yellow

May 2016

Hat tip to William Kentridge.

This was simultaneously a lot of fun, and incredibly painstaking. I don’t have the exact figure, but I think I spent about ~90 hours on this in total, over the course of about a week.

There are 5 main scenes, each on a single piece of paper. The core process was essentially:

• Draw something
• Take a picture
• Erase it, then draw it again, with a slight alteration
• Take another picture

If you want to see this in action, here’s a brief video of Kentridge on his process.

A rookie mistake was doing most of the drawing before testing the animation flow in Photoshop. I realized that I’d been changing the drawings too much between each picture, and I had to compensate by lowering the frame rate. This meant that it came out less fluid than I would’ve liked, in the end.

I came away from this experience with a newfound respect for animators. My video clocked in at just over a minute. Thinking about the work that goes into a feature-length film… it’s somewhere between terrifying and amazing.