December's Animation / 2016
Is everyone feeling like they're dying too?
What a year it was! Full of dramatic entrances and exits, shocking tales and testing times. It's important to reflect on the year we've had though. It may have been a really bad one- but there have been worse ones, and the best ones? They're up next.
I love this comic by Drew Dernavich. He's a featured cartoonist in The New Yorker's December issue of Best Cartoons of 2016, which has now become a household tradition during the Holidays.
In this questionable age, I hope for simple things:
-more eye contact
-good conversation
-honesty
(then things get a little complicated here...)
-healing power
& the ability to stop time
2016 taught me a ton of things.
I'm really impatient.
I need to breathe more, dance more and read more.
December was a weird month!
It's high-stress and I get really WRAPPED into it.
So distractions and time away visiting family meant for a quickie video this month.
December's animation was a bit of a cheat (in my books) since I had this little elf I made a long time ago. I always wanted to animate him, but I never got around to it until I drew him eyes and a couple mouths.
The nice thing is that the set up is becoming easier now. Dragon Frame allows me to manually adjust the camera in ways that work best for lighting effects. And synch your audio track to your frames. Love it.
In one little evening, I was able to put together a very short animation of an elf singing.
The biggest challenge was synching the mouths to the words. Every sound has a different mouth and it takes a lot of imagination to put it together. I'm sure there's a synching program out there, but I don't own one. Truth is, I could have spent more time on adjusting the frames, but I had a time limit.
This animation was shot using a Canon T3i Rebel and a 50mm lens on DragonFrame at 12FPS.
It took a total of 4 hours.
And so I did it. 12 animations for 2016! Oh, and I lost 45 pounds :)
Feels good to commit.
Wanna really talk about commitment though? Check out Moniquea Marion's 365 . This amazing lady created a video per day showcasing her talents as a writer, performer and videographer. Total hero. Congrats girl- and congrats to you for all that you've accomplished. It's only going to get better.
Bring it on, 2017.
Happy New Year!
xo
