[music playing] JULIA POTT: I think the reason I'm so drawn to animation is that you have complete control, and you can do whatever you want.
JESSE THOMAS: When creating informative videos, you're slowing the viewer down to understand one thing at a time.
JOHN CANEMAKER: Animation can personify emotions.
It can personify thought.
JUSTIN CONE: It's the same stuff you see when you go to sleep at night.
Animation says, let's recreate that experience somehow.
Let's pull other people into it.
JOHN CANEMAKER: There's something intrinsically magic about animation.
Many artists through the ages have wanted to bring their art to life.
Animation has been around for a long time.
And we're finding more and more cave drawings in which animals have multiple limbs, and the artist wanted to give the impression of motion.
You come into the 19th century with magic lanterns in which one piece of glass had one picture, and then, you switch it over, and it changes and become something else.
But it wasn't until photography came around, motion pictures, that was able to be used to make a success of a series of still drawings look like they were alive.
There's a whole series of techniques that can be used now.
One of the great traditional ones was hand-drawn animation.
There's also puppet animation.
There's clay animation, which is a form of puppet animation.
Today, there's computer animation, CGI.
Some of the major players happened really early on.
One of them was a man named Emile Cohl.
He introduced the idea of surrealism and the use of abstraction in animation.
Windsor McKay started to make his animated films about three years later, in 1911.
He had an incredible ability to create a real life character out of impossible things, like a mosquito or a dinosaur.
And coming forward to the Disney Animation Studio in the 1930s, where they codified and they tested out these principles.
One of them was something called stretch and squash.
Those are principles that give you an elasticity.
And then, they found there was a principle called anticipation.
There was other things like follow through, if a person has long hair and they come to a stop, the hair will continue to go.
It's a secondary action.
So all of these little symbols add a veracity to the animation so the audience are convinced they're seeing something that's really happening.
And it opened up all sorts of possibilities for the future.
JESSE THOMAS: Since the beginning of motion pictures, we've had informative videos.
So think about the films that would've been played a science class.
One of the classic ones is the "Power of 10" video.
And Disney is another great example of this.
If you look at the Goofy golf video from the '50s, he's explaining how the golf swing works using overlayed graphs and charts and stuff.
So we thought that we could maybe do it differently or better or whatever.
And so our business is getting information out to the public and educating them.
So the first video I ever did was called "The State of the Internet."
It was combining the storytelling nature of the political cartoon with the information that you get from this infographic.
For the last 50 years, animation has been created in a fun way for a very broad audience.
And so I think there's a lot of respect and trust in this medium for storytelling.
But you are manipulating how the viewer is processing that.
And in general, designing presentations, one of the things I'm always pushing is make the big information element as big as possible.
Slideshow-like videos lends itself to people taking screenshots, sharing them, and being able to add their context of that slice of the story.
Times have really changed, where now we're using the internet as a community center for ideas, and the role the animation plays is for the purpose of education.
JUSTIN CONE: The roots of motion graphics are really the roots of experimental animation, which I don't know if people understand that that is as old as the medium of film itself.
Both motion graphics and animation, they encourage play.
And it's through that process of experimentation that I think a lot of interesting stuff is made.
Every now and then, somebody creates something that really has a viewpoint or that's trying to do something new, usually by accident.
And next thing you know, they're developing a voice of their own.
By taking risks and inviting in mistakes, you can invite a whole new way of creating into your process.
There's just a kind of weird abstract drama playing out on the screen that transcends a lot of the normal structures of storytelling.
I think it goes back to when we used to gaze into the fire.
That kind of primal experience of looking at flickering imagery and hearing things that seemed to match with it, that's very deeply embedded in us.
And motion graphics basically taps into that.
And that's important.
You don't always have to have a character or clear narrative in order to move somebody.
JULIA POTT: Animation is just the medium I use to express my stories.
With live action, it's more of a community, and it doesn't maybe allow for your weird thought process to kick in.
I much prefer the way pencil looks.
You can get these little accidents into the smudges of the paper.
And you're just in your room, and you can create these incredible worlds.
With "Belly" I tried to think about what it was like to be ostracized by an older sister and and how you can just feel like so rotten inside.
So animation is a great medium for that because it's just you.
It's all coming out of you.
And the stuff that comes out are things that would only come out if you're just stuck alone with your brain for a really long time.
Have you seen my brother?
His name is Alex.
Yes.
I have seen him.
JULIA POTT: I think if something makes sense to you, even if it's abstract, it will make sense to the viewer.
So yeah, like going inside the belly as this abstract element for something being in the pit of your stomach just seemed to make sense.
Hey, buddy.
I miss you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
I know.
MALE VOICE: Come on, Oscar.
Our ride's here.
JULIA POTT: And then when people come up and they're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, I totally got it.
I feel that way too sometimes.
And you're just like, really?
Really.
It's a very weird feeling.
With animation, I like to express myself as sort of externalizing inner angst and turmoils and things.
And because it's in this cute package, it's easier to digest.
JUSTIN CONE: In animation, anything is possible.
There really are no limits.
JESSE THOMAS: The reason that infographics have become very popular is people are using the internet more and more to be educated about things.
JULIA POTT: I love the process of drawing and figuring out how you can make it look weird but still realistic.
JOHN CANEMAKER: If you think it, you can draw it, you can animate it.
You can be an animator.
[music playing]
