Yesterday This Was Home: Animating

This is one of three scenes I animated today. In this scene Sam looks out the window, sees the girl boarding in Winter Park and decides to switch seats so she can sit beside him. The scene is 68 frames or to seconds and 20 frames. I had to act out how you might switch seats and I decided on him leaning forward and hen thrusting himself up on both arms to swing his butt over. It is a classic squash and stretch scene. The squash being his lean forward and the stretch being his thrust upward. I had fun animating his hand move to the far seat. He pauses for six frames looking out the window and then swings across.

In this screen shot from Callipeg, you can see the different levels used in the animation. The bottom level is the background . Above that I put the storyboard so I could reference it for the values used when painting the character. The animation drawings are on a level above the character’s painting level. I am not hiding how the drawings were dome. Some of them are very rough while other inbetweens get cleaner since they are put in to simply slow down certain sections.

It turn out I miss animating. It has been fun getting back into the process without having piles of papers cluttering the desk.

This short film can be seen at the Orange C0unty Regional History Center in the special exhibition, Yesterday This Was Home on display October 3, 2020 – February 14, 2021, The exhibition is about the 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Orange County, Florida, remains the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history.

Events unfolded on Election Day 1920, when Mose Norman, a black U.S. citizen, attempted to exercise his legal right to vote in Ocoee and was turned away from the polls. That evening, a mob of armed white men came to the home of his friend, July Perry, in an effort to locate Norman. Shooting ensued. Perry was captured and eventually lynched. An unknown number of African American citizens were murdered, and their homes and community were burned to the ground. Most of the black population of Ocoee fled, never to return.