Elements Animation Development Process 2

Well, I think its fair to say I've spent at least two weeks now animating grass. I was very close to giving up and switching to a new idea. In fact I was set on changing my idea. But, when I was discussing to my friend about how I'd given up the idea, my tutor Matt overheard what my old idea was and said he liked it and encouraged me to stick with it. I expressed my concerns about just how much work this thing was going to take and whether it would be worth carrying it on and he replied, 'that's animation'.

Anyway the rest is history and since that moment of doubt my passion about the animation has been reignited.

A common theme in my animations is something I'm very interested in. Watching a huge amount of time passing in the space of a very short amount of time. This process is time-lapsing. I used it in my last animation when I had a father and son Pritt Stick age decades together in the space of thirty seconds. And here, even though I'd like to think my Elements animation is very different, it to uses the technique of time-lapsing.

One of the greatest obstacles we face with trying to tell an engaging story within the space of twenty or thirty seconds is that it is a very short amount of time to get an audience rooting for a protagonist. You don't have time to tell an audience a back-story or even give them a name really. Therefore what I have come to think of as an effective technique of storytelling is to instead of showing less, just speed up the storytelling process.

There is an amazing video I found on YouTube called Portrait of Lotte - 0 to 14 in 4 mins which is basically, like the title states, footage of a girl her dad has captured of her everyday since she was born up until her 14th birthday. Now you wouldn't expect to become emotionally connected to someone in the space of four minutes, but because we've watched so much time pass and basically watched her grow up, seen all her emotions from laughing to crying, I did find it very touching.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH1x5aRtjSQ