The paradox of animation time. If the inanimate experiences real time why does it appear alive for a brief moment?

Abstract

Animation is by nature a time based medium. It is a dissection of time, a fragmentary exploration and journey of discovery frame by frame. By utilising the idiosyncrasies of film and perception of vision, the animator attempts to reconstruct their understanding of reality twenty five times every second. The paradox of this action occurs between the observation of this and the execution of the result. In short this is what the animator experiences and what the inanimate does. This extract is based on my observations as a practitioner in the field of stopmotion animation, and my considerations of the passage of time for me as the illusionist, conjurer and artist, and the time that I shared with the inanimate object; the puppet or similarly inanimate object, that which was bereft of life. Unaware itself of time the puppets would appear lifeless, static and unconscious, until the camera awoke and shared its moment with the audience. Here the animator not only brings the puppet – that which is animated, the term being interchangeable with 'inanimate object' – something not necessarily anthropomorphosised or directly representational like a human or animal figure, rather something that would naturally be inanimate – to life, but also wakens it to a period of time. It is this period of time that only the animated object experiences. It is also this period of time that the animator needs, essentially, to understand to create something akin to a new reality. If the animator cannot dissect this time, hold those fragments internally and imbue them into the inanimate then the result is a discordant recreation of reality.