Animation Blog

This blog post is the hardest, because it is very difficult for me to pick just one animation that fires my imagination. I love animations and have seen hundreds or thousands by now. Instead of picking one that’s particularly beautiful or genius, I will pick one that inspires me when I, myself, work with Flash.

I chose Joel Veitch and Rob Manuel’s “Chill Out”, a music video for Youth of Britain’s song of the same name.



The sense of space is both limited and three dimensional, since it is obviously a collage of a few sources thrown on top of one another, it looks like just 2 or three layers. However, the content of the background has a very strong sense of space. It is driving footage shot from kitten-eye-level. The laying of the motorcycle on top of this almost makes it look like it’s in motion. It is a clever trick, but not realistic enough to fool anyone’s eye- just believable enough to entertain people by its obvious unreality.

The character is also extremely simple. The character is barely articulated. It is mechanistic. It looks sort of like an animated bobblehead. The kitten bobs its head to the beat in an almost uniform fashion for the entire video. It does not seem to have any complex emotions, but its movements do effectively communicate both speed and an enjoyment of the music. He also pauses when the footage and the music pauses and, pops a wheelie whenever the music does what electronic music fans call “dropping a break” (starting up a new layer of sound, to the proper rhythm.) These movements’ synchronization with the music give the impression that the kitten is enjoying the music, and the character effectively becomes an embodiment of the song.

Truthfully, I like this video because I like seeing a kitten enjoy loud electronic music, and now I like it even more because it is simple enough for me to aspire to create something of a similar quality. Now that I know the basics of Flash, given enough time, I could make this, and that fact makes me very happy (because I’ve been watching and loving silly flash animations for a decade now, and it’s a new, very internet-centered, geeky medium that I think has a lot of humorous and creative potential.)