that’s creating your favorite anime

I’m showing you these examples because it’s important to be presentable. You’re not just showing off your office to animators & storyboarding artists who are trying to look for a job, you’re presenting your studio and its employees to inverters, and publishing companies who wish to do business with you & to see if your studio can meet their standards.

The company known as Disney is filled to the brim with investors. They currently own the rights to four currently running animation studios such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Studios, and Lucasfilm. When making your own animation studio, you have to essentially “sell” your studio to a publishing company so they may invest in it. The publishing company(sometimes multiple depending on the project) will give your studio projects to work on and they’ll give you the necessary resources to do so.

The word “outsource” means to “obtain (goods or a service) from an outside or foreign supplier, especially in place of an internal source”. It’s far more common than you think. Office spaces, website structures, and advertisements in general. Even your favorite cartoons from early the 2000s were outsourced to studios in eastern countries such as Korea & China. Western countries do this frequently and vice versa in eastern countries. Japanese animation studios outsource their work to western studios time after time. You even see the name of certain studios in the credits of a show.

Some studios don’t outsource at all. Even the most work may be overwhelming to them. But even small studios with limited resources can make a difference in the work they produce. So don’t be discouraged when making a studio yourself and don’t be afraid of doing it alone. Try to work with others and they’ll work with you. “Teamwork” is key to success.

We at Springboard Incubators are opening a small animation studio ourselves and are in need of a handful of animators & storyboarding artists. Here’s our contact information:

We are also hiring teachers to teach students of all ages how to be an animator and to work with art programs such as Moho, Adobe Animate & Toon Boom Harmony.

Thank you for reading.

Becoming an Animation Producer!

To be an animation producer you should know what animation producers are. They have the responsibility to oversee the production of animation (short, series, and movie). It’s a matter of starting your own business and that is a separate kind of education and finances. You will hire & gather workers such as directors, animators, writers & so on. When I said “responsibility” I meant that you have to give insight to your employees on what they need to do to make the animation.

For example. Ramsey Naito is the current president of Nickelodeon studios. However, in the past, she has worked on many shows & movies such as The Spongebob Squarepants movie & The Baby Boss as an executive producer. The difference between these two is that while all employees report to him/her for everything an executive producer doesn’t get too involved in a production. It’s like being the king/queen of the castle in a way.

For more information, click here: Ramsey Ann Naito | Wiki , Nickelodeon Animation Studio | Wiki

Both Producers and Executive Producers usually have connections to more than one studio in both the U.S and other countries. But there have been instances where an American animation studio has collaborated with anime producers. One, in particular, is a studio based in Texas called Tonari Animation. They have a web-based studio, meaning they mostly function online. They have hired animators & layout artists via social media websites to work on Japanese-based productions. They have collaborated with various Japanese animation studios such as Toei Animation & Studio Perriot in previous years.

The CEO of the studio is Jarrett Martin. As I said before, the role of a producer is to manage the employees on their work, but Mr. Martin is also an animator himself who has contributed directly into said projects. Mr. Martin has very much enjoyed working with anime creators over the past few years & will continue to do so.

While they have been very successful in their work, they’re still looking for new recruits as the animation industry continues to grow. Please visit their website for more information.

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Learning media production will take a few college courses. But we at Springboard have connections to various producers who can help educate you at half the price. And if you are an animation producer reading this, we would really appreciate you contacting us to help us teach the youth about animation production.

I now have a studio up and running. If you have an anime project, contact us and lets work together!https://t.co/Xx9wT3B9Ml

— Jarrett Martin ジャレット・マーティン (@JarrettHMartin) August 29, 2020

To join his studio as either an animator, layout artist, or both, send him your portfolio. His contact information is here.

Email: [email protected]
Phone: (516) 414-2000

I encourage you the viewer to consider becoming an animation producer you will be doing a huge favor for not just yourself but many animators, writers, directors & storyboard artists as well. Thank you for reading.

Is Social Media bad for Artists?

Before I begin I would like to inform the viewers of a few important things. I’m only going to speak about the benefits for artists when it comes to being on social media sites. NOT for people in general. You are free to roam social media every day. However, I do not recommend “all day” every day. Moderation is very important to one’s mind, body & soul. Thank you.

Let’s be positive first before I give you all my honest answers. Artists can benefit from social media in a couple of ways. You, artists, want to be productive yes? So consistently posting is key to gaining attention on social media sites like Instagram for example. Adding hashtags (Like this #) helps shows your posts to a wider audience.

When you post, people will leave positive comments/helpful feedback. It can be one person but it can also be 100 people. You slowly but surely grow an audience of people who love your work & are willing to support you. And of course, seeing/hearing works from other artists no matter how famous they are, can be a very helpful inspiration/motivation for you. The word “aspiring” is an illusion. The moment you put your pencil on that paper and draw an apple for example or a poem about apples, or make a rap song about apples, then congratulations, you’re an artist (regardless if you like apples or not). You’re inspired by others and you want to make things as good as them or better.

Now, back on topic. Here are the downsides for artists trying to “stay on top” on social media. It’s easy to get “likes” and “shares”, just post a drawing you did, add some hashtags, and boom 50+ likes in less than a day. Being a “famous “ artist on Instagram or Twitter isn’t difficult it’s STAYING famous is the difficult part.

With a big enough audience roughly around 500+ to 1K (a thousand) followers, they expect more from you as an artist. Even if it means posting daily. The coming & going of followers is like a rushing tide. They come & they go. But if you aren’t consistently active, your follower count will drop significantly. But being productive can be very tiring.

Very often artists are compared by others. Sometimes, comparisons may come off as a compliment, but, they can also spawn negativity & misunderstandings. Being accused of “plagiarism” for example, drawing/singing something, someone else has already done. Even if you had good intentions & didn’t realize it, even your community will hang that guilty over your head. But most of the time, being compared to other artists can damage not just your credibility but your confidence to learn from other artists. Your mind creates this “illusion” that you have to be “original”. Originality doesn’t exist. Why? Because inspiration does. Do not be afraid from learning from other artists because you will inevitability create your own content.

And lastly, always do any form of art for yourself. Creating art for an audience, views, and money is also a good thing but you must do it for your own sake. For example, have a sketchbook with you. You make such an impressive drawing you immediately think you want to post it online & share it with your followers. But you’ve done that with your other personal work and it didn’t get as much attention as you thought. Your followers will send you “requests” or “suggestions” themselves on what they want you to draw for them. Even send you money as long as you draw what they want from you. But will that make you happy? Sure you’ll make them happy by drawing something they want to see. Sure they’re willing to give you money to see a certain drawing. But I ask again, will that make YOU happy? Find & keep that happiness of being an artist. If you’re just going to be miserable, applying to your follower’s wants/needs, doing things you don’t like to do, you may as well put your pen/pencil down for good.

Even artists on social media need to be consistently active in doing their art commissions. Someone pays an artist(s) to draw them something for a profit. Most jobs for artists come from social media websites through “DMs” (Direct messages). Not all artists are successful when it comes to doing art commissions. You must have responsible prices. Nothing too expensive but also nothing too cheap. Otherwise, you won’t get any customers at all. Let alone customers who pay well. Your art also needs to be presentable. No one is going to pay $25 for a stick figure drawn on a napkin. Most art is done digitally and not every artist is ready to make the switch from traditional to digital and be good enough to make money off of their recent skills.

Let’s come back to the big question at hand. Is Social Media bad for artists? The answer is Yes & No. It has excellent benefits but it also has serious consequences. It can be enjoyable & convenient but stressful & frustrating. For artists. Social media is a “double edge sword”.

I do have a few solutions for artists who failed to gain a presence and clout (attention) on social media, it’s important to try again & be persistent. People have lots of opinions & it can be overwhelming but theirs no harm in either “muting” them so you won’t see their harmful words or blocking them so they won’t see your content at all. Surround yourself with positive energy by creating your own community of folks who like you & your work.

The other solution is making your own website and posting your artwork there instead. There’s no need to go to college and learn computer science for 4 years, these days it’s simple to learn how to build a website from scratch. And the employees at SpringBoard Incubators can assist you every step of the way. Not just in building a website but making a portfolio as well. Not to mention sharing your finished website with various clients so getting a job in the art field is easier.

If you want Springboard Incubators to help you make a website, the contact information is right here.

One more thing. Don’t spend too much on the internet all day. You can do it every day if you wish but not ALL day long. Put your phone or laptop on sleep mode and take a walk outside, get some fresh air.

Thank you for reading.

BBBSLI – Raspberry Pi and Sphero Workshop

With great success at our STEM workshop at BBBSLI this past saturday, Bigs’ and Littles were able to learn about Raspberry Pi circuits and work with Sphero kits. We all worked as a team and had fun while we were learning how to program. It was a great experience to share our knowledge of SpringBoard incubators Inc. Shoutout to our corporate and event partners for making events like this possible.

Thanks to Instructor Will King for giving us great insight on how to conduct a Raspberry Pi Circuit. Thanks to instructors Tuly Reyes and Marilyn Castro for helping our Bigs’ and Littles learn how to code and program a Sphero. More importantly special thanks to BBBSLI for having us.

The animation industry truly began it’s “revolution” in the late 1960s when more and more animated films were produced and released in the public. You’d think it would be the “Walt-Era” when Disney films were being released as the years went by but so many other companies besides Disney were keeping up as well. Regardless, many people found opportunity to find jobs in the animation industry.

June 22^nd 1935 in Santa Barbara, California was the day the first African-American animator was born. His name is Floyd Norman. Currently 86 years old but still very active in the animation industry. What made him join the industry was him watching old Disney movie classics such as Bambi & Dumbo. Early in his career he started as an inbetweener or also known as“Tweenening” animator. This means when an animator adds frames so the final animation is more “smooth” and fluid. Eventually he moved on to work as key animator for notable motion pictures such as Disney’s Sleeping Beauty & Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians. He may have been an animator of color but he like many others had to start somewhere in the early and every growing industry.

Another few examples of African Americans in the animation industry are Frank Braxton who has done key animation for a handful of Charlie brown TV specials and LeSean Thomas who at first started off as an animator, in later years has opened his own animation studio in the eastern countries and created/produced & directed a handful of original anime series such as Cannon Busters & Yasuke. These men of African American decent have made their mark on the animation industry no matter the genre.

To learn more of these men, I will provide the link to their respective Wikipedia pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_American_animation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Norman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Braxton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeSean_Thomas

Although this country has a history of discrimination of races, these men did not falter to achieve their careers in animation and till this day continued to produced more works. I encourage the younger generation to study these gentlemen to become an animator and maybe eventually produce original animation works. Springboard Incubators can help.

We are hiring animators/art teachers with extensive experience in the animation industry to teach those who want to join in it. As for students, all ages can sign up for classes, one on one or groups. Please contact us at at [email protected] or 516.414.2000. Our Business hours are 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Thanks for reading.

By Brandon Lindo

The second part of our workshop with BBBSLI will include the Raspberry PI. Here is another preview of the type of projects you can do with SpringBoard. If your organization is interested, please contact us at 516.414.2000. We (SpringBoard) put the fun in STEM Learning.

The Raspberry PI is a pocket computer. Yes, a really cool computer about the size of a credit card. For this project we will use the serial ports and a breadboard. Think of this as Engineering 101.

Raspberry Pi has a GPIO “General Purpose Input/Output” serial interface, that is composed of two parallel rows of metal pins. The GPIO provides an interface between the software and the physical world.

With these pins we can program the Raspberry Pi to interact with physical objects in the real world. We can receive signals from external sources such as a button or a device for measuring wind speed. We can also use it to control physical objects such as turning a light on and off or even operating a 3D printer. In this case The project you see in the photo below is the traffic light simulator.

After you learn how to connect the circuits on the breadboard, you will learn how to program the traffic light simulator in python. Pretty cool if you ask me. – By Tuly Reyes

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Big Brother Big Sisters of Long Island’s mission is to “create and support one-on-one mentoring relationships that ignite the power and promise of youth.”

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island provides children facing adversity with strong and enduring, professionally supported, one-on-one relationships that change their lives for the better, forever. To this end, BBBSLI has many different mentoring programs.

SpringBoard will be doing a STEM workshop for Bigs’ and Littles’ on September 25, 2021. I am very excited to be part of the team that will be teaching the workshops. So what will we be doing? Here is a preview.

My workshop is a gentle introduction to robotics. I will introduce the concept of autonomous robotics using the SPRK + robot. What can Bigs and Littles expect? They will work together to program our robot to do simple tasks, hence, autonomous robotics. It will be a great learning experience and I cannot wait. – by Tuly Reyes

Click Here to Learn more About BBBSLI: BBBSLI

I live in a suburban area in New York. I drive of course but most of the time I walk around the streets to my local pharmacy to pick up some essentials. As I do my afternoon cardio, I noticed around me empty buildings with signs that say “Rent” and a phone number displayed underneath. Next to the pharmacy, I take a small peak from the window, just to get a good look inside. I can’t help but think “You can definitely open an animation studio in there.”

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By Tuly Reyes & Chelsea Prudencio

As promised in our series, “A Data Science Story” this blog will provide insights into data from surrounding villages in Nassau County as it relates to Education and the Digital Divide. The data set was downloaded from the US Census for the following Villages: Rockville Centre, Freeport Village, Garden City, The Village of Hempstead, and Lynbrook.

Step 1: In Data Science terms, we “wrangled” the data. That means, remove blanks, and organize in a structure that we can use. We used Excel, and a nice trick to “transpose” the rows and columns, then saved it as a comma separated values (CSV).

Step 2: Next we need to explore the data. So we will use Google Colab. It is an excellent tool for data exploration and analysis, again in Data Science terms, this is EDA or Exploratory Data Analysis.

During our EDA, we noticed that “computer and internet access” were reported in percentages. And while the percentages looked good all around, we wondered what the impact would look like not in percentages but in terms of individual persons.

Here is our analysis:

Step 1: Data Wrangling

• Total House Holds
• Persons Per House Holds
• Percent of House Holds with Computers
• Percent of House Holds with Broadband Internet Access

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Step 2: EDA & Hypothesis

Lets look at the bar chart as percentages

So we compute the number of Households and the Number of Persons affected by the digital divide in each of these villages. We took the inverse of the percentages for computers and internet access and use them in our computation.

• Total households without computers = Total Households x (1 – PCT With Computers)
• Total households without internet = Total Households x (1 – PCT with Internet)
• Total persons without computers = (Total households without computers) x (Person Per Household)
• Total persons without internet = (Total Household without internet) x (Persons per Household)

The results are shown by the table below:

Step 3: Conclusion & Impact

By taking the percentages and converting them to numbers show the real impact the “Digital Divide” has on communities in our area. Sometimes showing impact a as percentage does not bring to light the seriousness of the problem. In the case of Hempstead we can see that the access to computers and internet affects 5,010 + 10,891. A total of over 15,000 persons are impacted by the digital divide.

Now let’s take a look at the visualization and not percentages but as actual persons affected.

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Data scientists are “big data” wranglers, gathering and analyzing large sets of structured and unstructured data. A data scientist’s role combines computer science, statistics, and mathematics.  Data scientists are in high demand. They analyze, process, and model data then interpret the results to create actionable plans for companies and other organizations.

“Data scientists are anomaly spotters”, said Dr. Steven C. Lindo, Chairman & CEO of SpringBoard Incubators Inc. Meaning that they follow a technique for Exploratory Data Analysis (or EDA). This method uses data visualizations techniques to look for outliers in datasets.

At SpringBoard, our Data Science workshops use the Python programming language for data analysis. We use it natively or with platforms like Google Colab or Jupyter IPython.

Python is perfect for scientific computing, here are the main components you will learn to use at SpringBoard:

• Basic Python: Basic data types (Containers, Lists, Dictionaries, Sets, Tuples), Functions, Classes
• Numpy: Arrays, Array indexing, Datatypes, Array math, Broadcasting
• Matplotlib: Plotting, Subplots, Images
• Pandas: Data analysis methods and tools.
• IPython or Colab: Creating notebooks, Typical workflows

Our next blog in “A Data Science Story” will use these tools to provide insights into census data from surrounding villages in Nassau County.

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