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When we got back from vacation we kicked straight back in to relentless rut. I’m going to meditate on that some today. While working.I am constantly amazed by this child. Hates anything that isn’t to do with drawing or (now) animation possibilities. Math? Numbers? He’s got a bit of that dyslexia thing going and also out of pure disinterest couldn’t write a simple addition or subtraction equation to save his life. He doesn’t care. You couldn’t get him to care. If I was an Unschooler that would be cool, but I don’t have it in me to be a diehard unschooler. I entice him with Flash animations of math because all he cares about is art and animation. And he sits and draws it all. Plays one brief bit over and over and over studying the animation. All the other homeschoolers are speeding along with studies and if I ask him a simple equation he gets this clouded look in his eye and either smiles brightly at me and throws out any number that pops into his head or scowls and says, “Boring!” and goes right back to drawing. I tell him he’s going to need this other boring stuff to help him out in the future with his art, he’s going to need to know math. “Hmmm,” he goes and there will be a flicker of concession to learning these other things. (He also knows more than he thinks he knows or cares to know.) Then also for sake of mom’s emotional health he’ll buckle down for a while and consider things like pints and cups and quarts and gallons, like we were working on yesterday. Day in and day out I wait for the opportune moments to squeeze a bit of that boring stuff into this brain and try like hell to make it not boring so he’ll be interested. “Put him in school where he’ll learn some discipline!” you say, but he’s disciplined as hell. Fiercely disciplined, it’s just all directed to making the characters in his brain come alive.
Last week he didn’t want me to throw out a box of styrofoam pellets. He said they were perfect eyes. He took them and went through laboriously drawing pupils in different positions on them for some of his clay creations.
I spent the last couple of weeks looking up animation and stop animation sites for him. We’ve only been to a couple, I put most on reserve so he doesn’t get overwhelmed. Yesterday (after the Zoo’s Halloween day, which he found disappointing as he admitted afterwards he was expecting stories over a bonfire for some reason, however he did love the storyteller but didn’t like the big crowd, which the animals also didn’t like) we spent at animateclay.com. He watched those little clips over and over, looked at armatures and how you craft the clay and put them on the armature. I pointed out how people use different heads for the characters and in stop animation make different mouths etc. and stop the camera and change them out. And he’s looking and drawing like crazy throughout.
Then he sits down last night and he works on sketches for a stop animation character he wants to do. And I looked at it this morning and saw how precise this little seven-year-old was being. And those little beautifully drawn arrows, and such assuredness of line. He can still barely write his numbers, just throws them out of his pen, getting them out of the way as quickly as possible. And out of that little hand comes also these incredible sketches with no hint of stutter in line, no guessing, no pencil foreplanning. In his head and onto the paper it goes. I know people out there couldn’t care less, but my jaw just drops. “Oh mi’god,” I say, “What am I going to do…?”
He was all excited afterwards. He was going to make this thing. With our help of course. He was ready to make it right then and get to work with it.
When I was seven I couldn’t have whipped out a sketch with this kind of fluidity, couldn’t have begun to. I look at just those little arrows alone and think, “Damn.”
And I think, “Damn”, because he’s ready to make this stuff and start filming. And we don’t have what he needs to do it. Believe me, if we had it, he’d be doing it, too.
He’s out this evening watching the stop motion animation feature, “The Corpse Bride”. Armatures with silicone. All digital. And I took the time to ferret out what looks like a good stop motion animation forum and joined it and am hoping they can give some advice on what to do as we can’t buy expensive armatures and don’t have the equipment needed. And he’s raring to go. I imagine many of them started out as kids in the same situation and will be able to offer some good pointers. I hope they don’t say, “Hmmmph, a kid.”
One day this summer I looked in the camera to find he was doing his own stop motion animation studies and he has me film him jumping and falling etc. so he can study it frame by frame.
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