Drawn animation

One of the things I would really love to start teaching at the Art Museum by Fall is a Drawn Animation class. This is kind of been a dream of mine for the past couple of years. Both Andy Fish and Brian Shea had a great deal of success with both the Claymation and Stop Motion classes.

It was how I would approach the class was the question for me.

I had taken drawn animation classes with Mark Lynch from 1989 till probably sometime around 1992/1993. Mark had used Super 8 Cameras to film the animations with. And the results were always very original and hysterical.

Of course there were always buckets of tempera paint used in the claymations because the claymation characters would always end in tragedy. Which was also hysterical.

I had thought about taking the old equipment Mark used and use it for my class. But it was becoming apparent that this wasn't going to work very well due to the fact that it was very difficult to both buy and develop film.

Even back in 1989, this equipment was already pretty outdated and Mark had talked about moving towards 16mm film to do the animations on. But that never came to be.

Well, I had been chatting with Andy who was having a great deal of success with the claymation classes. What he had been using is a web cam with Photobooth to take the initial shots and then load the images up on Flash.

I had asked him how a drawn animation would look using that technique and he said it worked really great.

So, I had talked with Chris who runs the youth programs at the Museum about possibly testing how this would work on the last day of classes during April Art Week. I had all but two students in my Friday Animal Animation class, so I thought what I would do is have them work on a drawn animation with their characters the first hour of class and then we would go over to the computer lab the last hour of class and see how well their animations worked.

We had also called in one of the assistants Raffy to help us to figure out Flash. Raffy's really great at the program so he was invaluable at getting the images loaded from Photobooth to Flash.

And the results were excellent!! They reminded me so much of the quality of the animations I use to create for Mark Lynch's class. And not only that, the two students I had in the class did an excellent job with their drawn animation. Especially since neither of them had attempted drawn animation, they both did a great job!!

All in all, it made for a really great way to end the week and I'm really looking forward to doing a drawn animation class for Fall session.