Dorse’s Handbook of Hand Drawn Animated Special Effects

Things you’ve thought about that you didn’t’ know you’ve thought about.

A beginning….

Drawing is an activity that many people enjoy. Children, usually at an early age, began to express themselves in drawings, the act of putting pencil to paper in an effort to graphically describe an object or creature in their surroundings. Drawing puts a person in a relaxed, peaceful frame of mind, as playing a musical instrument does, Albert Einstein, one of the great, if not the greatest scientist of all time played the violin for relaxation. Many artists I know also play musical instruments and many of these artists are animators. Music and art seem to occupy the same area of the brain. This place in the mind where the artist goes when drawing or playing music is a place where the artist wants to go back to, for the reward is a sense of peace when there, and an end result hopefully to be enjoyed by others.

Animators are artists who create a series of related drawings, adding the dimension of time to their illustrations, much like the musician who, with varied notes and silent spaces, creates a audible collection of sounds which occur over a period of time, the animator creates a series of pictures illustrating an visual idea over a period of time. The artist’s drawings, when viewed in sequence over time, bring the drawn ideas to life. The animator is born!  A “cartoon” lives!

There are character animators, who are very good at animating creatures. Their animation requires acting skills so as to make their creature seem motivated by their very own brain and of course a sense of timing. In a sense, it is an experience of inner self discovery. The effects animators are those who enjoy animating occurrences of natural phenomenon and the environment in the outside world. An effects animator seems more interested in abstract design, invention and the mysteries of the universe, the what, why and how things move.

We’ve concerned ourselves here with the artist’s who want to create animation with their drawings, rather than animate a pre-constructed puppet or a visual effect in the computer. Artists who enjoy expressing their ideas by drawing their animation have fewer professional opportunities today because of the successful use of the computer technology, but we’ll leave that for future discussion.

To be continued….