"what the dog saw" finished

For review boards, the big semester critique we have on our thesis work, one of the things I wanted to do was finish up the first experimental animation I started last spring. I just added a few more frames to make the transition a little smoother, so it could be played on a loop. I can't seem to figure out how to get it to move from the last frame back to the first without pausing on vimeo, but normally it would play continuously!

So here's a completed version of "What The Dog Saw" and a description to go along with it:

"What The Dog Saw"

I wanted to take something simple, like a dog walking, and collage back into it, abstracting each of the original drawings. This was my first experiment with the kind of collage animation I had in mind. The title "What The Dog Saw" comes from a Malcolm Gladwell book. The book is a collection of articles Gladwell's written over the years, as attempted glimpses into the workings and thought processes of other people's minds. In the preface of his book, Gladwell says that "Curiosity about the interior life of other people's day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands...The [challenge] to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell...Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting." Gladwell concludes his introduction by saying that "good writing...succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."
I also hold Gladwell's belief that everything has a story to tell, and that something as casual as a dog walking can be made interesting when colored by a personal lens. The title refers to that idea, but could also be interpreted as the experience of walking seen from the dog's point of view – an erratic blend of colors and shifting shapes.


Thanks for looking!