Case 004
the case files of new york art detective
Walter Lin P.I.
An Animation Experiment
The new year rolled in like a fog over the city—dense, heavy, hard to shake. That’s when I started tinkering. Procreate Dreams, they call it. Animation software slick enough to make you think you know what you’re doing. And Photoshop? That’s where the AI comes in. A handy tool, sure, but one that casts a long shadow. You start to wonder—am I just creating, or am I helping tear things apart? Civilisation doesn’t crumble all at once. It happens bit by bit, through choices like this.
But the tool works. You can’t deny it. Generative fill—it gives you backgrounds without the sweat, fills the space with color that you can layer over and animate. Useful, no question. Ethical? That’s harder to pin down.
First Frames
The first time I tried animation, it wasn’t slick. It was crude and clumsy, back in secondary school. A Super-8 camera, stop-motion, frame by frame. My mate and I moved Plasticine snails across a cardboard set. Slow work, inch by inch, second by second. It wasn’t polished, but there was life in it. You felt it in your hands. You had to.
Now? It’s different. Easier. Quicker. The snails are gone, and so is the grind. Procreate Dreams does the heavy lifting. It moves faster than your hands ever could. You sketch, you tweak, and the machine does the rest. It’s impressive. It’s efficient. But it doesn’t have that same rawness, that same weight. It’s like the work’s been sanitized, stripped of the struggle that made it mean something.
Faster, Not Better
Animation today moves at a pace that’d leave the old days in the dust. You can bring drawings to life in minutes, maybe less. The tools are slick, intuitive. Procreate Dreams gives you results faster than you’d think possible. But faster doesn’t mean better. It just means faster.
The grind—the sweat of moving those snails millimeter by millimeter—that was the work. That was the art. Now it’s just... convenient. And maybe that’s the problem. You lose something when you take away the struggle. You lose the part that felt alive.
