A History of (Human) Violence

Some animations (and, for that matter, movies generally) have been criticized for their violence. Some violence is funny - slapstick, and other kinds of physical comedy. Some is gruesomely fascinating. But the deeper question is, why is it? What makes it so? Is it part of our human equipment or is it learned?

CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks took the question on in their April 25, 2009 broadcast with a feature documentary "A History of Violence". I found it fascinating. Here's a direct link to an mp3 file of the documentary:

A History of Violence
These ideas are going to inform my animated storytelling. I can never know too much about what we are discovering about ourselves through the brain sciences.

A New Kind of Classic Animation?

Or maybe it's just a new class of animation software. Since I last posted, I've been working on new programs for the Mac and Windows, another web site, and animating using my new programs.

The animated GIF above (which links to my new site, How-To-Make-Your-Own-Animation) is an example of this new type of animation. I don't have a good phrase that sums up what's going on, but it's all about creating the animation frames in paint software - any paint software (and some other programs).

That's always been possible - if you saved the image repeatedly with a new, sequential file name every time you save it. I've done that for a few very short animations and naming each file correctly, manually, completely breaks my artistic concentration. (Richard Williams: "Animation is concentration.")

So I wrote a helper program: StopMotion FrameCollector. Click on the animation below to find out more.



These GIFS were created by saving frames sequentially in Photoshop 7 - which has no built-in animation features, unlike Photoshop CS3 and CS4. You can see the power of Photoshop for animation - I've got drop shadows and layers going on, as well as squash and stretch and motion blur in the top animation. The second animation is nothing fancy, but here's another one showing layers. The technique can be used for any movie format - these animations just happen to be GIFs.