In animation “tweening” refers to creating the frames that smooth out the action and make it read as a single motion. Traditionally, the frames which define a motion – the “key” frames – would be drawn be the lead animator, with the less important (be)tween frames handed down to junior animators. Nowadays, for many forms of animation the job of tweening is handled by software – particularly in 3d animation, the animator starts by defining the key poses and then instructs the computer on how to interpolate between them, defining an instruction-set on how to generate the finished animation.
I am by no means a great animator, but I find something both deeply appealing and unnerving about the act of animating. The way each moment flows into the next is something that feels special and important to me. As humans, we can notice individual days and years, we can notice landmarks on the timescape that passes us steadily by on this one-way trip, but the actual flow of time escapes us. The keyframes are there, snapshotted in memory and keepsake, but the tweens just fall out of our minds like water through a sieve. For me there is a kind of importance, a near-sacred feeling, to continuity – the past is connected to the future and we are carried on that connection. Animation is an exciting activity because it lets me express this admiration – and also a terrifying one, because the burden of doing it justice can generate unique anxieties.
This idea only started to be articulated for me fairly recently, watching the series Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, about a trio of girls starting an animation club at their school. I found the characters’ passion for the art extremely compelling – no, not just their passion, but their entire outlook on life that made animation the inevitable outlet of their energies. Though much of the series focuses on the endless series of choices and compromises needed to actually bring a project to fruition, the projects themselves are indelibly shaped by the characters’ personalities – whether the need to realistically create human motion, moment by painstaking moment, or the need to have the contrivances of the world make sense in relation to one another, I felt an echo of my own need to have each moment connect to the next, to have everything aligned, correct, structured, meaningful. It is a strange and powerful thing to see something in yourself you didn’t know was there within a work created by someone else. What was really striking, though, was the moment of realizing how much pressure I’d been putting on myself – each moment, flowing into the next, naturally, smoothly, eternally – and I’d somehow mentally appointed myself as the person who had to mind that, administer it, maintain it! I assumed somewhere along the line that we all felt some obligation to the past and the future, some stewardship over the structure of the world which would flow naturally and inevitably from the moments we created. Of course, this was nonsense when examined for even a moment – few people share this weird perspective on causality, much less the burdens derived from it – but I can see now that that assumption was there, nevertheless.
This emerges into my work, where I feel it must be logical and structured or it’s an insult to the logic and structure I observe in the world around me – where I must take care what I put into the world, lest it be a sin against nature, akin to littering. For a long time I’ve been afraid I might fuck something up, break something. When you catch even a tiny glimpse of the river of causality emerging from the simplest of actions, it can be paralyzing: As with the time traveler terrified of somehow erasing their own existence, what existences might we erase with a careless word or action? Yet we must persist, moment to moment, living up to the obligations of the past and future as best as we can, living in the tween frames, unmarked and unremembered.