 Bonjour. Come on in. Welcome to my studio. Have a look around. I'm Jonathan Thunder, animator and artist. Welcome to my studio here in Duluth, Minnesota where I animate and create artwork. I've been blessed to have the opportunity to create animations that teach the Ojibwe language. So I was born in Red Lake on the Red Lake Chippewa Indian Reservation. When I was about two, we moved to the Twin Cities where I was raised. I knew that I wanted to be an artist when I was in the third grade. I was given an assignment to draw a happy face and a sad face. I didn't know how to do it. I couldn't figure out how to draw this happy and sad face. So I went home and I was sitting at the kitchen table, obviously flustered. Trying to do my homework and my mom said, what are you working on, son? So she comes over and I told her what the assignment was and she said, well, try it like this. So she sits down and she draws a circle with a little sad face in it, almost like an emoji. And then a circle with a little happy face in it. And like to my third grade brain, that was brilliant. Like it just blew my mind completely. I remember staring at it in such amazement that I vividly remember it being a child and thinking I want to be as great an artist as my mom is. When I start an animation project, I will be approached with an idea. And that idea often is turned into a script. So I'll get it in script form and usually go by the rule that one page equals about 60 seconds of screen time. Once we get down a game plan on how to execute it visually, I'll sit down and do a sketch similar to this sketch that I did with just a big pencil like that. This sketch I scanned into my workstation here with my scanner and then I pulled it up into Photoshop, which is generally where I do a lot of my coloring and layering and that will usually be in layers. So like the head will be a layer and then I'll go through and kind of make the body, you know, the arms are often on multiple layers so that way I can, you know, if anything needs to be animated. And then once I have that, then I'll go ahead and create an environment. So I'll put it on a bench, you know, kind of give it some shading. Also, you know, like to create nice environments for them so you can sort of see where they are in the setting to kind of give you a visual lead up to what, you know, the story is going to be about. From there, what I will do is open up a program called Adobe After Effects and After Effects is pretty much Photoshop on wheels and that's where I'll do a lot of my animation key framework, stuff like that and start to bring these characters to life. I'll get some voiceover work and then those show up here as these little individual voiceover files. This is a scene where this elder is going to be asking this young lady, look over there, what is, you know, like that bird doing or look over there, what are those puppies doing? So I thought it would be cute to have the elder sort of point with her lips before she starts to speak. Back home, I remember, you know, my grandma used to always point with her lips. It was kind of something that I really remember about her. I usually have about three or four different poses for the mouth. So I'll start to do the kind of the lip sync they call it. And then here you can roughly see that, you know, the lips are sort of moving and then what I'll do is go in and then just try to time it up to the voice and then I'll just give it a little test. Once I got an animation kind of in progress and it's looking good. I'll usually render it out so I can sort of see what my animation is looking like so far. This is it kind of in real time. Once that's put together, I compile all of the animations in my editing program. You can see that there's layers and layers of like audio sound design, which is like little ambient noises. And then I'll, you know, I'll go in and select some nice music. I also like to put in sort of ambience, which is always nice. These guys will be in a park, so I have this nice clip of, you know, like birds in a park or something like that. So then I line them up and then once I get things kind of all put together, what I'll do is I'll go in and from the script, I'll kind of put a placeholder subtitle here where the script is going to line up with what's happening on the screen. And then that's how I know where to put my VO and that way I can go through and check things shot for shot to make sure that we're like going down our shot list and taking care of everything that we need so that not only is the story being told for this particular animation being a lesson, you know, the lesson is being delivered in a format that makes sense. And once I get that all in place, what you have is... Animation magic. This drawing is based on a picture of my grandma that I have here. It was a gal who is from Red Lake, and she worked at Head Start most of her life as a gal who would serve the kiddos lunch every day. And I think that, you know, she would love the fact that, you know, she's able to continue to be a part of, you know, this sort of thing. So I got an animation for a couple reasons. So I was that guy who was in his 20s still watching cartoons. And at the time I was at painting school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I was studying to be a painter. I remember seeing this Pixar film called Monsters, Inc. And it was so brilliant to me. I just said, you know what, when I get done with painting school, I want to go to school for that. And for animation, you know, like you can bring your painting skills to the table, you can bring your storytelling skills to the table, and you can flex a little technical muscle in the same time. And, you know, the reaction that I get when I show some of this stuff is just like, just seeing the look on people's faces is almost worth all the work. Any art form, including animation, is going to be a lot of hitting the books, a lot of doing research, find out like the heritage of animation. You know, like Ray Harryhausen was one of the first animators, Clash of the Titans. He made the Kraken come to life and did a lot of the Sinbad movies, you know, with like animated skeletons. Like no stuff like that, get to love it and just study hard and work hard, really hone your craft. And, you know, when you come to the point where you're making, you know, like animations for yourself, you know, that love and appreciation for the craft is going to show through. One day I got asked to illustrate this book called Not a Modding, which, you know, was written by multiple Ojibwe language speakers. And, you know, like I said, I'm not a language speaker. Like I guess I never really thought that I would be asked to be on a project like that. But I took it and, you know, I worked closely with the team that was responsible for writing the content. And it was a really rewarding experience, you know. I felt super blessed that somebody like me, you know, an artist like myself could find him himself on a project where I was going to be delivering artwork that would do some good. You know, like it would really like serve a purpose much bigger than myself. And it also kind of fueled my soul, you know, in a way that I hadn't expected.