Ruminating. . .

Um, wait. There's an easy part to animation?
There are always things that are easier than others, but most things that seem easy either a.) weren't really done right the first time or b.) got easier with practice. As for right now, for me, it's not really that animation is crazy hard or difficult to understand, it's that it takes a lot of patience, thought, and time in order to complete a fun-to-watch well-crafted animation. I am slightly lacking in the patience category and completely broken in the time category which also affects my thought process. So if you were to ask me, animation is not hard. Learning animation is hard.

I have just finished shooting for my second animation film in which the only requirement was to create an object based film using stop motion. Stop motion is a time consuming process like all animation, but not only does it take a long time to create, most likely all the work has to be shot at one time. In my case, I made things even harder on myself because I chose to do a stop motion animation outside dealing with things like the melting sun and miniature whirlwinds. It was only a plastic bottle who wanted to be recycled, but by the end of shooting, doing the ending of the film was my favorite part. When I finish the film, you will understand. I have shot the film twice now and I hope to never do it again. That's another hard thing about doing stop motion is that if a scene isn't done right, the whole scene has to be redone because there's no way to go back. That's miserable.

Moving along, there are things that are easier in animation. For instance, creating an idea is easy. Anybody can have a good idea. The hard part is making the idea interesting to watch, but that's another story. The programs for animation now a days make creating an animation easy as long as a person knows and understands how to use the program. Once again, it requires practice to learn the programs, but the general idea for the programs are all the same which makes transitioning between programs and different types of animation much easier. For example, now a days it's much easier to make 3D animation blend with 2D animation or putting live action movement in an animation. I say now a days as if I was actually there, but from what I've heard about how it use to be done, I prefer the method these days.

Animation isn't as easy as a lot of people think it is. Most people just think that "oh, well you just draw a bunch of things multiple times and it makes it move. If I could draw, I'm sure I could do that." To those people, I just wanna say, "Can you draw a stick figure? Then make it move. And make it move well." Then, maybe, they would have a better appreciate for the movies they go see.

Progress Report on Recycle

This is the progress report for my second animation film. It is not complete. I still need to finish out the story, do my recording for the ending, figure out some sound, and adjust the pacing. Hopefully I'll have this all done by next tuesday. D:

This is the link to my progress. Just Recycle Me