With his new animal animations, Yoni Alter plays tricks with your mind. Is it an abstract dotted painting? Is it a moving flamingo? Is it sneaking up on you when you look away? Yoni, a London-based designer, has come up with an interesting concept in which he reduces the amount of dots of his figures to the bare minimum, so your mind fills in the spaces.
With the arrival of flash, Yoni started to play with the possibilities of moving images, and has continued doing so. This has resulted in a wide collection of animations ranging from cityscapes of London with cars driving around, to a figure of Michael Jackson doing his dance moves, and of course his signature dotted animals.
What makes these animations different from others you find on your daily giphy browse (don’t deny it), is that Yoni significantly reduces the amount of information in his figures but keeps the most important visual aspects so it’s still recognizable. “Our mind completes the missing information and tells us what it is. I try to use a minimal amount of visual information to see if it still communicates the character, or the idea,” Yoni says.
He has carefully studied the way the move too, so if it’s not the dots that give the identity of the animal away, it will definitely be the way they walk, trot, run or bounce.
“It’s all about using the right reference. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right one, because I need them with no angle, no perspective and they need to do a full cycle of the way they walk,” Yoni explains. But once he finds it, he starts reducing every redundant piece of information, sometimes ending up with animations of nine frames or less.
Now, Yoni has taken his dotted animals one step further; they walk around on a backdrop of more dots in the same color scheme. But unlike his previous creatures, these animals sometimes pause their step and simultaneously merge into the background, turning into a sort of abstract painting.
Yoni’s next move will be to showcase these abstract beasts in a physical exhibition, using eye-tracking technologies to detect whether a visitor is looking at the screen or not. If you are looking at one of his pieces, you will see an abstract canvas filled with dots, but when you look away, that tiger will definitely sneak up on you.
