I’ve been teaching animation, using Flash for a about 10 months now – and wow… it’s been that long!  One thing I’ve noticed is that animation, and this is for the simplest sense of the word down to the most complex, is that many students just kind of expect things to happen on their own.  Like those old cartoons, where Daffy gets tormented by the hand of the animator – all you have to do is draw a static figure of a duck and the rest just happens.

Hell, I wish it was that easy.

But animation is a progression, it’s not just getting something from point A to point B, it has to consider time as well.  And that’s something that seems to get lost.

Many of my students seem to see time as an intangible.  It’s something that we exist in, but can’t manipulate.  Of course, this may seem true in most instances, but I know I have the power to make time slow down, in a very real sense, when I get to the lectures about coding (if/else anyone?).  So if time is a progression, and we can measure it with clocks (or cell phones), why can’t we manipulate it?  Odd question I’ve always wondered, every other dimension we can go in any direction, but time leaves us stuck going forwards (I’m guessing we can take rights and lefts, but no steps back).

In animation, we get to break that rule – to a degree.  Once we place our object to animate, be it animal, vegetable or mineral at a point in time, we can in fact revisit that time and location and alter it to fit our needs better.  In fact, with Flash I constantly go backwards and forwards to shape my animation’s outcomes to my needs.  Sounds almost godlike!

Then there’s the other bit that deals with time – just like all of us weren’t all introduced into each other’s lives at the very beginning, we don’t have to have our characters all sitting around at the beginning, waiting to enter from stage left like actors in a play.

So taking these observations in mind, we begin to see that animation has rules that need to be met and pushed. We can introduce our characters one by one, change when they meet, and under what circumstances. These are all parts of telling a story, deciding how things conceptually interact. But what about the bit when we just need something to move across the room? Here we get to see time at its most basic. Now we have train A leaving the station and heading to station B 20 miles away. How long will it take?

Well, how fast is it going? With animation we measure time the way we measure distance, with a yardstick – we break down seconds into smaller divisions called frames (no milliseconds yet!).

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Hell, I don’t know where I was going with this anymore.  My site got hacked and taken down for a day.  Sitting at home now, with a cat purring on my lap, Janis Joplin on the radio, and a need to go make dinner soon.