Animation Rears its Round, Black Ears

As you may have noticed, fellow Art and technology student or curious onlooker, I have been discussing "motion pictures", pictures that are so barely similar and played so rapidly in sequence that it gives the illusion of motion. Such is every movie, just a serious of dozens, thousands, millions of photos. It wasn't long after film was invented with camera and photographs that people started to realize "Wait, can't we just DRAW movies?"

"Toot-toot!" -Steamboat

Well honestly, the idea began to float around for some time with little animated shorts and shows, like Felix the Cat, and productions of the famous Walt Disney, like Silly Symphonies and Steamboat Willie. But it wasn't until "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Fellowship of the Apple" came out (I added the fellowship part, don't throw a riot) that the possibility of pure animation as a mode of cinematic entertainment was relevant. The first full length film made from scratch and paint was produced. And, here's what surprised everyone, it made money! Animation had really begun to well-up in popularity before its release, becoming a fun little area to venture in for the artist.

Stop motion videos and animations are all over, now, like the infamous "GIF" image format, which despite being infamous for relatively poor photo quality in color range, has animation support, allowing for humorous little quips and snippets composed of several images in sequence to be pasted all over the web.

Obligatory Team Fortress material. Deal with it.

And also, I am reminded of the "game" called "Gary's Mod". This little "game" is... well, it isn't really a game on its own. It's a program that allows you to use props and characters from almost any PC game you may own, put them in any setting of almost any game you own, and mess around. You can strap rockets to chairs, make people with tiny heads, and most notably, pose characters and freeze facial expressions. Before the game developer, VALVe, created the game filming software "Source Film Maker", people used Gary's Mod (commonly called GMod) to make movies. Creators would pose the characters and take a picture, pose the characters a little differently and take a picture, then repeat the process for hours. Then, they would assemble the pictures, play them in sequence, add music, and create little animations, then immediately upload them to YouTube. The poor production quality contributed to the remarkably low frame rate, creating humorously abrupt and choppy animations to experiment with, leading to the evolution and demand of Source Film Maker, which is developed and almost exclusively used for Team Fortress 2 videos. However, many many aspiring animators are getting jobs from the attention grabbed by their high quality videos and animations. Here's a good one that won several awards and was actually played on live television at the international, annual "Video Game Awards", made by an animator for Bethesda. Once again, Team Fortress 2 related.


With all the GMod and SFM videos being made, I strongly believe that the amateur animation movement is being promoted and dabbled in more than ever, and I'm proud to promote it.