Growing up Animated

I am pretty sure growing up; making animated films was always a goal of mine. Once I used up an entire post-it notebook to make a stick figure animation of a snowboarder. Stop motion interested me until I found out that it takes so much time to make a scene that lasts only for a couple of seconds. To resolve this, I used those little green GI-Joe men (like the ones in Toy Story) and move them with my finger while filming. Just enough so you wouldn’t see my finger but still making it look like there was action happening. 

Another thing when I was growing up was watching animation and more specifically Claymation films like Wallace and Gromet or The Miracle Maker. The Miracle Maker The Story of Jesus, by directors Derek Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov, is especially interesting to me because of the use of not only Claymation but also transitioning to cartoon animation to show flashbacks or stories being told by Jesus. Granted the animation of the characters are somewhat  rigid and are not as fluid as later films like Wallace and Gromet but still a great personal childhood memory.

Let's Track A Bit... Shall We?

So while I was scrolling through some videos on YouTube, I came across this video that I right away knew had After Effects editing put in on it. They had used the tracking effect in order to have each of the cartoon body parts (ears, eyes, hats, etc). It's actually really cool to see this done because, well for starters, I knew all of the cartoons that the band was playing, but Just to see it tracked so well and have some of the other ones animated while being tracked was cool too.

One of the really cool effects that was used was the music notes that came out of the instruments and hands as the players hit certain notes or hit certain keys on the piano or certain areas on the percussion sets. I loved this video and I thought that it was really cool. I would love to be able to do something like this when I get more advanced on After Effects. It would make for a great video in my reel and it would also just be plain fun to do something like this to one of my favorite songs.

Animated Cartoons

I'm surprised that I haven't seen a blog post about the animated cartoons that we all watched in the 90s. Even though the animation is nothing compared to something like Transformers, or Avatar, it's still important to me because of the nostalgic value it has. A few of my favorite cartoons were Hey Arnold and Rugrats.

Who didn't love the boy who had a football shaped head and wore a kilt every day? There are so many episodes I remember watching and I know exactly what happens. I don't remember when I decided to stop watching Hey Arnold. I don't remember when it was cancelled (I even remember being extremely excited about the movie).

Back in the 90s, they definitely did not have the resources or technology we have today, but they still managed to make a loving, and interesting characters with what they did have. They didn't need a team of people who were in charge of every single piece of hair on his head like Stuart Little, it was a much, much simpler time. There are still shows like Hey Arnold floating around on Cartoon Network, but they don't feature a football head shaped boy with very very creepy stalker named Helga. (They do have a kid named Phineas, but he still doesn't make the cut.)

Below is the opening to Hey Arnold for those who are interested