OMG, I Can’t Draw

Simple drawing can be effective in animations.  The flash animations “These Are The Boring Bits,” “Bendito Machine,” “Talk To Me”, and “Ray Of Nope” all feature simplistic drawing styles.

“These Are The Boring Bits” uses simple tweens to create the motion of only very few parts of the drawing at a time. It has a simple black and white color palette where the background is consistently white and there are black lines and shapes that create the figures. The screens change between scenes of each person’s thoughts as well as the birds that are outside the window. There are a few close-ups on the figures when they are talking and it is focusing on each character individually, but there are long shots used when multiple characters are being focused on at once. There are no panning motions that are really used in this particular animation.

“The Bendito Machine” also uses rather simple tweens to create motion for all of the figures. Only certain parts of each figure are actually being moved to create the motion. The color palette is yellow, orange, and black. The background consists of the colors, while all of the figures are black cutouts. The screen never really changes, it only focuses on one main scene and place the entire time. However, close-ups are used to focus on individual portions of the scene and long shots are used to focus on all aspects of the scene at once. There is no panning used in this animation either.

“Talk To Me” features very simple tweens as well in order to make one or two parts of the figure move. This animation uses a neutral color palette where the figure is filled in a pale yellow with black outlining, the phone is grey, the table is a pale brown and the background is a crème color. The screen changes only a few times. There are a few close-ups on the figure when focusing on his actions and also long shots to focus on the whole scene, but there is no panning.

“Ray Of Nope” uses simple tweens to move a limited number of parts of each figure at a time. This color palette is more colorful than the other animations because it involved a large variety of colors. The figures stay consistently red and orange, the disks they hold are consistently black and yellow, and the background changes color as the scenes change. There are a lot of screen changes in this animation as the background changes as the figures move from scene to scene. There are close-ups used to focus on each figure at a time and create a greater sense of movement as they fly and fall through each scene and long shots are used to focus on more than one figure at a time. Panning is also used in order to create the motion of them flying and falling through the screen.