i think the reason i'm so drawn to animation is that you have complete control and you can do whatever you want. whencreating informative videos you're slowing the viewer down to understand one thingat a time. animation can personify emotions, it can personify thought. it's the same stuff you see when you go to sleepat night. animation says let's recreate thatexperience somehow, let's pull other people into it. there's something intrinsically magic about animation. many artists through theages have wanted to bring their art to life.
animation has been around for a long time. i mean, we are finding more and more cave drawings in which animals have multiple limbs; the artistwanted to get the impression of motion. you come into the nineteenth century with magiclanterns in which one piece of glass had one picture and then you switch it over and itchanges and becomes something else. but it wasn't until photography came around, motion pictures that was able to beused to make a successive series of still drawings look like they were alive.
there's a whole series of techniques thatcan be used now. one of the great traditional ones was hand-drawnanimation. there's also puppet animation. there's clay animation which is a form of puppetanimation. today there's computer animation. cgi. some of the major players happened really early on. one of them was a man named emile cole. he introduced the idea of surrealism andthe use of abstraction in animation. winsor mccay started to make hisanimated films about three years later
in nineteen eleven. he had anincredible ability to create a real life character out of impossiblethings like a mosquito or a dinosaur. in coming forward to the disney animationstudio in the nineteen thirties where they codified and they tested out these principles. oneof them was something called stretch and squash. those are principles that giveyou an elasticity. but then they found there was a principal calledanticipation. there was other things like follow through. if aperson has long hair and they come to a stop, their hair will continue to go. it's asecondary action.
so all of these little symbols add averacity to the animations so that audiences are convinced they're seeing something that's really happening and it opened up all sorts of possibilities for the future. since the beginning of motion pictureswe've had informative videos so think about the films that would've been played in a science class. one of the classic ones is the power of tenvideo. and disney is another great example of this. you look at the goofy golf video from thefifties. he's explaining how the golf swing works using overlaid graphsand charts and stuff so we thought that we could kind of maybe do it differently or better orwhatever and so our business is getting
information out to the public andeducating them. so the first video that we ever did was called the state of the internet it was combining the storytelling nature of the politicalcartoons with the information that you get from this info graphic. the lastfifty years animation has been created in a fun way for a very broad audienceand so i think there's a lot of respect and trust in this medium forstorytelling but you are manipulating how the viewer is processing that and ingeneral designing presentations one of the things i'm always pushing is makethe big information element as big as possible. slideshow like videos lendsitself to people taking screenshots
sharing them and being able to add theircontext to that slice of the story. times have really changed where now we're using the internet as a community center for ideas and the role that animation plays isfor the purpose of education. the roots of motion graphics are really theroots of experimental animation which i don't know if people understand that that is as old asthe medium of film itself. both motion graphics and animation theyencourage play and it's through that process of experimentation that i think a lot ofinteresting stuff is made. every now and then somebody creates something thatreally has a viewpoint or that's trying to do something new usually by accident andand next thing you know they're
developing a voice of their own. bytaking risks and inviting in mistakes you can invite a whole new way of creating into your process. there's justa kind of weird abstract drama playing out on the screen that transcends a lotof the normal structures of storytelling. i think it goes back to when we used to gaze into the fire. that kind of primal experience of looking at flickering imagery and hearing things thatseemed to match with it. that's very deeply embedded in this. motion graphicsbasically taps into that and that's important. you know you don't always have to have
a character or a clear narrative in order to move somebody. animation is just the medium i use toexpress my stories. with live action it's more of a community and it doesn't maybe allow for your real thought process to kick in. i much prefer the way pencil looks. you can getthese little accidents into the smudges on the paper and you're just in your room and you can create these incredible worlds. with belly, i tried to think about what it was like to be ostracized by an older sister and how you can just feel like so rotten inside, so animation's a great medium for that
cause it's just you. it's all coming out of you, and the stuff that comes out are things that would only come out if you're just suck alone with your brain for a really long time. have you seen my brother? his name is alex. yes, i have seen him. i think if something makes sense to you, even if it's abstract, it will make sense to the viewer. so yeah, like going inside the belly as thisabstract element for something being in the pit of your stomach just seemed to make sense. hey buddy. i miss you.
yeah, yeah, right. i know. come on, oscar. our ride's here. and then when people come up and they're just like oh yeah i totally got it i feel that way too sometimes and you're just like really really? it's a very weird feeling. with animation i like to express myself as sort of externalizinginner angst and turmoils and things and because it's in this cute package it's easier to digest. in animation anything is possible.
there really are no limits. the reason that info graphics have become very popular is people are using the internet more and moreto be educated about things. i love the process of drawing and figuring out how you can make it look weird but still realistic. if you think it, you can draw it, you can animate it. you can be an animator.
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