Again and again, you spin clumsily into sharp edges and ledges and chair legs. You’ve been contorted in a telephone box-sized space, limited to miming careful dances around corners, and entertaining yourself with the voices in your headphones and your head. At sporadic moments, you twitch a furry character into a new position and click a camera shutter closed. This, you deduce, is the art of creating movement by barely moving anything at all.
Control is the theme of the week: daylight is blocked with cardboard and artificial lights secured in place, the tripod is taped to the ground, and the onion-skin function on Dragonframe allows you to position objects a splinter away from where they sat in the last frame. In this cave of control, you will the animation to be smoother than before. Tickled by the irony, you decide you want the animated character to jiggle wildly, uncontrollably, about the set. You want to present a personality. If moving the figure a minimal amount per picture creates realistic movement, it follows that significant movements between frames create an exaggerated, crazed impression. You experiment, improvise and make spontaneous decisions that allow your animation, and your interest in it, to thrive.
It’s easy to become disgruntled and frustrated with this odd filmmaking form – you spend hours shifting fractions of objects to produce half a second of material, easily neglected in a blink. You lose time and sleep, sanity and social skills; there is nothing healthy about a control this obsessive. Yet, in a strange twist of logic, there is nothing more satisfying than coercing an inanimate creature into a frenetic routine. Ultimately, oddly, as bruises blossom on your femurs, you’re content within the secluded euphoria of your imaginary world, and your tiny telephone box.
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