Creativity and New Media

A few years ago, my friends and I took a computer animation class. I signed up because the course posting noted that we would learn how to create live action animations - online! My friends and I have seemingly always loved anime and this class made it seem like I could perhaps create the animated worlds that we held such heavy investments. But I soon learned that storytelling was not exactly my forte. I've always been a numbers guy. Numbers are tangible and accountable for, but in creating a fictional world, I had to create the tangibility present in plausible storylines, character development, and action sequences, as well as I had to be accountable for each second of the piece. So at our beginner level, I created stick figure videos. I used Pivot Animator to make the stick figures, to animate them, I used Hypercam 2 to record a sped up version of my images, similar to a digital flip-book. I uploaded my final products to YouTube to make it accessible to others. The fact that my videos exist on YouTube give me a permanent reminder of one of my first instances of honing my creativity. I appreciate that fact about fostering creativity on social media: there is a sort of timeline that can trigger one's memory and bring them back to that point in time when they first created that stickman animation or a Second Life avatar.

First stickman fight

Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah9DOgAv1d8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds2wMHLRN9I