Moving Forward

My mom first showed me how to do it.  She gave me post-it notes and a pencil.  I came up with something like this:

My mom continues to show the younger
members of the family this trick.

 "You take corner of your post-its, and flip through them like this," Mom would instruct.  This  is known as traditional animation.

Animation -- a rapid display of sequenced images -- can be traced back to the earliest of paintings, often trying to convey motion by redrawing the same figure in a slightly different position.  Because the human eye retains an image for a split second after the source of the image disappears, the chopped nature of drawn movement becomes nothing more than an illusion on screen.

I always picked this movie off the shelf at the video
rental store -- my poor brothers.

There's no real creator of animation; many people were working on it simultaneously.  However, credit for stop-motion animation goes to Georges Méliès.  Stop-motion animation is literally when the camera is stopped, the props are moved, a frame is shot, and repeat. 

The 1993 stop-motion film, particularly close to my heart, The Nightmare Before Christmas was rated "a stunningly original and visually delightful work."


And now, as we move forward with technology, animation only grows.  I used computer animation to take my post-it example I created in paint to make them move.  Still fairly new with technology, I definitely didn't realize how much goes into even the simplest of GIFs (graphics interchange format).

This is my first animation!

The art here, is in the tedious process of animating.  I used Photoshop (Photoshop is awesome!).  I had to separate the strip of characters I created in paint into different pictures.  Then I layered the images on top of each other in the right order.

After that, the sizes of the images all had to be adjusted to the same dimensions.  Then I had to individually move the characters so they were centered on top of each other, to give the illusion that only the legs and arms were moving.

Lastly, I pressed play.

It doesn't sound like much, and it might not even look like much, but this took a while and I feel rather accomplished with myself.