Love and hate: Animation

My relationship with animation has always been a complicated one. A rollercoaster, to say the least.

I made my first ever animation film when I was about nine years old. It was a Lego Harry Potter stop motion animation about monsters in Hogwarts and Hermione as the lead (because I was a great Hermione impersonator as a kid and that was the only role I could properly voice act ðŸ˜‚😂).

I loved making lego stop motion because it was just like writing a story, but so incredibly different. It was much faster and so much easier, and it made people laugh.

Turns out, however, that professional stop motion is nothing like that. It's not easy. It's not fast. And it makes you cry yourself to sleep every day after animating all day.

But then you see the end product, and you fall in love all over again. And only days later you've got a new animation idea.

Every time I set out to create animation now, whether it's stop motion with paper cut outs or toys, drawn with photoshop or computer-generated with the After Effects puppet tool, I feel like that little kid playing with legos.

So even though it takes fifty million years to make one second of animation and I want to cry whenever I make a mistake, not to even mention when my cat comes and sits on everything, I still keep animating.

Because artists are self loathing masochists.

Or we just know that our art makes people happy, and that wins any amount of pain that we may be experiencing. And therefore nothing else matters.

So please watch this and please smile.

Your reaction is the reason for my existence.





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