Animation. To inject a soul into something lifeless. Making an in-animate thing do something more interesting. I have always had a fondness for this, mostly because I watched too many cartoons as a kid. I dreamed of drawin’ some horrible critter eat innocent bystanders.
My friend Doug and I used to use legos and Playdough and action figures to bring the things in our head into the real world. When Doug got the PXL, we used to sit in his cramped bed room and stopframe the adventures of Bill (or something like that) climbing up his dresser and book case, only to fall from the top and be destroyed messily. A real statement on life, the universe, and everything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000
It was good, given the resources a couple of 14 year old kids had at the time. The PXL was a black and white, low-res camera that used audio tape as its recording media. Quite frankly, it was the first conceptual leap that I was aware of that put video-capabilities into the hands of impoverished, bored, aspiring film-makers. And the best thing was, it forced you to be creative. We had to film upside down to get our submarine adventure (which was quite boring, but fun to make) to look right. Nobody’d believe a submarine strung from sewing thread. So we hid it under the shot by flipping the camera and the sub upside down.
Doug still has those tapes, I am sure, but the PXL’s long dead.
The advent of superfast home computers, flatbed scanners, and relatively cheap cameras of all kinds must be a wet-dream for all the aspiring bored kids who want to be film-makers. I mean, for 19 bucks or so you can get yourself software that will do what used to take hordes of animators weeks to do. And you can do it in 15 minutes. My thing is to rip animation and sound from packages I like (probably flagrant copyright infringement) and do fun stuff with it.
This is something I cooked up the other day. Nothing more than a way to try out the lip-sync software that comes with this Anime suite I got. But it was fun to watch the little guy do what I wanted him to do. I’ve almost figured out how to use it.
Anyways, if you’ve got kids, keep them off the Counterstrike and get them some neat doohickeys to play around with. Give them a camera and send them out into the world. Try some Playdough.
Alright, off to the hobby shop to nerd it up with my friends. I’ve at last and truly come to the relatively painless realization that I’ve always been a dork and enjoy rolling dice better than I like, say, marathon running. If it’s bad, then, well, hey. Fuck it.
