Animation VS Animator

This is the second animation in the series.

Since I've been posting a lot of Flash videos lately, I thought I'd add one more.

This animation is a part of the Animator vs Animation series. According to creator Allan Becker's website, he started the series in 2006, his junior year of high school. The series was incredibly popular, and was nominated Newgrounds movie of the year in 2006, 2007 and 2011.

This is a really fun series and I'm impressed that a junior in high school was able to come up with the idea for it. I really enjoy how the stick man breaks out of the animation program and begins to interact with items on the desktop. I think takes a lot of creativity to imagine the different ways one could interact with everyday items.

Emotional Stick Figures: Animator Vs. Animation

A few years back, a video called Animator Vs. Animation became viral. This video features a self-aware stick figure made in Flash fighting with its creator. A huge hit, the creator, Alan Becker, released two more episodes over the following couple years. Just a few days ago, after years of nothing, Becker released the fourth installment of Animator Vs. Animation.

Each Animator Vs. Animation video has the sentient drawing interacting and fighting with its environment. There is a narrative occurring across the four videos, but each video can easily be watched standalone. Stickman also interacts directly with Animator via Animator’s cursor and together they wreak havoc on whatever venue they’re in—be it the desktop, Solitaire, or, in the new episode’s case, Facebook and an iPhone. Stickman takes tools from Flash to use as weapons, he hits ‘Likes’ statuses on Facebook, he knocks around aps on the iPhone. The final scene of the newest video is Stickman high-fiving Animator by Animator choosing the Hand tool in Flash.

Not only is the animation really cool and really clever, the use of relatively non-verbal storytelling is pretty cool. Especially in this newest video, though there is text present throughout, much of the narrative relies heavily on just visuals and sound effects. It’s amazing that we can catch the emotions of a faceless stick figure, but body language and head angle really does a lot.

Blast to the Past – Animator vs. Animation

So I wrote this really great blog post about an incredibly creative video called 'Animator vs. Animation', when I accidentally pressed the undo button a couple too many times and it deleted everything I wrote. And then THANK GOD it automatically saved the nothingness.

Needless to say, tears are dripping onto the keyboard right now. But I gotta give you guys something so I hope you don't mind if I sum up what I wrote. First off, here's the original video created by Alan Becker:

The video has many sequels, including my favorite where they go onto the desktop of the computer:

After this I talked about these videos paving the way for creative videos taking place on a computer. I tied this into a recent short film called "Noah", which tells an entire story through the eye of a computer screen. I'm having trouble getting the video embedded here but you can check it out on this site:

http://slothed.com/2013/09/17/noah-a-surprisingly-compelling-short-film-was-filmed-entirely-on-a-computer-screen/

Sorry for the lack of beautiful words guys but I don't want to damage my computer with all of these tears falling on the keyboard. *sigh* Better luck next time.