I’ve long been fascinated by animation. The idea of someone’s drawings coming to life has always seemed very powerful to me – an incredibly direct form of creativity. When I was younger, I tried my hand at it the old fashioned way – creating minutely different images on paper or cells to photograph frame by frame on a super-8 movie camera, using an animation rostrum my Dad made for me.
These days you can do all that digitally, of course. And one of the things I did during lockdown was teach myself computer animation. I was using some software called Moho to create simple 2-D animations, including some trailers for my Silas Quinn books and this short reading for my novel Fortune’s Hand.
More recently, I found out about Blender, a free and open source bit of software that allows you to create 3-D (and 2-D) animation. A few YouTube tutorials later, I jumped in and had a go at creating my first 3-D animation. Given that I write mainly historical fiction, you might be surprised to discover that it’s a sci-fi short featuring a robot. But the simple fact is robots are easier to model and animate – you don’t need to worry about facial expression for one thing.
The film grew out of an exercise in creating a walk cycle for my robot. It was exciting to discover how I could move cameras around and change the perspective – and also create lighting effects by adding “volume” to the atmosphere.
The story, I hope, makes a virtue of my (extremely) limited skills. Anyhow, here it is – watch it with the sound on for full effect. And let me know what you think!