I got a phone call at 5:50 that resulted in me having to stay late at work until about 8-8:30 at night. As I have said in many of my recent posts my initial plans were to work on the unfinished harmonograph collecting dust in my parent’s garage. Due to the time, I opted to stay home.
I didn’t feel very inspired by many of the ideas I was having except the urge to do an animation. I pushed the thought away knowing that it takes a long time to get any real results. It kept popping back up.
So I decided to do a quick, random, freeform animation. In contrast to my first dry-erase animation I wasn’t planning anything out. I wasn’t going to be doing any realistic movement. I wanted it to be similar to the kind of animation you usually see in dry-erase where the act of drawing itself is animated.
What excited me the most about it was that I didn’t know what the heck I was drawing from one frame to the next. I just went with the flow. It was an interesting experiment and I definitely will try it again some time in the future.
Working in this way also allowed me the ability to finish more frames. I don’t have to worry about redrawing the whole thing every single frame. I can simply adjust a little here and a little there. The final animation which you can watch below is 12 seconds long.
I hope you enjoy!
Comments
7 responses to “Day 219 / Freeform Dry-Erase Animation”
Very cool! Craig, how did you photograph the animation? Was it your DSLR or did you have it set up with an automated system?
This is very nice and I am going to have to give this a try…
TB
Hey Todd, I shot it with my DSLR on an animation stand I have on loan from my work. You can see it at the bottom of this post: http://theb-roll.com/day-119-a-new-workspace/
Also, (sorry but I have to remind you) It’s Charlie.
I love the transition to the gnomes. good stuff
Sorry Charlie! Man that’s humbling. Seriously, sorry. Thank you for sharing your set up. I’m going to give it a try this weekend.
Honestly, sorry.
TB
Don’t worry about it Todd. It’s all good. I’m sure eventually it’ll sink in. I’m sorry if my comment came across short or cold. If we collaborate on something I’m going to require that you know my name. Haha!
PROMISE!
TB
[…] of his. They were mostly noise based tracks consisting of dissonant guitar sounds. He had seen a previous dry-erase experiment I’d done before and thought it would be cool if I used the same technique to create visual […]