Using his website macboy.com to promote his talent, William has succeeded in getting noticed by the production team at Peacock Productions who chose him to produce six animated clips for a one-hour documentary “Best Jobs Ever” which premiered November 3, 2011.
Click here to watch clip of Best Jobs Ever by William Levin
William Levin has a great story to share. Interestingly enough, he is still surprised how he managed to turn his cartoon hobby into a successful career as an independent animator. William recently adopted Toon Boom Animate, and creates cartoons, music and videos that have been featured on The New York Times, Sesame Street, ABC Good Morning America, and more recently CNBC.
Using his website macboy.com to promote his talent, William has succeeded in getting noticed by the production team at Peacock Productions who chose him to produce six animated clips for a one-hour documentary “Best Jobs Ever” which premiered November 3, 2011. This documentary introduces seven people who feel strongly about their jobs and see their work more like play. “I had the idea of incorporating animation into the documentary to make it stand out,” explains Caroline Sommers, producer at Peacock Productions. Th
e team searched the web to identify potential animators who could fit the bill and this is how they discovered William Levin. They were impressed with his style and called him up. Knowing CNBC is such a business oriented channel, Caroline didn’t know how the animation component would be received by the executive producer and the broadcaster. She decided to give it a shot and asked William to create an animation on spec for a clip about Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya. “Considering the few instructions we gave William, we were totally wowed by his animation and maverick style,” shares Caroline. She showed the result to her Senior Producer and Executive Producer who loved the piece, which was then sent to the client. The response was fantastic and the project was green lit. “I truly appreciate William’s creativity. He is clever, talented and accessible. He took direction very well,” states Caroline. "Now that I helped 'shepherd' people to think outside the box at CNBC, I'm hopeful we'll get to work with William a lot more down the road!", concludes Caroline.
For William, the opportunity was exciting to 
say the least. As he just switched over from Flash to Animate, this contract made him ramp up on the tool quite rapidly. “I decided to use Animate as I felt I hit Flash’s limitations. I wanted more control over my scenes. It was always a struggle during render. With Flash I often experienced visual artifacts and poorly synced audio when rendering. It took several tries to get the proper render, when it was right it was almost a miracle! This process is completely smooth with Animate,” explains William. After upgrading his hardware to Mac OS 10.7 and installing Animate, William watched all the video tutorials on his dual screen set up, enabling him to run the software on one side and watch the step-by-step videos on the other.”The video tutorials were extremely helpful. They do a very good job of explaining the different tasks. I was impressed how easy it is to pick up Animate and use immediately,” he continues.
Opting for cut-out animation with unique assets per clip, William had 5 additional clips of about 30 seconds each to produce in one month; he allocated 2 days of work per clip, adding a third day when there were revisions. “Usually they liked the clips on first shot, which was great!” William explains. “The rendering was always correct, no surprises! I could also pick which sequence of the animation I wanted to render to do a test, which was very useful,” he adds. William also appreciates how he can rotate the canvas while drawing as well as control the movement of an entire scene by zooming and panning the camera.
Another point William brings up relates to how easy it was to make color changes. “In one of the clips, we had a yellow Ferrari. When I was requested to make it black, I just modified the color in the color palette and the change was automatic throughout the clip. All I needed to do is re-render and that was fast!”
This fast-paced experience opened the door to many creative ideas William is ready to embark on. One of which is to create more frame-by-frame animation, knowing he can rely on his new animation companion to bring them to the world.
