101. Baby steps in animation
101. Baby steps in animation
Learnings from some cute birds
This past week, I dove into the nitty-gritty and made another baby step into animation. Check it out:
Mesmerizing, right?? I keep on watching it over and over again. I can’t believe I made that.
When I was reviewing animation tutorials on YouTube last week, I realized that the first time I viewed a particular instructional video was in August 2020. I then came back to it again in February 2021. In both cases, I was still working full-time in tech. I didn’t have the energy or confidence to follow along. Yet I kept coming back to that tutorial. The heart wants what it wants.
The difference this time around was that I wasn’t as intimidated because I had a basic grasp of the software from a previous experiment: making animations for a previous post.
It was a good first project to get my bearings on learning the software, but the animation for that post was really a single illustration with some computer-aided interpolation to make it all wiggly.
In comparison, this bird animation has 45 hand-drawn frames. Drawing, animating, and coloring this two-second loop took about four hours. And this was just a study of an existing work
, so I didn’t have to do any character design or figure out timing for the animation poses.But I’m happy with this approach of keeping the scope tiny for each of these projects. I default towards perfection and ambition, but those high expectations just lead to paralysis and fear of failure. As I’ve written before:
Blocked artists tried to become artists against their parents’ wishes, which triggers a fear of abandonment or failure.
This pressure and guilt to succeed forces them to set huge goals in order to justify forgoing a safer path.
Ironically, this makes it difficult to produce any art at all.
Instead, I’m now just trying to take things bird by bird.
My visceral takeaway from this project: the effort-to-output ratio of animation can feel overwhelming, but the results still feel like magic.
What’s next?
I’ll be traveling later this month, so my next project will be a sprint before then to build off these learnings by incorporating some narrative elements.
Stay tuned for updates next weekend!
In other news, thanks to
for the lovely word cloud representing my efforts for the !
Also see:
