Its memorial day and here in LA the active Navy ships are in town for Fleet Week! The amazing folks at the battleship IOWA (where I volunteer at) asked me to teach an animation class to the visiting Sailors. This year I got to go on board the USS Harpers Ferry to talk about cartoons and being a creative!
The sailors on board were really excited! Coincidentally they had painted one of their doors to their electrician’s lab with the Rick and Morty Portal and the other with Dexter! So the ship was really a perfect match.
We talked about Animatics, storyboarding, and design, and I got to explain a little bit of the writing process for TV shows. I also illustrated a ball bounce example which the sailors helped out with.
Here is our graduating class! (there were actually a few more people but they had to leave early to work report to their posts.)
Afterwards they gave us a special tour of the ship! I love getting to see this stuff up close
I got to man the helm for a moment and check out the inside of this radar repeater!
Our tour guide was an electrician, so he showed us all the cool antennas. there are some that are so powerful, that when they are on, you cannot be within 15 feet of them, or you will receive radiation damage. Its like Fallout up on this boat!
They got some rad equipment here too. you can store lots of cargo on this bad girl.
The highlight of any landing dock ship is of course, the Well Deck! which can be flooded with water to deploy amphibious vehicles or boats!
They can also be used to capture a space capsule, like the Artemis Orion Crew module.
At the end of the tour they asked me to sign their portal door!
Afterwards I hung out around Fleet week and saw some of the sights. They always have such cool equipment on display
I was jealous of the kid that got to operate the M777 Howitzer
The Satin Dollz were really singing today!
One of the sailors stopped me to let me know he bought one of my shirts!
I also designed a few other things for 2025 Fleet Week. It’s the Navy’s 250’th anniversary, so I made some little Navy 250 logos for shirts and mugs.
I brought my new Samsung tablet so I could live sketch. Here are some drawings of a couple of vehicles I saw there. a little amphibious tank guy (LAV-25) and a classic Huey!
Welp. That’s about it for fleet week 2025! It was a real blast, I always have fun interacting with the service members and its a real honor to get to teach them about animation. They obviously have extremely difficult jobs, so I am very happy to provide them a couple of hours of entertainment and connection with their favorite TV shows. I think it also helps prepare them for transition to life as civilians. They will all most likely go on to have a second career, and I would like to think that some of them could work in the creative industry. They certainly have the work ethic down already.