What activity brings you great joy? Or perhaps contented absorption, which I consider better than joy – less ephemeral. For me it’s creating illustrations, and animated versions of them. This is the public debut of my newest, exclusive to you!
Most tutorials on stop motion animation involve taking a series of photos (a lot of photos) of physical objects, like lego, or plasticine models. Think Wallace and Gromit. Even for animations involving paper, people seem to cut out actual physical paper, then move it around and take photos of it.
Well, I don’t know if I’m doing it right or not. But my illustrations are entirely digital, so I animate them the same way. I move the ‘pieces of paper’ in tiny increments in the same way but in an app (called Union), saving a photo after each adjustment. Then I move all the photos into the Stop Motion Studio app (free, easy, and awesome), get them in the right order, copy and paste duplicates to create more images right there in the app if the animation is too short or jerky, add music and sound effects, and bob’s your uncle. I do find it really easy, it’s just very time-consuming. It takes nearly 1000 images to make one imperfect minute. And takes ages to find the right music, too.
This is the first animation I’ve made in ages but it gives me great joy to have created it and I’m going to make quite a few more in the series. The theme is how the majority of the advice offered to neurodivergent people online just completely misses the point, boiling down to “Have you tried not being neurodivergent?”. And sometimes it’s unintentionally insulting: I’m 58, and they’re telling me to try using a day planner? Well jeez, in all those years I never once thought of it, thanks so much for that idea. (Glances at disorganised piles of orphaned planners).
Hopefully these animations will be taken in the spirit intended: poking gentle fun, while educating those who do that and comforting those on the receiving end that they’re not alone in *deep sighs*. Their purpose is also to grow my new Substack community for people unravelling neurodivergence in later life, luring them in from across the interwebs with somewhat snarky stop motion. Have a lot of new social media accounts to create and build in the coming weeks.
Let’s see if I can keep this up and going, the way you’ve helped me to here in this Substack. So grateful for these two years of habit-formation training!
So beautiful 🤩
Terrific!