An Admirably Obsessive Animation Project

A year’s worth of drawings on Post-its, distilled into a very entertaining video.

I’m a big fan of obsessive art projects (I’ve even done a couple of them myself), and I just learned of a great one by an animator named Daren Jannace. Every day in 2021, he sketched 30 drawings, each on a yellow Post-it. Then he photographed each drawing and used them to create the animation video shown above. It’s called 10,946, for the total number of drawings.

As you’ll see, each Post-it is numbered in the lower-right corner. But the numbers fly by quickly, because Jannace sequenced the animation to run at 30 frames per second. Since he was doing 30 drawings per day, that means each day’s drawings are represented by one second of video. Multiply that by 365 days and you have a year’s worth of artistic output distilled down to a little over six minutes.

While I find the parameters of this project very conceptually satisfying, I also just like the animation on its own terms. Fun stuff all around, and definitely worth watching all the way through. Enjoy! (You can see more of Jannace’s animations here.)

(I learned about this animation from my friend and fellow Substacker Rob Walker’s great site, The Art of Noticing, and Rob learned about it from this post on the art website Colossal.)

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Mention

If you go to my home page and look at the navigation bar along the top, you’ll see a bunch of categories: “Artifacts,” “Consumerism,” “Design,” “Driving,” and so on. Those are the tags that I’ve been assigning to these Inconspicuous Consumption posts. (This post you’re reading right, for example, is tagged “Obsessions.”) Feel free to use those navigation-bar headings to explore the past IC content that most interests you!

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.