Hand Drawn Animation

For this workshop we were to make a simple hand drawn stick figure animation in pairs. Me and my partner came up with a narrative based upon his news story, the narrative was about these islanders who appeared normal and sophisticated but are actually crazy. We never got the animation finished as we attempted more than we could handle and what we did end up with was a very basic introduction to hand drawn animation with very little variety. Although unfinished this project showed us how hard animating can be and how much work needs to be done to create an animation. The technique we used was to draw out everything on to a thin piece of transparent paper and then trace over it on a similar sized piece and then take a picture of each frame. With this technique adding too much detail, as we did, is extremely time consuming! However with the ability to draw whatever comes to mind it is a very open way to create an animation. There are better ways this kind of thing can be done so you wouldn't have to draw out everything on each frame using a program such as Photoshop may help shorten the time, another way may be to use the paper differently, such as drawing a background on one piece and a character on other pieces and moving them around on the background. However with this technique there are many ways that you could present your animation in, the way we did t was to move previous frames away after use, although leaving them in and maybe moving the position of the next frame and camera could leave a trail behind.