Nathan Meyer has been homeschooled his whole life and is currently age 17 (2018)
He created his first Lego stop motion animation at the age of 10. It only consisted of about 10-50 images and according to Nathan, it “looked horrible.”
However he persisted with the craft and slowly improved. He and his twin brother decided
to start a YouTube channel where they could post their animations “for fun”. “This way we could get more into the animation community and increase our learning,” Nathan explained.
“After doing this for a couple of years our good friend Ben (another homeschooler) introduced us to Blender. Blender is a free open source 3D application where you can completely create 3D model, it totally blew my mind, and started to learn all the fields of 3D CGI.”
Nathan is currently a freelance animator and he says he is learning rapidly, especially about how to deal with clients.
Below is a sample of some of Nathan’s animation work.
https://youtu.be/8TnR_iGfqhQ
Here is a link to the JustNat Bros Youtube channel where you can see other video clips by the twins.
Photography
Nathan is also interested in photography. His uncle encouraged him and he started taking photos with a smart phone until he received a Canon camera for his birthday two years ago.
Nathan shares his photography online too: “I posted my pictures online to get exposure and sell my images. I used Eyeem to do this and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to start photography!
My most succesful images were not the ones taken with an expensive camera, but the ones that captured a special moment.”
In 2017 Eyeem published one of Nathan’s pictures (taken from an Iphone 4) and use it in their international photography magazine. (photo above)
Drawing
Drawing is another skill that Nathan has developed. He says he developed it as it is a useful in the field of animation. He made a habit of drawing every day he has been drawing for about 4 years now.
Here are some of Nathan’s pencil drawings:
Nathan’s advice to other homeschoolers: “I would encourage fellow homeschoolers to out different kinds of art and hobbies, in my experience, if you stick to something long enough, you would most likely get something out of it.”
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