Recently, as a part of our learning at the Big Picture Academy, we have been playing with stop motion animation. A couple of observations…
- The people who make animated films are incredibly talented and amazingly patient.
- The time it takes to make just a few seconds of animation is measured in hours.
- It is extremely rewarding to bring inanimate objects to life.
But then, that’s what the word animation means; the act, process, or result of imparting life, interest, spirit, motion, or activity. It can also be defined as the quality or condition of being alive, active, spirited, or vigorous. One of the things that I noticed as we spent a couple of days exploring this process, was that in many ways, stop animation is very much like life. Often, we only see the frame that we are in at the time. A lot of work goes into each frame (well maybe not in our case) and often you can get totally absorbed in the moment. All your focus and attention, all your energy, a whole heap of emotion and passion goes into making that one frame work. Every detail and every movement is carefully planned and executed. And then ‘click’… the image is captured. And the then the whole process starts over again. We move onto a new frame. It is subtlety different, slightly changed. It is one more part of the whole… and yet we put as much effort into this one as the one before.
As in life, stop motion animation never makes much sense until you start viewing all the frames together, in sequence. For me, this is what makes the whole process interesting. Even though I have a plan of what I would like to see happen, and even though I know what the outcome might look like… I am always amazed as I look at the finished scene. The ‘animated’ frames really do come to life.
But is more that just our ability to create that makes humans different from all the other animals… we have the capacity to enjoy what we have created. It helps me to understand just a little more about how God might of felt as He looked at all He had made. So here’s to the the greatest animation of all time… Planet Earth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dom0EauR6Wg
