Visitor of this website and citizen of the internet, what follows is an extremely long brief intro to my essay “Basic Animation Aesthetics”, dating back to 2009A.D.HD. If you are too lazy to read and just want 2 DL heres a link.
Around 2007 I started to get invited to speak about my work, and found the exercise of writing down my thoughts on animation made it easier to structure them. Those were the days, mind you, when doing low-polygon animation was not a “thing” and to some extent warranted explanation. To my great bewilderment, talking about theory seemed to bore the living soul out of people - so I quickly stopped doing it and went for a more narrative approach to showing things.
A couple of years later, I was asked to write an article for a German magazine called Objects - I put some of my more theoretical thoughts together and structured them around a film I had just finished. I made a point of speaking about animation in the broadest terms, without referencing technology or software. The resulting essay - Basic Animation Aesthetics, spread quicker than I could’ve imagined. Over the years I’ve heard of it being used in at least a dozen animation courses and been a point of inspiration for people in other fields too. I’m really humbled by this and hope it might continue to be useful to people out there.
As you might know, my website imploded last year and the essay went with it, so here is a new PDF copy for your perusal. The film I’m referencing in the text can be seen here. A Japanese translation by Nobuaki Doi can be found here.
this is a painting i made for the genki project. it hangs in the hall where naked people hold out their sawed open skulls offering brains.
I was really surprised to find this on an old harddrive recently. This is an image I made way back in 2003 of the words to Squarepusher’s song Red Hot Car. Using the waveform - I chopped up the text of the lyrics to match with the chopped up vocals.
