While looking through the work of animator and motion designer Min Liu for a research paper, I stumbled across this Instagram trend from a few years back named The 100 Day Project. A project started by the group The Great Discontent (TGD), the whole premise of this movement was for artistic creators to do one of a certain thing everyday for 100 days. For example, Liu made a short 2D cel-animated gif everyday for 100 days. The examples given on their website (which can be found here) were:

"For example, one student made a poster in under a minute every day for 100 days; another danced in public every day and made a video; another student, Rachel Berger, picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it in writing for 100 days."

I was inspired by this. I'm an animator myself, and I've been stuck in a bit of a rut recently, slowly running out of ideas for things to create.

For the past few months, I've been doing the same kind of animation again and again. Digital animations, short GIFs (that can be found here) with the pretty much the same technique and style. Not to say that that's a bad thing, because I'll be doing something similar for my own take on the 100 day project. But the problem with my previous work was that I thought of them as complete, standalone pieces, when in reality, they were more so equivalent to quick sketches done in a pocket sketchbook when I have nothing better to do. Again, I bear no ill will against my previous work in regards to technique and craftsmanship. But needless to say, it was kind of lacking something.

Anyways, going back to The 100 Day Project — I will be following in the footsteps of Min Liu and a multitude of other creators who have participated in this movement. Although on TGD's website it lists an official start date for this project, I will be starting my 100 Day Project today. In fact, I've already begun, and created this super short gif:

As for what I'm going to keep consistent (style wise) in my animations for this project, I still want to maintain the digital frame by frame aspect of my other work. This is something that I know that I can do no matter where I am, and since I know that I travel a lot, this will be crucial in order for me to keep up with the schedule. Something that I've never done before though is using live footage underneath my digital animations. I tried this out for the first time today, and it really is quite simple and the end result looks pretty cool. All I need to do is shoot a 1-3 second video on my phone, upload it to my computer, and animate on top of it. This is an easy and accessible upgrade to my work, and something I believe I can maintain for 100 days. I also think I'll try using stop motion footage underneath my digital animations, but I can only do that when I'm on campus (since I have a shooting space set up for stop motion in my studio). Basically, I just want my animations to have some sort of physical, real world background instead of just solid colour. It brings my animations so much closer to the real world, despite the fact that most of them consist of abstract shapes and lines.

I'll be adding a new page on this website and uploading all of my gifs there as they're made, while posting a blog post about this once a week.

I'm confident that I can keep this up for 100 days. I mean, this first GIF barely took 15 minutes. 1 GIF a day isn't a lot to ask. This project is structured and consistent, while at the same time being low stress and almost idle. And I think that's the best part.