It's Actually Such a Beautiful Day!

In light of the recent weather anomaly I've decide to take a trip back down memory lane. A few months ago I stumbled upon a film called “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” by Dan Hertzfeldt, and it has changed they way I looked at stick figure drawings. Yes of course you need skills to animate anything, but the fact that he created a beautiful story centered around a stick figure character names Bill blows my mind.

The first impression you get of this film is that it is a lighthearted tale about this stick figure guy as he goes though his daily life. Then really quickly the mood changes that film takes a more serious tone. Although it is unlikely for an animation to take a serious turn, when it does, usually for me it is very impactful. Bill's story, the story about a stick figure, actually brought me to tears but that is beside the point. Although it is a stick figure animation against a very clean background, the film is very interning in the way the tit operates. The film is cropped out, only showing what it wants to show you at any given point in time. This blocking out created a very interesting visual effect as it jumped from scene to scene, or even within the same scene it self. The narration over the entire film while this blocking out gives the feeling of attempting to follow a story along in your own mind. At any rate, this film is as beautiful and here’s a clip that demonstrates most of what I talked about and more!

More Animation Techniques

A couple of weeks ago, I did a blog post about different animation techniques. This week, I want to talk about some uses of animation that we do not necessarily recognize on first sight as well as talk about some other animation techniques.

The first animation technique I want to talk about is 'stick animation'. Stick figures are used often in storyboarding but as far as I remember, they have also been used in animation. The following is a very powerful video conveying a social message through the use of advanced stick animation.

Stick animations are often made with Adobe Flash. They are easier to draw and animate. There are also many online sites that allow you to animate stick figures frame by frame and export them in different formats. An example of this site that I tried using is:

http://www.stickpage.com/stickanimatorgameplay.shtml

I used this site to create a small 14 frame animation. I would have uploaded it here but I could not get the Adobe Flash to download in time.

Another animation technique that I found to be very interesting was paint-on-glass animation. In this style of animation, slow drying paint oils are manipulated on sheets of glass to create animation.

This is a popular animation technique however, it is considered very hard to master. The most well-known paint-on-glass animator is Russian animator Alexandr Petrov. He has used this style in numerous award winning short films.

This is a short film using paint-on-glass animation created by a college student.

I think these are two very awesome animation styles. Paint-on-glass is something that I would definitely want to give a shot.

My First Animation Software!

When I was younger we didn't have all this fancy technology of After Effects or Maya. Okay well maybe we did but I had no idea that it even existed. My brother was in high school at the time and he brought home this program called Pivot. It is a simple software to create animations. Based on stickfigures, the software gives you the possibility to create an animation by moving the joints and nodes of the figures.There is no need to redraw your figures in each frames. The figure creator gives you the possibility to create any types of figures you want. I fell in love with software and began creating little animations. Here is a video on the software and some examples on what people have done.

If you are looking for something to mess around with I definitely recommend downloading Pivot. It is really easy to use and you can do some pretty amazing things with it.