High School Art Project

[Gonta]

Hey, I'm a senior in high school and one of my classes is Advanced Placement Art Studio. My concentration for this semester is "interactive art," thus far I've created a screaming black box made of felt triangles and plastic bags and a proof-of-concept, perminant real-world to virtual-world "window."

I thought it might be of interest that I am working on a quick and dirty project dealing with animation.

In-betweening is universally known as the most tedious part of producing a classicly animated film. Stemming from this knowledge I came up with the idea of setting up a station with directions, a light table, begginning and ending keyframes, paper and a pencil, and letting anyone walk up and draw a frame.

While it would be ideal to allow complete control of the animation's outcome to be placed in the participants' hands, I found this idea hard to impliment because without a directing agent, the animation would probably fall apart, (I'm not saying this wouldn't be interesting, just not practical for what I need to get accomplished.) One idea of mine was to allow people to draw keyframes, but to keep things simple I'll be "directing" things.

The resulting frames will be shot and turned into a little animation.

[athena]

Hey Gonta, welcome to the forum. :hi:

In-betweening is universally known as the most tedious part of producing a classicly animated film. Stemming from this knowledge I came up with the idea of setting up a station with directions, a light table, begginning and ending keyframes, paper and a pencil, and letting anyone walk up and draw a frame.

While it would be ideal to allow complete control of the animation's outcome to be placed in the participants' hands, I found this idea hard to impliment because without a directing agent, the animation would probably fall apart, (I'm not saying this wouldn't be interesting, just not practical for what I need to get accomplished.) One idea of mine was to allow people to draw keyframes, but to keep things simple I'll be "directing" things.

The resulting frames will be shot and turned into a little animation.
This sounds similar to a short we were shown in animation school called AniJam (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295855/plotsummary). It was assembled by the same production company that did the infamous 'Sick and Twisted' short, "Lupo the Butcher". The gist of it is 22 animators who were all give the same character and the first and last frame of their sequence. They had no idea what action preceded them or came after them, so the short meanders all over the place as each animator takes up the character.

[Gonta]

Thanks for the welcome!

I suppose the main difference here is that the animation will be drawn (mainly) by non-animators, and that it will just be a quick clip, (This project's first trial will be a walk-cycle.)

Additionally, since my original post I've had some more ideas.

If the objects/characters being animated were simple enough, this would be something that could be done fairly quickly, given enough people participated. Wouldn't it be cool to have a little booth set up at an animation expo, or something to similar, and have people create a clip in a day? You could even have multiple booths, and if the participants were given control over the cartoon's direction, (keyframes) then they would determine the length, (It comes down to how many people participate.)