Sand Animation

This week for Basic Animation Techniques class, we learned about sand animation. If you have never seen sand animation before, I suggest you look at Caroline Leaf (she's the animator who invented sand animation in the 70's):

The Owl Who Married A Goose

So for our assignment this weekend, we had to create a 10+sec sand animation of our own with 3 objects, 2 morphs. This was my first time ever doing sand animation and I must say, I absolutely love doing this technique. There's something really freeing about sand animation for me, like I just get to play as an animator and just have fun and experiment. Plus it's just gorgeous, the way the light and dark interact with sand is interesting to animate with, there's really no other technique like it that I've done before.

I choose to go a very different route for my animation this week and do something a bit more abstract because I've been dying to create a more abstract piece of animation and I felt that sand would lend itself to abstract animation very well. My only idea behind doing this was to listen to whatever music I was going to have in my final animation while I was animating and let the music influence my choice of imagery to create and the timing. This piece I chose to animate to was Scheherazade Movement 1. I'm glad I really enjoy this song because I listened to it on repeat for a good 5 hrs by now and I'm still not sick of it. X )

Anyways, here's the link to my first ever sand animation:

Sand Animation Experiment

And here's some of the frames from my animation that I rather like. Sand animation is just so simply beautiful!