Quick primer: Animation used to be painted on to transparent pages,
"cells," before everything went digital. If you film the cells at 24
frames per second, the drawings will appear to move fluidly. Heck,
even 12 frames per second is good enough to make the characters come
alive.
Storyboard artist Marty Cooper (a.k.a. Hombre McSteez
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkNqSFUZ4XXuiJ8JWpFPs1w])
draws directly on transparent cells and then photographs them in the
field, allowing his characters to interact with the real world. Of
course, that trick has been done before, in movies like Who
Framed Roger Rabbit — but that film required millions of dollars
worth of equipment in the 1980s. Today, an iPhone app lets Cooper
make quick and dirty films with nothing more than some office
supplies. That kind of freedom would make an old time animator's eyes
pop out of his head while his tongue rolled to the ground like a
red carpet.
Cooper's first animated film, "Aug(de)mented Reality," got 4.5
million views on YouTube. It's full of animated weirdness: a giant
hermit crab lives in a dumpster, a freezer door opens to reveal a
manic penguin, a massive hairball coughs up a cat. And that's all in
the first 45 seconds.
And now comes the latest installment. "Aug(de)mented Reality 3"
features more of Cooper's inventive (and oddly aggressive) characters
made out of inanimate objects, like a paper towel that knocks over a
bottle of vinegar, and a pool ball that retaliates for being hit. And
at the beginning, Cooper demonstrates how he does it, setting up a
tripod and taking photos of transparencies, one by one. But
the cool part isn't the technology. It's Cooper's subversive sense
of humor.
