Sometime in 2011 I started playing in the space of using animation as a way to make sense of the world. Every once in a while I try to take stock and create a catalog of all these animations. None of the catalogs is complete but they still give me a great sense of accomplishment. The image that comes to mind is Sysiphus pushing a boulder up a hill. From Sysiphus’ perspective (am I spelling that right?), all the animating starts to feel the same: an endless loop of research, script-writing, drawing, animation, editing, scoring, sub-titling, promoting,… and if the camera pans out you see that out of the side of Sysiphus’ mountain there is a spool of narrative, or garden crops, or software, or knitting… whatever it is that is his work in the world.
So below are two attempts at panning out and viewing “the knitting” that has emerged so far. In both of the catalogs below you can click on an entry and if the animation is publicly available (i.e. my contract does not preclude me from sharing) then a link is provided to the animation so you can watch.
I made a tabular catalog in airtable (a user friendly no-code database platform).
… and a more visually presented catalog created using the mapping platform kumu. One can create maps in kumu with no code but I found the learning curve steep. If you want to avoid creating an unusable hot mess, make sure you understand the (not-so-intuitive) architecture and terminology kumu uses. If you want to get fancy it helps to be comfortable with CSS at least.