Life, The Universe & Animation Today

While I have very little experience working with animation, I have come appreciate the immense amount of time an effort that goes into making the various title sequences that help films and television shows standout. For instance in the Bond franchise each film has its own unique opening sequence style and theme that helps set it apart from its predecessors.                  

One of my favorite pieces of animation growing up were the various guide entries of BBC's 1981 adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One of things that stood out to me in researching these animation sequences was the fact that they were hand drawn rather than created on the computers of the day. Today everything is animated via computers.

Today with programs like after effects and maya we are capable of creating entire three dimensional life-like worlds. After seeing Alex Roman's Third and Seventh I was truly astonished to learn that the entire video we watched was one hundred percent animation. This realization both shocked and amazed me for two reasons. One, the fact that this one man was able to accomplish this by himself in the course of one year. Secondly, the thing that slightly scares me about this is the potential that if someone had a large enough team and equipment, they could easily fool the untrained eyes and blur the lines of reality and illusion. While this may sound like something out of a dystopian science fiction story, we're probably not too far off with all the technology currently available.

While this I don't think I have that level of dedication to create the same quality of work as Roman, I am looking forward to working this semester. Seeing the work of Roman as well as some the videos  of the previous versions of this class has given me something to shoot for. Although motion graphics and animation are not my primary areas study, I hope to continue dabbling in this field after the semester is over.

For those of you who like to go back and look at past posts on this site, here's a video I found a while ago of an interview with Rod Lord.