I made a little test animation tonight. It’s a guy pulling a chain and shouting “whoo whoo!” It’s not supposed to make sense. I just wanted to see what it would be like to do the initial animation on paper, then the inbetweens on the computer.

I love my Cintiq tablet, but when I was doing the 11 Second contest, I noticed that the small screen and bulky stylus didn’t lend themselves to loose gesture drawing–you know, the kind you put your whole arm into. Of course, the computer is invaluable for cleaning up artwork, and saving drawing time on static elements.

As I suspected, I kind of like this process; I think I animated a little faster, in spite of the awkwardness of pulling pieces of paper on and off a peg bar, over a light table.

Being the Apple geek I am, my method for digitizing the pencil drawings was an iPhone app called iMotion HD, with my iPhone stationed on a Tripod. iMotion has a companion iPad app that allows you to trigger the shutter without touching the phone. Then I was able to sit down at my computer, pull all the frames directly to my hard drive via wifi, and get back to work.

Nothing beats using cutting edge technology to do old-fashioned work!