Animation Messy 1

Here is my first 'animation messy' assignment that was created for the 2nd week of September.  This was my first time experimenting with sand on glass animation so there was a degree of adjusting to the medium.  The sand offered a very defined texture to it that doesn't take much effort to create as opposed to creating texture with pencil, although erasure isn't very possible in the same way thus going frame to frame took getting used to.  On the glass surface you can't exactly see where the sand was on the previous frame... although using the software, Dragonframe, it was possible to onion skin the previous and following frames to use as reference to animate.


Overall, this test was frustrating because I couldn't get exactly what I wanted right off the bat.  When I was slowly adding sand frame by frame to describe the fingerprints there would be times where I added too much or not enough... but I would only notice this after I shoot the frame, which by then (to me) meant that it was too late (because of the inexperience of handling sand on glass well... I didn't want to remove too much or accidentally knick it in a way that stood out).

Right off the bat it was difficult for me, but eventually I just learned to go with the flow and embrace the mistakes that happened.  So after I finished building up the sand in to the form of a full hand, I shot a few extra frames and then began to experiment with less thought behind the movement.

I began to play.

I played around with the sand texture in the palm of the hand for a few frames,

then started playing with the fingers, eventually trying to make the hand close into a fist.

Then I kept playing with the swirling in the palm and eventually made it sweep away off into space.

This last part was the most enjoyable and got me into a rhythm of animating that didn't involve much frustration - which is something I think every animator could use every now and then.



To make more sense of how my animation test turned out, I formed a mini narrative and complimented it with a flash animation.

This messy described the sense of touch, and I pictured a hand reaching out to this white space only to be swept away.  So I introduced it with a hand reaching out in flash.

If I may, this may be a way of describing my reaching out from the commercial flash approach to animating in the experimental form of various mediums.  I'll try not to read into the being swept away part, though.



I'm not a converted experimental animator just yet, but I enjoyed taking this first step of exploration.