Experimenting with cel animation again; 10 drawings to tell a story.

Around 20 - 15 years ago, designers were being hired en-masse by advertising agencies to spend their time toiling over animated GIF ad banners. Sometimes we used Macromedia Flash to make little games and cartoons and digital ads, which was easier because we could automate the tweening of vectors - the frames between each keyframe were created automatically. This is how most digital animation is created today, albeit with different and more sophisticated software.

Animated GIFs originally involved us creating very few frames to create a banner that could load fast. Most of us weren’t thrilled to be spending all of our time on banner ads, but GIFs were initially closer to cell animation in a way, because it involved crafting every frame, in the days before we used software to automatically tween keyframes for banners as well.

As an illustrator I still get a kick out of cel animation. I like drawing each frame by hand on paper, without using digital drawing tools, then scanning those drawings and converting each into a frame of an animation. It’s laborious, but it is almost meditative for someone who deals with anxiety. In a world where designers are expected to optimise every second of their time in environments that tend to value efficiency over quality, it almost feels like creative rebellion.

So, here is a short story in 10 hand-drawn illustrations.