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So you�ve read all the books on animation, but couldn�t find anything about rolling your drawings? It�s something every animator does, but where did they learn it? Maybe you�ve seen someone do it, but can�t get the hang of it yourself. Maybe you have no clue what it is and want to know more! Click here for article. |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I've had several letters come across my desk that have posed a similar question: "What exactly is meant by the term Experimental Animation?" After the first few letters, I didn't give it much thought. It was a question that I had asked myself before, so it didn't seem very remarkable. That is, until the letters kept pouring in from animation colleges across the country. These letters came from worried, confused, and many upset students; all wanting to know, "What is experimental animation?" I felt I owed it to all these students to find out. I sharpened my pencil and my wits and spent 2 weeks viewing Experimental Animation films and interviewing the "talent" behind the films. Experimental animators come from varied backgrounds and have a wide range of personalities or personality disorders, as the case may be. Most that I interviewed were cheerful and very excited to share their work. Often, though, their explanations of a deeper meaning behind their art sounded extremely far - fetched. I became worried when one young gentleman took 43 minutes to explain his 30 second film to me. I thanked the young man for the interview, and suggested that he write a manual to go along with his film. There were a few that hit play on the VCR or flipped on the projector and just sulked back into the shadows while their film rolled. Some had even disappeared before I was able to conduct an interview. Needless to say, I didn�t come up with much of a definition for what experimental animation is. So I�m resorting to an old trick to define the term. I�m going to break the term down into it�s two parts: "Experimental" and "Animation." We�ll start with "animation," since that�s what we are all interested in. Animation, of course, is a bunch of pictures put together. This can be in any medium. The only requirement is that several minutes to several days need to be spent to produce one of these pictures. Now we come to "experimental." This is the fuzzy part of the whole term. Now when we think of science, the term experiment comes to mind. Such experiments are frequently funded by the government to help cure diseases or study weight loss. While some experimental animations are funded by the government they never cure disease (another dead end in defining this thing.) Now, I have considered that "experimental" has actually been misused. It seems that "accidental" would best suit some of this stuff, but a lot of these filmmakers would spend several decades of their lives planning their films (nothing accidental there.) To date, this term continues to baffle me. However, I have been able to categorize it. Think of what we do, character animation, and take away one, or all of the following: story, appeal, characters, or common decency. What you have left is what I believe to be experimental animation. |