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Animation - A Review
Ever doodled in the corner of your notepad, with a small arrow or dot, and then proceed to draw another further higher, then another further more, and then lazily flipped through the entire book to see your piece of art move around? That would simply mean you have given your insignificant ‘dot’ life! To animate is to give life through the illusion of motion. But although so very simple, its secrets were only divulged to the most earnest. Wonder what would have happened if Michelangelo knew the art of animation, his fresco, the creation of Adam, at the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1511 would have moved on to a more higher note. Who knows what the starry night (1889) of Vincent Van Gogh could unravel. Or whether it was ever possible that Pablo Picasso’s, Three Musicians (1921), would have rendered symphonies we can only imagine they could have composed. To have Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, take form and walk out of the book right into your room, would, in this age, sound “elementary” but it was not so when Gertie the dinosaur was created in 1914 by Winsor McCay, who himself drew thousands of frames of Gertie on individual 6.5 x 8.5 inch sheets of rice paper. He hired neighbor and art student John A. Fitzsimmons to draw the backgrounds. Though incomprehensibly satisfying, it was painstaking and tedious, not to mention being very expensive. But wait, I’m sure you would have laughed your head off as some four-legged animal walking and talking like a biped, that had the ability to frown and laugh as you and I could and either whack the other with a shovel or splatter another’s face with an apple pie. Leaving you to wonder whether the phrase, ‘a cat and mouse game’ was coined long before the first Tom and Jerry show hit the TV screen or vice versa. Or even felt sadness or total helplessness as you saw Woody and the rest of the gang of toys, near their doom in Toy Story 3, leaving you to wish it didn’t have to end this way. Would they escape, is there no hope? That… is the magic of animation. To be inspired by a sentence or even a word, leading you to visualize that moment, to reciprocate it as art, to give it form, and then breathe the breath of life into it, as it arises like the phoenix, from the smoldering ashes buried in the far corner of your mind kindled by a moment, to nurture that thought till it ends with a new beginning, a feast to the senses. A medium that travels beyond the four corners of the wooden frame of a master piece, or the hard cover of a book of literary praise left alone in a dark corner in the library, or the immovable famed stained glass of Canterbury cathedral. But alas, animation isn’t a one-man show, (unless you are Phil Nibbelink who created, directed and animated Romeo and Juliet – Sealed with a kiss) it is an idea, a concept, hatched in the mind of one, delved upon to form a script by another, visualized by yet another to form model sheets of primary and secondary characters, props, etc. And after a visual treatment is finalized by the show director or a panel of directors, a story-board artist gives it that eye, that leads the audience closer in tune with the essence of the story line, then to the layout artist who sets the composition, the camera moves, the location, the framing of the camera, the angles the character are best depicted. Then to an animator, who is the real actor, who has to satisfy all and beyond what the script writer, storyboard and layout artist have set out for him. And actually perform the scene, then transpose his performance in a more dynamic way into the character, giving it life, emotions, the freedom to think and decide its fate, to be a hero or a coward coupled with inner conflict and everything human. Then the color of life, the final compositing of the many layers a scene has to itself, the final video editing, dramatic musical composition, voice syncing, and what not. To render a final living breathing animated character, to play ‘god’ for a moment and give it the illusion of life. Regardless of whether it be in hand-drawn 2D traditional animation, 2D digital animation, stop-motion, sand animation, 3D animation, and what not; it still holds the element of life that we throb after. Animation has and will always be man’s satisfying journey of expression that can cross culture, caste, creed, age, language, continents, and maybe someday… galaxies!
Editor's note: Most articles submitted to Chillibreeze go through a selection process. Only 30 percent of submitted articles are accepted for publication on the Chillibreeze.com featured article list. All accepted articles are edited and proofread for glaring errors of punctuation and grammar. Sentence structure is changed in certain cases and sometimes, entire sections are rewritten. If you notice any errors that have slipped through the cracks, do let us know! (Email us at info at chillibreeze dot com). Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in June, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.
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