[ DRAWN & QUARTERED ]
Graphic Arts As Literature
Online animation is
tomorrow’s art form
The rise of personal computing since the early 1980s has changed the way we look at the world -- and how we recreate it for others. This is particularly true in animation.
The traditional method of animation is to create an illusion of motion by dividing real motion into a series of discreet frames and flipping through them so quickly our brains are fooled. Early computer drawing programs such as MacPaint created a pixel world that existed one layer at a time. Computer-based animations using these methods relied on piles of drawings copied into memory and flipped through. These GIF-style animations were memory-hungry and slow, but stable. They also recreated the traditional frame-by-frame method of cinema animation, a format animators were comfortable with, and understood.
Soon, however, the notion of vector-based graphics arose. Instead of pixels painted on electronic paper, this applied hidden computer commands to artificial points arranged in electronic space. Programs like MacDraw, Illustrator and FreeHand created incredibly smooth graphics with low memory requirements.
COURTESY ANDYBUMATAI.COM
The Flash animation of Andy Bumatai's online music video of Don Ho's "Shock the Monkey," and mimics old-style cartoons (inset)
By the advent of the Internet, this notion was applied to the concept of motion. To get your picture from HERE to THERE on your screen, instead of drawing all the in-between steps, you simply commanded it to move on its own. One picture, one command -- a system compact enough to work in real time over the digital sludge of dial-up.
Motion online was originally the domain of Java applets, which were notoriously hinky and apt to freeze your machine. Plus, you needed programming skills. Folks interested in animations generally aren't tech-savvy -- what was needed was a program that embedded the Java in an intuitive way, beneath the visible surface of the animation. We don't care HOW it's done, just as long as it does what we tell it to, with a minimum of code-wrangling.
The default program for this is, hand-down, Macromedia's Flash, and even animations created in other programs are called "flash-type" animations. Since 2000, all Web browsers have Flash-reading capabilities built in under the hood, and the relatively high speed of cable modems makes these animations fluid and expansive. Last year, Macromedia estimated that 400 million Web browsers can view Flash. That's just about anybody who is jacked in.
Unlike layered GIF animations, Flash movies load much faster, allow interactivity and can use more than 256 colors.
So, the technology is here. Like anything else, what do we make of it? Here are three examples:
COURTESY OF ODDTODD.COM
Todd Rosenberg's sketchy style is looser and more personal.
FLASH WORKS well as a medium that can be cut on the beat, and Andy Bumatai's animation of Don Ho's "Shock the Monkey" cover is so cool that it airs on cable television. It can be found both at AndyBumatai.com and DonHo. com and there are no credits, so I'm not sure who did the original drawings, but the animation is old-style cartoony and pretty funny. Comedian Bumatai has always been hip to computer trends and unafraid to wade right in. This deliberately retro cartoon is awfully cutting-edge, and it introduced Don Ho to a whole new generation.
An even more notorious "music video" Flash site is Joel Veitch's RatherGood.com. Veitch uses the medium to animate creepy little stories and off-the-cuff songs with a distinctively loopy British flavor. I mean, flavour. Veitch's style is animating photographic cut-outs, and his video of kittens in Viking helmets singing Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" became an Internet cult favorite -- until LZ's music attorneys got into the act. But you can still find it by Googling "Viking kitties."
And then there's Todd Rosenberg's OddTodd.com site, the simplest, funniest and most cutting-edge of all because it's so personal. After being laid off from a development job at Atom Films a couple of years ago, New Yorker Rosenberg began meditating on the nature of life and unemployment in a series of hilarious little animations. He's partly supported by a "tip jar" at his Web site.
The site is intensely personal and universal at the same time, an online descendent of Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" comic books. Warning, though, if you visit the site, OddTodd occasionally uses not-suitable-for-children-and-grandmothers language.
As a means of personal expression, online animation is still taking baby steps, but the horizon is limitless. It's like the early days of underground comic books -- the potential is staggering.
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