Drawing the Figure just passed 100 hits on YouTube! Thanks to everyone who pressed (or will press) the button to watch my 59-second animated short. It took three weeks to make and has been online since March 4. For the curious, here are the making-of details:
The pencil is only nineteen drawings at different angles of rotation that I was swapping out, but there's no trickery in the animation of the figure character. The middle sequence of the figure reacting to his sudden existence is 361 drawings in a row, not 'on twos', which is why the motion is so smooth and consistent.
I tried a lot of different accents and attitudes for the narrator voice and didn't like any of them. Then I listened to some gravelly-voiced narrators on NPR, impersonated that quality and it worked.
I recorded the narrator voice in my living room and the figure voice in my car. My downstairs neighbors didn't need to hear me screaming, "what did you do! What did you do!" Recording in the car gave it an echo-y quality, so now I only record in my living room. Sorry neighbors.
There are a couple of places where the figure voice gets high-pitched and goes all digital. I didn't know what caused it at the time, but the microphone was set too low to handle my screaming into it. The audio will be better in the next one.
Thanks for the support! It's easy to keep doing this sort of thing, knowing people like the results.
