#reeeaaaaaally fucking cool and deserve more recognition

[phantomdecibel]

I keep seeing the “animation is not a genre it’s a medium” post and it’s like. whoo!! hell yeah love the animation-positive energy!!! I just can’t. bring myself to reblog it yet bc the urge add my unasked for possibly incorrect opinion to the post is overwhelming cause like guys. it’s definitely not a genre yeah, that’s the wrong word, but it’s not a medium either. in animation, and just art in general ‘medium’ refers to what the art is made with, and that applies to animation too; it is not ‘made with animation’, it is animated. medium is like, paint or clay or pencil on paper or ink or collage etc etc – all of which are forms of animation. stop motion (which is more of an umbrella for moving something little by little) can be done with sooooo many different mediums! you’ve got claymation which is probably the most well known type of stop motion animation, you’ve got sandmation, pixelation, ink on glass, paint on glass, and a hell of a lot of others I don’t know the technical names for, like animating with pastels or charcoal. and also scratch/paint on film, which isn’t stop motion really, but still a really neat form of animation. there could definitely be another definition for ‘medium’ that I just couldn’t find, but as far as I can tell that’s it. in art the word medium refers to the materials a piece was made with, and ‘animation’ is not a material. tbh I’m not quite sure how animation would be classified, in one succinct word, other than just like,, “a form of art✨✨”, which is why I didn’t want to add this directly to the original post (and also I was a tad afraid this has come off slightly passive aggressive which is not my goal in the slightest I just woke up literally ten minutes ago and am not a morning person). but just, to me, referring to the whole of animation as a medium kinda sorta has the same. vibes ig. as referring to it as a genre? just like. to me specifically, I’m definitely not speaking on behalf of all animators, but calling it a medium kinda. lumps it all together? everything unique and different about the different things you can do with animation and different mediums in animation, calling it one medium sorta takes away from some of that, to me. idk man maybe I’m harping on nothing, but it just rubs me the wrong way. like I guess ‘medium’ could be a. semi-accurate descriptor if you’re only referring to one form of animation like idk. digital, but even that has so many facets that count as different forms of animation – traditional 2D, 3D, tweening and different editing techniques, to name a few. Point Is: there’s a lot that can be done with animation, using different mediums, which is kinda the beauty of it and calling it one medium kinda takes away from it, to me. “animation” is an umbrella term for making an image move, and it contains a variety of different ways you can do that, as well as other umbrella terms. I mean, you wouldn’t call “art” a medium; it refers to a whole bunch of different things, like painting or writing or photography etc etc. hell – even painting and writing are umbrella terms, referring to the different types of those things! under painting you’ve got acrylic, watercolour, oil, etc, and writing you’ve got things like prose fiction, poetry, scriptwriting, biographies, etc etc. when you’re referring to an art piece’s medium, you tend to get a bit more specific than just calling it ‘an art thing I did using materials’. this is important to me bc it’s literally my major haha. thank you for coming to my ted talk.