During Group Criticism sessions (and especially with the Skype Crit with Colorado State University studentsit was suggested that my drawing style might lend itself to animation. I was deeply impressed when looked at the work the artists suggested, particularly that of William Kentridge.

As well as producing excellent artwork Kentridge also extensively documents his reasoning and creative process. This proved to be very helpful. I read about & watched Kentridge working on his animation  & considered how I could test if would be successful approach for my work – both in producing the animation and the aim of the work.

I could see how animation might be useful. I am proposing to reach my audience in part though the Internet & I think, it not unreasonable, that many internet user’s attention is more effectively caught using moving images.

Given the power & sophistication of the internet, why limit yourself to static images to get your message across?

The process?

Image capture:

I spoke to people on the course with animation experience. The animation process seemed rather elaborate to set up, required sophisticated software/computing experience  & incredibly time consuming.

Ideas for animation May 2014

So I resolved to have a go at a  “Lo-Fi” version.

Drawing board in front of a compact system camera on a tripod stand & a couple of lights. I did a quick pencil outline capturing an image every 2-5cms as I went.

The idea was that digital cameras number the captured image sequentially enabling them to be imported into an animation program in the order they were captured.

Computerised animation:

After a several weeks of  conversations, experimentation & head scratching we decided the best way to animate this simple series of images was to use Adobe Bride to import them into Adobe Photoshop as layers. The layers could then be converted to frames, and timelines. After some more conversations & head scratching it turned out to be simple enough o export these as movie files. I ca assure you it’s probably easier & less time consuming for me to show you than describe the process. Assuming you want to make your animation the way that I do mine.

An 7 frame anemation 28 MAY 14

Inspiration

Over the past 4 years I have amassed around 5,500 protective lancet caps  from  blood tests using  One Touch UltraMini Blood Glucose Meter. I wondered if these could be put to work in a ‘traditional’ and ever popular button style stop motion animation.