Blog Posts

SpringBoard Animation Pilot – by Brandon L

In February 2022 I had the idea of opening an animation studio. Of course, it will take some time & effort, but I am very passionate. Passionate enough that I’m willing to put in the effort. Weeks went by and before I knew it, it was March. I had to rethink my actions. Then the CEO of Springboard suggested a workshop, a “pilot”. Students from local high schools can come in and learn the basics of animation, a course that most colleges would teach but high schools did not. We decided to plan our upcoming “pilot” for the summer of 2022.

As the months of planning & collaborating with other schools & youth programs went by, we hired a brilliant instructor name Lopez. He is an awesome animator. He downloaded a free animation program called Kirita which is simple for the students to use. Then the big day arrived. On August 27^th, 5 students came in ready to learn the basics of animation. It was a free open house that would run for 2 hours. The 5 students certainly enjoyed their time with each other. 2 of them were high schooler One high schooler was Eva. Her younger brother, Jaden was in middle school. This pilot was geared towards high schoolers but her brother showed interest in the program and so we allowed him to come along too.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.