Animation - Shaun O'Boyle

Well, I finished 2 semesters of animation classes and here is my feeling on computer animation. It is one of the most un-intuitive and indirect ways to try to make a creative statement. One has to master many skills on the computer to make even a very simple animation come to life. But that is the nature of animation and always has been; a very labor intensive way to tell a story. Now much of the work that was once done by hand is passed over to he computer, and the computer must struggle to crunch all the data that is necessary for each frame of an animation. So to begin with you need the fastest computers you can get your hands on and even then you will be drumming your fingers waiting for the computer to catch up with you.

I am interested in animation as a tool to express stories that I am working on in different media, in particular ideas I am working on through my photographs. And this will be my next goal, to use what I have learned to express ideas that are more important to me than the models done below. The problem with these animation tools is that you can get a very "canned" look to your animations, they can end up looking like every other computer animation done out there because the tools and how they are used are the same. The trick to me is not to get caught in making something just because it can be done, but to approach animation as a tool for expressing ideas, and also to accept the fact that it may not be the appropriate tool to express a particular idea.

The following animation and stills are from a animation I worked on in class with most of the other students in class. All work was done in Maya animation software by Alias. I modeled, textured, lit and animated the windmill and other student worked on other objects in the final animation. We didn't have time to pull together a decent film, remember to allow for rendering time!

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