All together now

n the first official day back at college, the powers that be unleashed a surprise. All planned activities for students on graphic design, photography and multimedia courses were temporarily suspended in favour of a collaborative animation project.

We were each given photocopies of twelve frames from a film by Eadweard Muybridge of a horse galloping, representing one second of action. Our task was to manipulate or annotate them in any way we wanted, taking no more than three hours, whereupon all our submissions would be combined to form a single animation.

Responses ranged from the mundane ("I'm bored" written in the same corner of every frame) to the imaginative (the rider falling off in one sequence and successive frames torn into successively smaller pieces in another).

My contribution involved a chariot (without horse) overtaking Muybridge's horse, though the impact is reduced because I took the easier route, having no paints with me, of sending the chariot behind the horse rather than in front. The detailed movement of going over a bump on the ground, with the rider squashing and stretching as a result, is also lost in such a short sequence. Never mind. I intend to work on it on my own to see how it could be improved.

The combined animation was shown that afternoon, and will be shown in public on 7th March at the St Helens film and animation event. I'm hoping that it will also be posted to the Internet.

I really enjoyed being pushed to do something quickly and with limited resources. A similar task will probably be organised near half-term, and there's a possibility that we might be given three seconds to animate and three days to do it in. I'm looking forward to it already.