Blogger HATES my video, but you can watch it on youtube here.

In anticipation of heart-felt photo albums, Robert Frost, and ambient music, I wanted to approach this project very differently both conceptually and stylistically. As a person interested in teaching art one day, I wanted to do something I have never done before that could be useful to my future students: an animation.

I explored three different animation programs, most of which were quite disappointing.

First and foremost, I learned that this is absolutely not a project that young people should do. Honestly, even as a university task, it was quite daunting. Most websites I referenced suggested 24 frames/second of animation. That’s a lot of drawing for a 2 minute video (2,880 to be exact). To combat this, I did a few things.

1 – I doubled up the images. It makes for a choppier video, but, so long as you find a program where you can easily adjust the frame rate, it can actually be quite beneficial

2 – To take advantage of doubling up the frames, you can make subtle adjustments between the doubled frames. This is what I did for things like blinking, which makes it so that you can get things to move at different paces easily.

3 – I used a white board. This way, I didn’t have to redraw the background for the sake of making subtle adjustments.

To be honest, the time taken to make this could have probably been cut in half if I had 2 people and the proper equipment. Even though the drawing was quick, and the camera was only about 4 feet away, that commute is time consuming when you have to make it 2,880 times while also being careful as to not trip over chords or move the camera.

My advice: leave animation to the professionals. I know that I am certainly retiring.

Now for the software:

Frames: They offer a 30 day free trial on their website, which is enticing. Also, it is the full version, NOT a downgraded trial. The only qualm I have with this program is that it is clearly designed for children, thus it doesn’t let you do much. It is pretty basic, and it actually wouldn’t even allow me to adjust the frame rate to a fast enough pace. So I scrapped this program pretty quickly.

The next program I used, IKITMOVIES, actually looks rather badass. Unfortunately, the trial version they offer is garbage. You are only allowed to open the program 10 times in the trial, and each time you can only work on your project for 15 minutes before it automatically closes. I figured that 150 minutes would be plenty of time to throw together my project, so I uploaded all of my images and began working. They have really cool effects like gunshot flashing and explosions, which I had hoped to add to my introduction. However, I quickly learned that the trial version was not about to let me save/export anything. So this was a massive waste of time.

Sadly, Movie Maker was the best program by a long shot. And I don’t say “sadly” because I think it is a bad program. On the contrary, it is really intuitive. But it is clearly not designed for animation, and it saddens me that I wasn’t able to use an animation program to create this. I actually froze the program a few times because it simply didn’t like the idea of running through so many slides so quickly.

Another major drawback I didn’t like was that there could only be one audio track. I had grandiose plans of including sound effects, perhaps music, and I was even hoping to try making a version of it without the subtitles, and have the poem read. Sigh…

In conclusion: don’t animate.