Animation
Animation
My interest in animation could go back to my early childhood watching Saturday morning cartoons, but I did not really start to teach it to myself until 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdowns. It started with stop-motion animation, but has since expanded to include hand-drawn and digital animation. This gallery of examples illustrates a few key ways in which I have been able to utilize animation to express different ideas for different reasons.
It felt very natural for me to bring my educator and animator sides together into one effort. I find animating to be a very powerful and appropriate tool to teach something. You can slow things down in a very controlled and intentional way, show magical perspectives, and add dynamic visuals that get the attention of the audience. This is mentioned elsewhere on this site with additional context, but I wanted to include it here as well. This is absolutely something I would like to pursue more as I see so much potential in exploring this practice.
As a child of the 80s and 90s, I watched my fair share of music videos on MTV. I was often transfixed by the interesting visuals and experimental approaches. Even when I did not care a lot for the music, trying to figure out how some of these videos were made really grabbed my attention. Almost as soon as I started sharing little animation experiments with my friends, some of the more musically inclined of them reached out to see if I could make them a music video. I was excited to jump into it and make my 14 year old self proud. These two examples are very different styles of music, so required fairly different approaches. The video for Expert Timing was very early on in my dive into animation, and the video for Soft Top was about 4 years later. I look forward to my next opportunity to make a video to compliment some music.
One might not expect that someone who was worked their entire adult life in the world of education would have a lot of experience in promotion, but the amount of work you have to do to get learners and other educators on board with what you are tryin to can often be massive. I may not know all of the lingo technical aspect of working in advertisning, but I have a decent amount of experience getting someone's attention. Below, you will see a trailer I made for my writer friend's book of short stories and a semi-recent reel of my work.