Single (animation process, part 3)
I’m very pleased to say, after a long time of being too busy with my animation work to do much of anything else, I am finally done with Single! And I have a date for when I expect to release it. (More about that later…)
To begin with, allow me to vent a little. This was the most difficult animation I’ve ever had to do, particularly because the flow of it wasn’t very cut-and-dry. It took a lot of thought and effort in order to make an animation that tells a narrative in a consistent way, and with no less than a two minute time span within which to accomplish that.
I came very close to throwing in the towel, but I’m glad I didn’t, and even though the result is admittedly so-so, I still consider it my best effort.
The most thrilling part of the process was animating crumpled paper in stop motion. The typography I used was gathered from the Library of Congress’s newspaper archive, Chronicling America.
The thing I enjoyed most was animating crumpled paper in stop motion. As you can see above, some sequences had words strung together from individual letters. (Not all are like that, and it really depended more on which effect was appropriate for which sequence.) But, as I show below, some sequences involved whole words animated intact.
For these sequences, it wouldn’t have been enough to just simply find words. I also had to give careful consideration to the typeface that was used in whatever newspaper headline I wanted to animate. In this case, for instance, the bold, sans-serif font in the word “NO” was chosen deliberately in order to emphasize NO excuses.
The footage used in these sequences are public domain films, mostly from the Prelinger Archives, although some were gathered from other sources. All except one of them were downloaded from Archive.org.
And here’s the star of the show, T. Peeg! This little piggy is happy to be single, and he doesn’t mind telling the whole world about it!
As you can see above, the artwork is not first-rate, but even bad art can (and often does) make good animation! (Vewn, anyone?)
Some parts of this process I enjoyed more than others, and there were moments of overwhelming frustration, but I eked by, and I’m proud of myself for having done so. There’s a saying, we are our own worst critic, and for a perfectionist like me, that is definitely the truth! But I will let you be the judge of how well I did when this boisterous celebration of the single man’s life is ironically released on Valentine’s Day.
So, grab some popcorn and enjoy the show, whether you’re single or otherwise committed!
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