The Birth of the Animation Station

 It was nearly ten years ago that the Animation Station made its debut at the Lowry Avenue Open Streets/Harvestfest even on September 29, 2012.

Margo Ashmore, a friend of mine, told me that the folks organizing the neighborhood Harvestfest part of the event were looking for artists to do different kinds of art on the street. I had been playing with a new stop motion application on my laptop, and thought that maybe I could do stop motion animation with people, pixilation, like Norman McLaren had done in "Neighbors" way back in the 1950's. 

It all came together pretty quickly. I could bring my laptop computer with the stop motion software and I could mount a webcam on a tripod. I bought a video projector, so I could project the laptop screen on one of the portable movie screens I had. I was going to get power from the hardware store on the corner of Lowry and Penn, and they were also going have a table and a chair that I could use. The chair ended up being used as an animation prop as much as anything else. I didn't spend too much time sitting down.

I loaded up all equipment on my bicycle trailer and went up there. On the way to the spot where I would set up the animation station, I did some filming and shot some interviews. I would also edit together a video of the event, which is above.

The animation was just about anything that could happen. I didn't really have a spot on the street, it was really on the sidewalk because I didn't have an extension cord long enough to get any farther than that. I had some chalk, and there was drawing on the sidewalk, and lots of improv pixilation with mostly kids. I didn't exactly know how or when, but I knew I wanted to do something like this again.