Some progress

The perfect storm of hot weather, visiting relatives, and Sean attending a new school have conspired to make the past week's progress slow. I've been working on the codex video which Ben thinks is an enormously tedious project. He's right in the sense that animation as a craft is tedious by nature. But it becomes a not-so-bad mindless activity once you get into it. One of my grad students used to work at Disney for years as an effects animator. She drew the waves cresting and flowing in Fantasia 2000. She said that it sounds tedious but after awhile you don't mind it. Actually, I think it's this painstaking quality that gives animation its energy and charm. In the nineties I spent lots of time trying to figure out shortcuts for animation using various forms of computer interpolation. But the results were unsatisfactory lacking the dynamism of working frame by frame.