All content © Ward Jenkins unless otherwise noted.

figure drawing (1999)

What started out as an observation of how art students look when they draw a subject in Figure Drawing class suddenly snowballed into an experiment of endurance by animating the entire film on ones. Normally, in order to save time (and sanity), animators do a drawing and expose it for two frames (called animating on twos) and can still get a natural sense of movement out of their characters. For video that’s roughly 15 drawings per second. Here, I decided to create a drawing for each and every frame, or 30 drawings per second.

On top of that, there are no layers. Everything was drawn and re-drawn for each frame, so there’s only one layer shot as-is, under the camera.

The turnaround cycle at the end of the film, as we spin around the model, consisted of 128 drawings.

Music © DJ Shadow.