STICK FIGURE ANIMATION
2009-2010
"Intelligence is not synonymous with brains."
Even aliens have to troubleshoot their own hardware.
With the tractor beam unable to grab such a small object as a rubber kickball, our heroes resort to another idea.
Coming home empty-handed, facing the disapproval of their extended family.
Some of the stock figures available in Pivot Animator.
The notebook holding my storyboards for this and other early animation projects.
This was my first completed creative project of any real size, using stick-figure armatures in the freeware tool Pivot Animator, backgrounds cobbled together using Microsoft Paint, and edited in Windows Movie Maker on the family PC. This five-minute animation tells the story of an underqualified duo of alien explorers on a mission to investigate and recover human technology, finding themselves utterly stymied by a child's toys.
I don't actually remember how I started using this software. It had to have been something my father discovered and installed for me, because I certainly wasn't exploring online at that age. There were a few small animations I made before starting this one, but I never bothered to properly export them, so all that remains is my hand-drawn storyboards in an old paper notebook.
Many years later, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that not only is Pivot Animator still available, its original creator is still actively supporting it, with several major functionality upgrades released in recent years! This tool is as approachable as ever, and for someone who would find an environment like Blender's grease pencil system too daunting, Pivot is a great place to start.
