ANGST SHORT 2

So happy to finally get this animation done: Angst Shorts 2. It's the second of what I hope to be a handful of animations that match some silly comics I have been working on (here's this one)(I printed out a bunch for a zine swap - here's a photo from Instagram of that + a ridiculous batch of another thing + a sad strawberry sitting in a backwashed margarita).

After finishing my undergrad and taking some time to reflect on just how much time it took me to make a thesis animation (over a year), something seemed to stand out. So many ideas for animations have never had the chance to get realized. My friends from other majors had a lot of different pieces to show after 4 years, and in comparison, I didn't feel that animation students had a lot of material. The argument usually boils down to the process - the general rule seems to be: "animations take forever!" and "wow, you must have no social life."

When thinking "animation" it might be typical to instantly think Disney features, television shows that owned our childhood attention spans, etc. - pieces of art that have so many hands in them, so many hours, skills, time (and money) thrown into the mix. Animation exists as a pretty weird form of art.

Angst Shorts are just glorified sketchbook ideas/an effort to keep practicing storytelling and animating without the weight of the ideal "short film". I don't really want to spend my whole animation career strictly slaving over a few ideas - I am just trying to have fun. In the summer, I made storyboard thumbnails (this is the second out of three) and scanned those into the computer. I traced the keys and tried to hold back on animating much beyond those poses. Took one night to slop together some backgrounds in Photoshop. Had my friends throw some voices into a microphone. Voila - after spending an afternoon clicking through an audio library - I finished an impromptu soundtrack (some are mega buried/there's definitely a woman saying "please leave a message" at the first close-up of the cat's face)(I also did a lot of extra screamy screeches into the mic for her at the end).

The process took longer than I anticipated. The goal is to get much faster at these - to have more focus on what makes the story clearest in the least amount of time. I really just want to break down the limiting idea I have in my head that animations are always daunting, time-sucking forms of art. The best part of doing these is that when I go to start my more serious short films (I started one as soon as I finished this), the process seems so much less overwhelming and more manageable.