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Here's the thing I like most about the Macintosh: It makes people what they aren't. More than any other computer, it has the ability to take amateurs and turn them into, at the least, pro-sumers. Aldus PageMaker made every church secretary a graphic designer. Photoshop made everyone with a camera and a scanner a photographer for Weekly World News. iMovie turned us all into Adam Shankman, and GarageBand has created a whole mess of Coldplays.

Here's the thing I hate most about the Macintosh: It makes people what they aren't. Church secretaries don't make good graphic designers, Weekly World News is pretty much entertaining only for its text content, Adam Shankman is singlehandedly destroying Steve Martin's career, and Coldplay is the most overrated band since...well...ever.

And yet, because of our Macintoshes, we all have grand illusions of something greater. Maybe it's the thrill of learning, maybe it's the ability to show off, or maybe it's a way to justify the premium price of Macs. ("No, honey, I swear I'll make it all back in six months filming and editing wedding videos.") Whatever the reason, I'm just as guilty as the next guy at the Genius Bar on Friday nights, and here I go again. Now, I fancy myself an animator.

I've reviewed a few animation programs of varying capabilities over the years, the most notable of which is Toon Boom's Toon Boom Studio. Always a pretty cool program, it was also always pretty powerful, and it's one I've wanted to look into beyond my standard review period. To that end, I'll be writing a series of columns about my experiences with the newest release—Toon Boom Studio v3—rather than just writing a one-off review. I'll talk about the tutorials, the online help (no manual to speak of), the program's capabilities, and my personal project. Hopefully, you'll get something out of it, as I'm quite sure I will.

It all starts off, then, with an admission: I can't draw. My skills topped off in fifth grade, so I never really progressed beyond the ability to draw a fairly decent Godzilla and some jet fighters (provided they were really far off in the distance). Earlier versions of Toon Boom Studio had tools to help me work around this, but I still found myself limited by my lack of talent. The ideas were there, but the tools couldn't completely compensate for what I couldn't do on my own.

Toon Boom Studio v3, however, will help me get closer to what I want to achieve. Amongst other improvements, v3 offers:

• A new Free Transform tool that will enable me to apply any combination of scaling, rotation and skewing. In other words, it'll be easier for me manipulate an object in Toon Boom using tools with which I'm already familiar, rather than by making me redraw it.
• Automated lip sync tools to allow fast sound track synchronization. Obviously, as I can't really draw lips, this is key.
• Improved sound scrubbing enables accurate adjustments to the lip synchronization. If it's hard for me to draw lip movement, it would be even harder for me to sync it up to the dialogue with any degree of accuracy.
• Users can animate with key frames and use interpolation to create animation faster. As with the Free Transform tool, this will allow me to animate my objects without having to redraw them. I'm concerned that this will also result in a lack of control, but we'll see when I get to that point.

So, what is the project? Well, it was inspired by the closing animation sequence of Lemony Snickett's A Series of Unfortunate Events? Did you see it? It's good enough (although not nearly as charming and inventive as the books, of course), but the closing animation sequence during the credits is amazing, and worth the price of the rental alone. It relies more on style than on technique or detail, and the animation is actually quite minimal throughout. As I was watching this, I wasn't arrogant enough to think, "I could do that," but was inspired enough to think I sure would like to try.

So, I contacted Toon Boom to see if they were interested in working with me on this column. To my delight, they liked the idea, so I only needed something to actually, you know, animate. For that, I had to look no further than my own documents folder on my Mac. I've been marketing a children's poem I wrote a while back, but I've been having no luck. My illustrator has disappeared, leaving me with only uncolored sketches of drawings, but guess what? Toon Boom Studio allows you to add color. So, with the help of a local print shop, I'll be scanning in the line drawings, bringing them into Toon Boom Studio, and turning my children's book into a children's cartoon.

First things first, though. Time to learn the program. Over the next few weeks, I'll be burying myself in the Toon Boom Studio tutorials, working with their files so I'll know what to do with my own. I'll be covering my experiences in this column, so be sure to check back often if you're interested in following my progress and maybe gaining a few ideas of your own.

All Entries:

1. Project Introduction
2. Tutorials and Online Help
3. Overview of the Seven Step Tutorial

Learn more about Toon Boom Studio.