Art 300, Sec.05- Intro to 2D Animation
Heidi Kumao
Winter 2006

Project #1

FLIP BOOK (with 30 different stills)
DUE Thurs. Jan. 12

Make a flipbook consisting of 30 frames (this represents 1 second of video time) in which something IMPOSSIBLE happens.
Suggestion: use index cards or a pad of paper with some tooth to it.

One of the most enjoyable parts of creating an animation is the ability to make something happen that could never happen in real life. For this assignment, you are no longer wed to physical reality and mortality. Objects can turn into other objects, a coffee pot can emerge from your nose, your hand can hold all 9 planets, the coyote can get hit on the head with an iron anvil and have his head reshaped in a matter of seconds.

Animation (and the cinema) in their simplest states can be reduced to a sequence of still images. Movement, or the illusion of it, arises from the eye and brain connecting the different frames together to make a cohesive "whole" movie or animation.

To achieve a SMOOTH animation, a single gesture must have MANY "in-betweens," (or frames) that slowly unfold a certain gesture or action over time. (example: to show something flying from one side of the frame to the other might require 15 frames to go very smoothly, 30 frames to show it going very SLOWLY, or 2 frames to make it explode from side to side). The more frames, the slower the action.

To achieve a more JITTERY or old MTV-looking animation, totally different pictures are put in sequence next to each other creating a very visually active graphic style.

Can you combine fast and slow-moving imagery in a single frame? What associations can you make by having one object "morph" into another?

Some suggestions:
-Use the skills or media you already know to generate your individual frames: draw, paint, play on the computer, xerox, shoot photos, print, collage, simple cutouts, etc.
-create a short narrative or story
-create a self-portrait
-depict an explosion of movement
-create an abstract dancing of shapes or designs or texts
-create a visual pun
-shoot a roll of film
-make an inanimate object come to life
-reverse or manipulate TIME (make something go backwards, too slow, too fast)
-create a "metamorphosis:" create a relationship between two objects/people by having one turn into another
-animate a gesture or action

In the analog world (film, photography, flip books, stop-action/drawn animation, etc.) of animation, each individual frame must be generated manually. Like a deck of cards, the entire animation is created from a giant stack of stills and key frames. As we will discover over this semester, digital technologies (particularly motion graphics programs like After Effects) allow animators/film makers to specify only the beginning and the end points of the gesture or animation. THE COMPUTER CALCULATES the "in-betweens" eliminating the need to create every single frame as you are doing with this flipbook.