Animated Discussions: Doing it

Many years ago. Let us say 17 or 18 years ago.

Mrs Doonuthin had a go at learning to animate.

It was an evening class. When she lived in London. And it was a difficult subject to find a class in at that time. Animation.

Because we are not even talking digital animation, which maybe you could get access to fairly easily these days. Back then - computer animation was rare - a college degree subject. Equipment cost a fortune and was way out of Mrs Doonuthin's league. In those simple times.

No. We are talking....
Get a film camera - put it on a stand - take single frame shots - move the thing - take more shots - develop the film - play it back at 24 frames per second.

Or get some 16 or 35 mm film. Scratch on it, paint on it, draw on it. Then play it back at 24 frames per second. (Try researching Norman McLaren or Len Lye for this.)

Anyway. She did the course. She made a film of a succession of 2D images.She watched it at a screening at the London Film-makers Co-operative. It was indecipherable.

But

She was "bit by the bug".

She couldn't find another animation class to go to. But she enrolled in a week long "Introduction to Super 8 Film-making" workshop at Four Corners Film in the Roman Road. It was, she considered, the next best thing that she could do.

Then she bought a Canon Super 8 camera with single shot capability, a tripod, some film, and went home and had a go at filming things. Including: "Moi" (in my red-haired youth); a garden Barbie (so named because she was found in the garden); and - latterly - a strange Newspaper Rabbit. None of these films saw the light of day. Nor much of a projector light.

You see, it takes a lot of time and planning to make an animated film. Mrs Doonuthin has great problems overcoming techno-fear. And life gets complicated.

So now the Super 8 camera lives in its box. The film projector is packed up. And you have to track down Super 8 film stock (Well there's the Widescreen Centre in London ..... )

Mrs Doonuthin used to play with the animated gif-making part of her graphics software. (If you'll pardon the expression) Then Flash came along. Gifs were relegated to annoying, flashing doo-hickeys on bad web pages. And Mrs Doonuthin forgot her animating dreams for quite a while.

But then she reacquainted herself with me. Greydoll. Together we started this little blog thingy.

And now.... Mrs Doonuthin is looking secretive. Distracted. A little pre-occ-u-pied.

So this is what I think.
I think that Mrs Doonuthin wants to make films again.

And she's not sure how to go about it.