Film Animation Shoot - The Crescendo Step

Well reading week is over. Except for me it was animation week. I had this weekend booked in the camera animation room. So I spent the week preparing, which meant drawing everything for my movie and testing those drawings. And with everything as prepared as I could be, I shoot my movie on the Senior Oxberry Camera that our school has.

This animation shoot, on an animation stand with a real film camera is really the centerpiece of the first year of animation at Concordia. It took me roughly twelve hours to do my animation of roughly 45 seconds. It was extremely stressful, tedious, nerve racking. It was the weekend, so my only resource if something went wrong were my teachers phone numbers (which I only needed to use once). And we are working on film. You really only get one shot with film. You need to know what you are doing, and execute it right a few hundred times.

I am getting pretty close to understanding why that ordeal was worth going through. I'm not really sure how my film will turn out, and I am really not all that concerned with it. I'm only now recognizing that it really is my first "film" animation, the keyword being film. I shot my whole movie with my digital camera, yet I'm certain it didn't produce the same experience that I had when I shoot on the massive camera.

I think the key difference is that when you make a film animation, the only way that you will actually get a result that is close to your intention is if you have a deep understanding of what you are doing, and what is going on. Working with computers, you can often stumble your way through most of the process without ever really proving that you understand all of the basic elements.

What I think I can take away from the the experience is that film animation, on film, is not really a practical method of making movies anymore. It is extremely tedious, strenuous, allows for no mistakes, and is really boring at times. Computers on the other hand hold none of that fuse, and make life much to easy for beginners. So hopefully a solid fundamental knowledge of the field, with this hands on medium will provide a solid understanding for what comes later.

Ok, picture time. Maybe when I am more lucid I will write more about the subject. The first images is of the folders that had my whole movie in them. And click through the photos to see more images in the picasa web album.








And my film is title "The Crescendo Step" if your wondering.

Kyler