Confessions of a Wanna-be Animator

[Pardon the poor quality of the image above … its several generations old.]

Hello. My name is Travis, and IÂ  am a wanna-be animator. It was my senior year in high school and my best buds and I had the worst case of senior-itis. We decided we were all going to take the Film-making Class together, which was actually an English elective offered only to seniors. We thought it would be a lot of fun and an easy way to get credits and goof off our last semester. In reality, it ended up being one of the coolest classes any of us had taken. We had a few different projects, most of which we don’t openly talk about with others outside our group. However, there is one project, the big one, which we are all still terribly proud of making.

ENOUGH! was our group’s animation project.  It was a three-minute stop-motion animation shot on Super-8 film. The story goes something like this … It is the distant future and a battle royale of all the galaxy’s fiercest warriors breaks out on a Mad Max type apocalyptic planet. The battle boils down to the final two warriors and the film ends with the victor defeating his enemy.

The Making of ENOUGH! … When we were given this project, the class was split into groups determined mostly by the students themselves. We had a dream team super group of six, all of us friends and all of us geeks. We quickly joined forces and came up with the concept for our epic masterpiece. One of the gang had hordes of action figures stored away in his dad’s basement that he had kept from his childhood. This, together with whatever the rest of us had, we muddled through the casting process. We had one helluva megastar ensemble, including G.I. Joe, He-Man, Spawn, The Thing, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battle Beasts, Muscle Men, Earthworm Jim, Splinter and many more. We chose to build our sets from a mix of constructs and strategically placed space toys, including a partially beaten Millennium Falcon. We quickly learned the importance of having a place of our own, undisturbed, to shoot our film. It was apparent that we would not be completing this in one night. In fact, it took us  nearly a month to complete the shooting phase, making quarter-inch movements at a time, taking two single shots of each movement. We had to be sure that everything was perfect, as we could not go back and redo any shots. Eventually, it was finished.

At this point, we technically could have said “we’re done … let’s slack off until the end of the semester.” Oh no, not us … we were geeks thoroughly obsessed with our new found form of creativity. Instead of calling it finished, we set out to further perfect our project as other groups still toiled with what to to with their poorly sketched cartoons and clunky Lego blocks. A couple of guys in our group were also in Television Production classes, so they hooked us up with time on the Toaster. For those of you too young, or who weren’t involved with television classes in school, the Toaster was a computer-aided VHS FX editor used to add nifty wipes and dissolves, etc. The professional version of this technology was used in the early years making the Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement. In addition, we used the studio equipment to lay down a soundtrack for our film. We chose to transfer the footage from Super-8 to Super VHS [via local photo/video finishing shop] and then edit the footage to the song “Enough” by the band Gravity Kills, who at the time was one of our favorite local Saint Louis bands, second only to The Urge.

Why am I talking about this? Well, I ran out of other ideas … no, actually I was thinking about this little film we made, and how a few of us sometimes talk about doing another one, just for fun. I was thinking about this and realized that this is how many film-makers get started, even the big ones. Steven Speilberg and M. Night Shyamalan both got the film-making passion from making silly little movies like these with their Super-8 cameras in their adolescent years. What I’m saying is, if you’ve thought about doing things like this, go for it … you never know where it might take you. Besides, many of these that I’ve seen from other people are actually fun to watch.