Basic Animation Aesthetics: An Essay By David OReilly

Someone on Reddit managed to dig this up, and we should all thank them that they did.

Talented (and charismatic) Irishman, David OReilly is well known for being one of the more provocative and innovative animators out there today. His shorts Please Say Something and The External World continue to find new audiences today, despite the fact that they have been out for quite a while.

David’s style is fairly unique so I was genuinely excited to come across an essay he’d written on animation aesthetics. You’ll want to read it too, especially as he says this in the first paragraph:

The importance of animation aesthetics is such a subtle yet vitally important one. It might seem superficial to discuss these things, especially because cinema is so much more to do with content and story than a pure aesthetic experience, but nonetheless the visual nature of animation calls for debate on the subject. There is a continuous raft of animation, both commercial and independent, which looks the same, and I don’t believe it has to be so. The more we think about the subject the more playful and interesting computer animation becomes, the medium feels to me like a recently opened Pandora’s box which is still being examined, understood and tamed.

You can (and should) read the rest of the (9 page) document here.

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