Hi! I’m Jonathan Leiter. I'm twelve years old, and I'm an artist and animator.
When I was 4, I thought I would
become an inventor and scientist. I was so fascinated with chemical reactions
and how things worked. I mostly got the idea to want to be those from an episode
of The Muppet Babies. But by the time I had turned 5, I was getting a
little suspicious if I had made the right decision. A movie called Cats Don’t
Dance just came out on video, and my dad’s mother got it for my fifth
birthday. After I watched it I liked it a lot, and I started thinking about the
possibility of becoming an artist and filmmaker.
A little here and there since I was four, I had been filming myself doing things
on the video camera. I still have a lot of the footage of me when I did those on
old videotapes. But I never got really into filmmaking until one special year.
It was 2001; I was eight years old. My grandfather had been working with
computers for many years and was into a lot of new computer technology. I was
back to using the camera a lot. So he introduced me to a program that could
animate objects through "stop motion animation." And I was fascinated with it. I
had only recently learned that Cartoon TV shows were actually fast moving
drawings. With this program I could animate clay objects in a similar way. So I
thought I’d give clay animation a shot.
After a while I got fairly good at the process, and made many short animations
with a variety of clay characters I created. At the same time, I was starting to
make a lot of drawn animations.The drawn animation phase lasted me 3 whole
years. I was getting better and better at drawing.
In 2002 I was given a chance to test out a computer program called Moho ,
It was a 2D cartoon animation program that I used for a while to produce
interesting films. My grandparents, who gave me the program, were pleased that I
made a lot of progress with creating Moho animations. I was
mastering that program quite well by the time I had turned 11. You can see clips
of my longest animation made with Moho, a 26-minute film called The
Amazing Pencil, in the computer animation section of this
website.
Just this year I have been inspired by some fan art of the Kim Possible cartoon show by a guy named Richard Sirois. He did flawless art renditions of Kim, Ron, and, interestingly, himself with the two main characters. I started to try to draw my own character. I was very pleased with the way it turned out. And after that I started to look at some drawings on the Internet of my favorite cartoon characters, and I found I could copy them with almost no mistakes. It was almost as if they were done by the original artist! This encouraged me to work on inventing my own characters.
I recently created my own super hero characters, which I'm planning to star in a
new film called The T Team. It’s about three 14-year-old high school
students who have to stop a mad local public official from turning the world
into a wild cartoon that he can control.
That's pretty much how I got to be what I am today. Hope you’ll look at the rest
of the web site.
An Album of pictures of my family
See my 2002 winning animation
See my 2003 winning animation
Links to my favorite animation websites