Chalkboard Animation

Yanni Kronenberg

Chalkboard animation is a unique type of hand drawn stop motion on a large scale with a lot of potential to create beautiful sophisticated animations. Autumn Song is almost like a continuous line drawing however atmosphere and detail are added by blending the lines of the previous cell. This effect has been created by rubbing out the previous drawing, or frame and then then drawing the next frame in, leaving behind the ghostly chalky effect from previous frames giving this technique a defined style. This video has characters fly across chalkboards and morphing into different things. The narrative is quite loose in this way because it takes the viewer away from a sense of reality within the piece and gives off an eerie feeling to it, as something is moving unnaturally, because it's almost placing you in a room with the animation happening around you. Mixing the technique with how it has been presented gives the animation a magical or even mythical feeling to it.
To attempt to create a chalkboard animation of our own were split into groups and had to come up with a narrative between us. Our narrative became a pig coming down from the mountains which then gets shot by a soldier. This idea came from an attempt to represent each of our news stories, which for the most part, however ridiculous the story may be, it does do so. In our group we gave each person a job, one member worked on animating the pig, another drawing in and animating the background details, another animating the soldier, and I was in charge of the camera. The chalk as a material gives off a nice effect to the piece, the chalk itself can be used in many different ways, for us we took some inspiration from Autumn Song in that with each frame we would rub out the previous leaving us with a ghostly trail effect.