Animation is so much work!

Left: cute skipping girl for
my animation class (no, she
won't skip just yet... no matter
how many times you click.)

Okay. Everyone knows that animated films require a mind-boggling number of frames. What I'd never really considered was the amount of work that goes into each individual frame. Oh my God! For a "walk cycle," for example, an artist makes eight to twelve repeating frames to bring to life a runner, walker, saunter-er, whatever. But each frame has to be sketched, refined, penned, scanned, Photoshopped, inversed (that's when you render the character's background transparent so that the figure can be transplanted into the setting of your choice), and colored. And that's just the figure! Then you still have to make the background, although don't even ask me how. We haven't covered that yet.

But it's fun.