In watching these experimental animation videos, I hoped to get inspired. I really, really can't draw, and I'm very intimidated by animation, but after watching these videos I actually felt like there might be some hope for me. I just have to figure out a non-conventional, interesting way to create characters.
The Ray and Iso animation was interesting; the characters weren't much more than scribbles with arms and vague facial features. In the other animation, "These are the Boring Bits," the characters were even less. They were just faces with, sometimes, hair. I suppose the style worked, but overall I think I really just hated the animation. The dialogue and plot were stupid and pretentious, and the animation didn't much change my opinion of that.
One technique I really liked from the second animation, however, was from the scene in what I assume was a subway tunnel. The animator used a sort of crosshatch pattern to simulate the darkness of the tunnel, with negative space for the headlights of the train cars. I'd like to do something like that in my own animation, it was simple and very effective.
