by Colleen
Caudill
Animation is the illusion of movement when capturing a
series of drawings or photographs of objects and turning them into a video or
production. I have always been a fan of animation ever since I could properly
watch television, from Saturday morning cartoons and claymation movies, to
Japanese anime and Disney films. There were all kinds of animation surrounding
me growing up, but I didn't come to realize how great an art it was until just
recently.
Studying animation in my free time came as a surprise, as I
have my fair share of experience in many mediums of art, but I never thought of animation as
being something I could do myself. It comes off as overwhelming at first,
thinking of the large-scale movies, but the matter of fact is it's merely a
cluster of small gestures, moving little by little. The beautiful thing about
animation is that not only is there something out there for everyone's taste,
they stretch from long films made from hundreds of people to shorter videos
hand-drawn and perfected in many hours and weeks by one person. I myself --
after falling in love with the craft and doing days of research -- got the
materials and wisdom needed to make a small one minute video just by quickly
drawing a character with audio behind it, nothing colored in and no elaborate
background. I drew over two hundred individual frames in over six hours. Before
this point, I had only an idea of what kind of long repetitive process went
into animation.
I am still learning about said process and every new rock
turned over leads me back to awe in respect toward animators of all kinds.
Because of all of the work and effort put into something as short and small as
a one minute video of me introducing myself, there are few things I am prouder
of.
That is why I have come to love the art of animation.
