For anyone super interested and/or bored enough to look, here’s the specific equipment I like to use:
Cartoons
- Canson Esquisse Balloon Sketchbook 8.5 x 11
- Sakura Pigma Graphic 1mm pens
- Staedler Pigment Liner 0.1mm, 0.3mm, 0.5mm, 0.7mm pens
- Faber Castel colored brush pens
- Utrecht design marker, cool grey 10%
- Bic 0.7mm HB mechanical pencils
- Canon LiDE 25 scanner
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
Animation
- Adobe Photoshop CS2 and After Effects CS5
- Final Cut Pro
Movie making
- Canon 60D
- Whatever I can get…it’s all a lot more expensive than drawing stuff
- I’ve worked w/ a Sony EX3 and Canon 7D and enjoyed those
Software I highly recommend in general
- Photoshop – it’s like the old cratchety mechanic of Computerville – he can do anything you need him to, or he’s good friends with the guy who can. Practically everyone in the developed world knows the verb “photoshop”, but if you do any sort of work remotely to do with media, you should know the program.
- Logic Express – great audio program, much less expensive than Logic Pro or Pro Tools, but doesn’t really have any big limitations.
- Cakewalk Music Creator - for anyone with a PC who really wants to record music, but only has about $30 to spend on software. This is a really great program to learn the general interface of professional audio recording programs, and it’s awesome for beginners.
- Final Cut Pro – all the crusty old editors of the world seem to hate when people don’t want to learn Avid, but FCP is just way easier to understand if you’ve been playing with MS Paint since elementary school, and Photoshop since high school. It’s the same ‘tool-based’ idea, and it makes a lot more sense to me than Avid. If you grew up editing film on a Steenbeck in your basement, then go with Avid.
- Tweet Deck - for better or worse, if it wasn’t for Tweet Deck, I wouldn’t use twitter. It just makes the whole thing more convenient, and thus worth doing.
- WordPress – it’s not necessarily “software”, but more of a “content management system” as I’ve heard it called. Basically, it’s the best way to make a web site, period. If you don’t know a whole lot about web design, you can make a sweet web site, if you know CSS, HTML, and/or Javascript, you can do pretty much anything you could possibly think of, but still have a lot already done for you. For anyone who spent a while using Dreamweaver or Imageready to make web sites, the impact of how awesome WP will be even greater. “I’m using it right now….and loving it!”
- Google Docs, Calendar, etc. – if you put aside any Big Brother paranoia you may have, Google’s various cloud computing applications are pretty much the greatest thing ever invented (you know, beside the light bulb, electricity, water purification, the 3 field system…). If you trust in the Google it will do many good things for you. It is a loving and merciful Google.
- iTunes – because music is essential to life. Like breathing or chocolate.