Profound thought for the Task
In a relationship you can hold the space of intense presence for the partner who has slipped into identification with his/her thinking.
– Eckhart Tolle
The Task: Make a Flick-Book animation
On the surface this seemed like an easy enough task, but when I came to think about it, I could put quite a few obstacles in the way to stop me doing it. The most obvious was that I can’t draw, but others included that I had no inspiration, or materials to make a success of it. Of course I could just draw a ball moving across a page for a few seconds, but this didn’t seem challenging enough, so I considered other more elaborate flick-book animations. I first settled on the idea of a stickman, jumping onto a high-wire, and swinging across monkey-style to the other side of the page while an archer fired arrows at him from the corner of the page. After sketching it all out, it became clear that stickmen (and probably stick-women) are more complex that you think to draw. Especially if you have to draw accurate movements of limbs featuring specialised combat operations.
Then I thought of perhaps a bird flying across the page, and tried to draw a basic bird. It turns out I can’t draw birds either. So I had to avoid animals, it seemed. I did a bit of internet research to see if I could get some basic stick-animal movements on a frame by-frame basis, and the best one I could find was one of a spider. Maybe that would work for me. A simple spider crawling across the page. The spider body stays the same each time so you only have to move 8 legs each time.
Once I’d found a notebook that had enough blank sheets, I set to work with the challenge of getting the spider aross the page in 100 movements. If all went well, I could add perhaps a fly buzzing around later on, and after that a ball moving across the page along with an action figure trying to dodge arrows.
Well I did the spider anyway. It doesn’t flick as well as I’d hoped, so I have to remain disappointed with the exercise as a whole. But it was pleasant time spent in the reverie of drawing a spider’s legs one hundred times at different angles. And I now know how a spider uses it’s legs to scribble.
Below, is a video of my first attempt. If I ever have the patience, I will return to this flick-book and start to make it more interesting
In a flick-book you can hold a space of intense presence for the page which has slipped into a realisation of poor execution.
