Classical Hand-drawn & Stop Motion Animation Pencil Tests

This is a short, one minute long video (posted below) with some of my hand-drawn and stop motion animation tests from awhile back. These were all made by hand using an old school, overhead animation camera with pencil on paper, bottle caps, chalk, etc.

This is my favourite style of animation - hand-drawn and stop motion. I am in the early process of putting some new short animations together for some future Mechanical Ruins music videos. I would love to be back in the old school animation studio again. They sure do not create animation the way it used to be made. I learned how it was done in the original Disney and Hanna Barbera styles (both of which I did projects on for "History of Animation" class) and instructed by animators that had decades of experience in the TV and film animation industry. One of my instructors in college had worked on the 80s Canadian animated show, The Raccoons which was a staple in my childhood.

I am very happy that I got to learn to animate the old school way drawing every frame by hand. When you make a mistake in this style of animation, its not a quick fix on a computer and would take sometimes hours or days to go back and re-draw frames, etc. A pain in the ass but a beautiful, addicting form of animation.

Classical styles of animation are slowly becoming a thing of the past now with computer animation long taking over as the main form of animation. Old school animation is still around however, a lot of it is now created on computer software but made to LOOK like classical animation. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Its just how the arts advance with technology. An example off hand would be how South Park was originally made with construction paper and now is made with 3D animation software. I mean it makes sense for production time, costs, team size, etc. You get a lot more done. Its still made by human hands.

Do NOT get me started on AI as now people can just animate anything by typing in a damn sentence into an AI image generator. Not one need skill anymore. I am still going to create the old school way. I just have to create the way I love to do it and the way I do it best. I will always prefer art in all forms that was made by human hands from human imagination. Digital art and animation is fine as long as its human made with editing software, etc. I made my single and book covers all from my own photos with photo editing software with my own hands. I could edit all this with AI so its written perfecting but this is a blog and just me here being the genuine me.

Anyway, for I went off on a bit of rant or something there but no worries, I will keep it in here. Its real. Its me and these are just my thoughts. I promise my stories are WAY more serious and far better written lol. Its all just fun here on this blog. There will be many more random things posted here. Oh my lol

So i hope you enjoy this short reel of my own animation pencil tests. This one minute video represents several pencil tests from projects and represent many, many hours of work.

Keep believing! Keep dreaming!

Ryan