After watching Ted Parmalee’s version of the Tell-Tale Heart in class last time, I found myself becoming interested in minimalist animation. What I found was a whole bunch of interesting ideas using animation techniques that, like the Tell-Tale Heart, might be considered outside the scope of traditional animation. But each of these examples is entertaining in their own right, and adds something to the genre.
First, two reviews created for an online magazine by Ben Croshaw. The series is called Zero Punctuation. These two aren’t the most recent, but because much of his material is sort-of “inside baseball” if you’re not familiar with the video game industry, I picked two with fairly common subjects so just about anyone can appreciate the humor. In the first he’s making fun of reviewing Wii Sports 2 and the second is a game from Nintendo’s Mario franchise. NOTE: these are not work safe and the humor is quite blue at times. (Also I can’t figure out how to embed them in this blog, so you’ve got links instead).
In his work, Croshaw uses about one “frame” per second with brief spurts of actual animation. Frequently these spurts are simple animations, 3 or 4 frames in a loop to simulate movement, for example. But he uses his crude computer generated pictures to create visuals that move quickly along with his rapid-fire commentary, creating a hilarious (if vulgar) entertaining and informative shorts.
This piece of animation is minimalist in both its art style and the animated elements, at a mere 2,000 frames consisting solely of line drawings. Even without dialog, the creator has made a short film that conveys his message: everything is not how it appears.
Next, is a South Park-style piece of animation done for a geology class. The concept is interesting, in that the creator used a form that was already pretty minimalist (South Park style) and made it more so, so that he could create something that would engage his students in an entertaining way. Notice that the “animation” for the two main characters consists of only a few drawn mouths, repeated over an over, and the human faces are simply chopped at the mouth and moved up and down (this is somewhat similar to the show’s style, but they do it using many more frames so its not a blur). The speed of the mouths doesn’t even change with the speed of the words spoken! But this teacher has found a way to get a message across to his students in an entertaining, funny way, with a minimum of technological expertise.
Depending on your subject matter (and budget!), using minimalism to get your pictures into an animated form might be a great way to get your project made, and perhaps be quite successful!
My comments for this week are here and here.
