On Limited Animation

Upon finishing the limited animation chapter of Art In Motion, I found myself reminiscing the cartoons and animated films I had seen throughout my life. And as I look back through them, and frequent youtube videos, it has become apparent that limited animation has become so ordinary that I fail to notice it. No, even more than that, I've been conditioned to actually like the techniques used in limited animation.

Perhaps it was my interest in anime over the last ten years of my life, or my love of old Hannah Barbara cartoons, but anymore I find myself drawn to the aesthetic qualities that come from limited animation. Not only have I come to expect background characters to remain still, I enjoy the technique my more than if the characters were constantly moving.

In the past, I've seen cartoons, games, and 3d animations that look to replicate a certain realism by animating everything in the frame. I often see this in motion captured 3d animation and rotoscoped animation. I can't stand it when the characters are needlessly fidgeting or moving when they are not the focus of the shot. It drives me crazy.

For instance, remember the movie Monster House? The mo-cap in that movie is so difficult to watch because the characters wobble all over the place. If they had just kept them still and used some limited animation I would have greatly preferred it.

Also, though it's sort of cheesy and definitely used to cut corners, I like the dramatic still shots that they use in anime. The shots of mouths smiling, or two men staring each other down, are great in my opinion. They put more emphasis on the composition of the shot instead of the movements. I think this is one thing that sets Japanese animation so far ahead of American- they understand the image as well as the movements. But that's a post for another time.

My Short Stop Motion Animation.

My and Cyrus put together this short little stop motion using iStopmotion, my DVX100A, and a metal armature I had left over from my Production 2 Film. We found that doing stop motion digitally is practically hassle free, as iStopmotion has a ton of productivity tools to keep us consistent and on track. Also, being able to play the clips back, as we work, in real time was a huge help in keeping our armature in place and keeping the motion fairly lifelike. The entire shoot took only 45 minutes, but me and Cyrus are also both practiced in this form of animation, and us working together cut down production time considerably.

But the truth is that stop motion is almost always more time consuming in the Pre-Production stage because of all the character creation, shot planning, and set production. Actually animating the characters is the fun part, as it's relatively intuitive and generally hassle free as long as you're not shooting on film (which brings with it a very large load of hassles and worries). The one thing I still have difficulty with is timing the gestures in a way that seems lifelike. I often put in a few seconds of buffer room inbetween motions in order to give the audience a moment to breath. This drags the animation out a bit, but I think it diminishes the robotic feel that you often see with lower quality stop motion animation.