The History of Animation Lessons

[Huronna]

ANIMATION LESSONS HISTORY

Animation Lessons was started by a man named Animator.

He had visited many PSP sites and saw some wonderful images, but nothing moved.

He joined a few sites and spoke to the managers, asking if he could promote his site.

The idea was that people would join, learn to animate their tags and then go back to their respective groups and pass on the information. He told the managers that he was not there to "steal" their members and that he would never be in competition with the other sites in regards to contests, awards etc. And to this day these ideals continue.

Because many of the PSP-ers came from adult groups which were part of MSN at the time, we had a lot of "sexy" images posted. Because Animator wanted this a family friendly group, these types of images were soon deemed unacceptable. Due to the fact that we didn't have time to check ever little bit, rules of "prude" were installed. These basically have remained, with only small alterations.

During the first year, it was decided that we would be ©compliant. Oh were there complaints. But the idea prevailed as many have over the years. We began our own "Safe tubes", things that were made by members and then contributed to our tube area. All members of AL had access to them and could use them in any way they needed with only a little credit ALST needed.

Everything was going fine with the group until one morning in May of 2004 Animation Lessons was hacked.

MSN said that they closed us for piracy, of what we were never able to find out. There were areas open to members and it could have been something uploaded and then reported to MSN without our knowledge, but MSN would never tell us exactly what it was. At first, Animator was disheartened. All our hard work, all the loading of the tubes, which at that time were about 1000...how could we replace everything. But we did! We worked 16 hours a day, each of us, Animator, Ailsa and myself, collating the tubes into categories, rewriting the pages, thankfully Animator had kept copies of all the tutorials, and after alerting the sites that many of us belonged to we reopened at 8 PM on a Sunday evening and by midnight, almost all the old members had found us and returned as Animation Lessons2.

Over time Animator had health issues and would be gone for weeks at a time. Huronna and Ailsa kept everything going in his absence. 

Many times at MSN there were problems accessing the site and in 2006 after over a week of getting "white pages" Huronna opened up this site on Proboards. It was just a temporary place for people to meet and chat. No graphics were rarely even posted. In fact the url of the site was huronna.proboards until a few years ago when we were able to change the url to what it is now.AnimationLessons.proboards.com 

Animator had disappeared without a word for over a year. We had no contact at all as e-mails went unanswered. We kept him as a member. Then in the summer of 2008 he came back. You should have heard the cheers. He had had a stroke and was not able to use his right hand at the moment but had gotten some usage of his left. For a couple of months he stayed on, being able to relax as he had given the site to Huronna as he did not want any responsibility. Soon he alerted us that he was going to leave the site, the internet and the computer for good. He never really said why, but that was always like him, a very private person. He said if we wanted his tags, his Ms Mavis animations or whatever, we were welcome to them as he was even going to shut his own site down. He gave us a week, and we took everything which can be found in the TRIBUTE TO ANIMATOR area.

The next thing to happen was to find out that the rumor about MSN closing down was actually going to happen. MSN was due to close in Feb 2009. So since we already had this site it was converted to basically what you see now, with some upgrades of course. But all the lessons were moved, the images were moved and all the safe tubes were placed in a paid Photobucket account. There were now close to 5000 tubes.

And on January 1, 2009 at one minute after midnight Animation Lessons on Proboards was officially opened.

And here we still are, many of us from the very beginning.

And now you know the rest of the story.