In 2012, I began a personal Web site at agaan.com to explore how technology can be leveraged for African nation building. One of my first ideas was to open an animation studio that relates the rich oral heritage of Africans and African-Americans. Africans have thousands of years folklore that remains largely untapped by the animation industry. At the time, I was a software analyst at Verizon Wireless, but my interest was always to study computer graphics so that I could make this dream reality. So in 2014, that’s what I did. I started a PhD program in Engineering at UW-Milwaukee where I focused on computer graphics and medical image visualization.
While pursuing my PhD, I took a couple courses in animation with CalArts alum and former Hollywood animator for Disney and The Simpsons, Prof. Timothy Decker. While my animation work was nothing to write home about, it did give me a chance to rekindle some of my art skills, having been an avid painter in my HS days. More importantly, it exposed me to the basic animation workflows that I needed to design and build my own animation software. Fast forward to 2023, and the Animteam App is nearly a completed MVP.
Animteam is powerful because it enables collaborative editing from mobile devices which heretofore have been limited to local stand alone Apps. Animteam stores your work in Cloud Service Providers and makes it accessible from any device where the Animteam App is installed. Over Q1 2023, I plan to release the App and gradually increase the number of subscribers to 1K. If you have an interest in animation or digital art, go ahead and give Animteam a try.