Beyond the business of making money, animation is an art form that’s expensive, time-intensive and frustratingly slow to bear fruit. The history of animation details the relentless application of technology to speed up the process of creating imagery, whether it’s hand-drawn or computer-generated imagery. What animator doesn’t dream of freedom from the medium’s time constraints? As Jeff Scher observes, “Animators create time,” and as Richard Williams notes, animation is “…the most expensive medium that takes the longest time…”       see Piano-Forte: Fluid, Hand-made, Low-tech Animation

What animator doesn’t ask, constantly, “Is it possible to work in this medium through smaller art, and still achieve big motion and impact?” … or words to that effect?

It’s my career-long reflection: “Is there an approach to animation in which the effort to explore and experiment doesn’t overcome the artist?”  In other words, is there a way to engage in animating that’s closer, say, to en plein air watercolor painting than to a typical six-week grind to build a ten-second TV spot, or a six-month sojourn to animate a personal, independent response to Ravel’s “Bolero?”

Approaches like pixillation, stop-motion, scratching-on-film come to mind. They’re relative quickies compared to the hand-drawn stuff, or the CGI dreamscapes many of us fantasize about.

On February 3, 2010, the Boston Globe published a refreshing review of the exhibit Frame by Frame: Animated at Harvard.

It was refreshing because the reviewer, Mark Feeney, got so right a big part of the conundrum we animators face: we have the tools to do the most wondrous stuff, but we have to make a living. And of course most of us make a living illustrating the in-your-face, absurd humor of TV shows (essentially radio shows) and other repetitive stuff. That’s one part of the conundrum.

The second part is the Time-It-Takes-To-Make-It part, which never goes away.  The second part means we animators frequently chew over everything obsessively before we commit to a project, because each new idea can translate to weeks and weeks of additional work.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I got my professional start as a student in Eric Martin’s “Beginning Animation” class at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center in 1974-75. For thirty-plus years after that, I’ve done commercial animation work, but I never forgot the lively experimental scene in the basement of Carpenter Center, where a gaggle of bright people massaged, stretched and warped the limits of  “projected imagery that’s designed frame-by-frame,” our working definition of animation.

Nowadays, my work with the LineStorm Digital FlipBook, a curriculum I teach in schools and colleges, is informed by the lively, exploratory nature of those animation classes at Carpenter Center. Happily, my LineStormers delight in stretching the medium! It’s a lot more fun to build time together.

As Hope Springs Eternally, so I return endlessly to square one: that animation, first and foremost, is an art form, not a commercial enterprise; and that animation is far too important and wondrous an art form to fester in the hands of TV producers bent on augmenting their immediate bottom line.

So while we experiment with animation as visual music, kinetic design, and movement through space, we’re endlessly contriving new ways to reduce the inherently cumbersome process of building motion frame-by-frame. But, as we battle to simplify the process, let’s remember to protect and promote the elemental basis of animation — the moving art medium — itself; namely, the movement and the art, no matter how long it takes.

Reared on the raucous action of cartoons by the Warner Brothers and Fleischer Studios, and amazed by the technical heights the Disney studio scaled, I found in Breer’s “A Man and His Dog Out for Air” a great draught of freedom, a scruffy, energizing revelation.

“In addition to everything else, animation can do this, too?!” I thought…

My animation teacher, Eric Martin, introduced the class to Breer’s highly effective, low-tech approach: Breer used 4”x 6” index cards with a minimum of technical clutter. For maximum smoothness and minimal expense, I’ve championed this approach ever since.

Always seeking smooth motion – what I consider the essence of good animation – I loved rotoscoping, the frame-by-frame tracing of gestures from live-action film or video into animation artwork. (the Fleischers’ Koko the Clown, Disney’s Snow White and the Blue Fairy from ”Pinocchio” — all were rotoscoped.)

Robert Breer was the first person I encountered who had figured it out. We corresponded briefly. He sent me a sketch of the rotoscope set-up he used on two of his other experimental films, “Gulls and Buoys” and “Fuji.”  With his sketch, I cobbled together my own rotoscope.

Then I spent three months laboriously tracing, frame-by-frame, Super 8mm footage I’d taken of two popular street artists, Don and Lana, who juggled in Harvard Square. Mixed in were 16mm footage I rotoscoped of W.C. Fields (the famous comedian, also an accomplished juggler) and other Super 8 movies I’d taken of Francisco “El Gran” Picasso, the flamboyant juggler then with the Ringling Brothers Circus, who, among other stunts, juggled four ping-pong balls with his mouth!

As part of the animation class, we meticulously read soundtracks. In my case, I read the beats of Jess Stacy’s buoyant piano solo from the 1938 Carnegie Hall recording of the Benny Goodman Orchestra playing “Sing Sing Sing.” With the beat sheet in hand, I carefully in-betweened, filled and matched the picture to as many beats as I could.

The result, “Piano-Forte,” my “thesis” film for the animation class, came out great.

It was selected to screen in competition at the International Animation Film Festival in New York City.

Someone handed me the program for the Festival. There was “Piano-Forte,” listed right next to Chuck Jones’s “A Cricket in Times Square,” and I remember thinking, “Wow! A person could make a living doing this!”

So, I took a leap of faith, and, in the words of Richard Williams, “I picked the most expensive medium that takes the longest time that you can get and the reward is that you can play God with it. You can do anything you like with it. You have total control of all the elements.” And by expensive, I now know, Williams doesn’t mean expensive monetarily. He means that Animators Playing God pay for the privilege with a massive investment of time – sacks of time, stacks of time, reams of time, canyons and oceans of time.

“Live-action filmmakers,” I tell my students nowadays, “just point the camera and capture stuff.  Animators, on the other hand, create everything we see onscreen — stitch-by-stitch, step-by-step, field-by-field, frame-by-frame, moment-by-moment. And that takes time.”

Fluid, hand-made, low-tech animation looks like nothing else. And it takes a ton of time to produce. It is wonderful indeed that such smooth and engrossing movement can originate with such humble materials as a stack of index cards!

So, I hope you enjoy “Piano-Forte,” which, from its modest origins as a student film has gone on to screen at film festivals and art salons, to open dance recitals and neighborhood screenings and annual meetings (for the International Jugglers Association); and to give us a few moments to consider, occasionally, what animation can do, even at its most basic level.

The Clark Collection of Mechanical Movement Models, one of the great exhibits at the Museum of Science in Boston, was built in the early 1900’s. Designed by American engineer William M. Clark, the Clark Collection of Mechanical Movement Models, according to the Museum’s website,  was “… displayed as the Mechanical Wonderland in New York in 1928 and at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago in 1933. Today, 120 of these mechanical models remain in excellent working order,” in the basement of the West Wing at the Museum of Science. The collection is about a hundred years old, still going strong, and well worth a visit.

The Clark Collection of Mechanical Movement Models is a group of beautifully machined wooden cases, each about six feet high, each containing sixteen examples of gear drives, constructed of wood, each gear drive brightly painted.

Pressing a single button on each case sets every gear drive inside whirring and pounding, each repeating its cycle as long as the button remains pressed. The movements are rollicking, the motion delectable for anyone to observe – especially an animator.

One of my first freelance animation jobs was to translate the movement of these gear wheels into a thirty second TV spot for the Museum, titled, appropriately, “How Many Ways Can You Put a Wheel to Work?” I spent an entire eight-hour day examining these cases, and the wondrous, analog (of course!) fan-belt linkages inside, which drove all the gears in each case simultaneously.

I isolated the most interesting examples of the mechanical movement models and filmed them, head-on, with a 16mm hand-cranked Bolex. My favorites of these I rotoscoped, frame-by-frame, into animation drawings, then had free reign to choose the most lively colors for each. The rotoscope set-up was about as primitive as could be: I rented an ancient Bell+Howell sports analyst, single-framing projector, and just ground out all the artwork. The projector was unbelievably noisy, but the process worked.

Of course, it became a race against the clock to finish the spot on schedule and hit the deadline. But once it was all done, and I’d caught my breath, I had one of those moments one fantasizes about. I was sitting with a colleague in a swank bar on Newbury Street in Boston. Suddenly, at the end of the room, my Museum of Science spot appeared on the big screen TV’s. Everyone stopped talking, as the music and voiceover began, “How many ways can you put a wheel to work?” The colors were luscious, the movement magical. In thirty seconds, it was over. My friend said, “That looked great!” and everyone started talking again.

So pleased was I at that reception, that I sat, speechless.

The rotoscope race was over (for the moment), and it finally felt worth it!

Lesson learned: animation projects take time; but once they’re finished, no one cares how much time they take! That’s the price the animator pays to create the magic.