Well there’s no way to make the answer drawn out seeing as there’s no way to make it magically appear after a suitably dramatic pause.
It’s animation.
I’ve been pondering on this. When I was in my early teens I lived with my Grandfather who was a modeller and one of the models he built when I was about twelve or thirteen that always impressed me the most was a 1/48 scale B29 bomber, sitting on a simple looking base made to look like a section of runway with just a small grass verge. But in one corner it had a tower with a light at the top that lit up when switched on, and running up through the undercarriage were wires that allowed him to turn the propellers on one by one and vary the speed. I used to love watching it. I used to especially love turning off all the lights so I could see the way the tower light illuminated the fuselage. He was a keen Model Railroader and had the skills to build the engines into the model and to set them up to be able to vary the speed. He added animation to many of the models he built.
You never seem to see stuff like that these days. And that seems odd when you consider that was in the late 70s so now, more than thirty years later, we have the technology to build so much smaller, and so much more intricate electronics. We could do things like that without any effort at all. Back then it seemed so advanced, now it would be so easy. We could now have trains that would billow forth smoke, tanks that move, light, horns, sounds, if we wanted we could even make a tank that fires. But we don’t.
Is it considered sacrilage ? Is it considered to be turning a serious hobby into a toylike one ? Or are most of us just at the age where we are happy to make models but are unwilling to enter into the realms of witchcraft and scorcery that is modern electronics ? I know my wife still programmes anything with lights and buttons for me, even though I do have a prediliction for making purchases based on how many lights and buttons something comes with. I don’t have to know what they do, just that it has them. And any electronics manufacturers reading this needs to know that a toaster should look like a part of a spacecraft, should sound like a nuclear reactor powering up and the insides should glow like a smelting furnace. But I digress.
So if kits went down the road of having available aftermarket addons that added sound and animation would we embrace them or would we still shun them ? I’m of two minds. On one hand I feel like it would cheapen my construction, it would add someone else’s personality into what I consider my art. It feels like it would turn it into a toy. I think in some ways it would take what I consider to be a serious representation of an historical scene and turn it into a circus act. Sort of like those “push the button” dioramas at museums that pipe out gull squawkings to go along with the stuffed gull inside.
But on the other hand I do think that if it was done right the addition of sounds to a scene could give it a new degree of life. Maybe not one I’d want to be on all the time, but something that was there for the moments when you want it. Or lights to enable you to build a nighttime scene lit by the fires burning in the distance. Assuming of course that the effect in reality matched up with the perception of it in my mind.
Maybe I’d be happy with a middle ground. Something like an armoured train with turrets that turn, smoke that issues forth and the sounds of engines etc is something I could live with. But in dioramas the figures are the focus for me, the vehicle being the canvas. I could never see that being able to be adequately animated, and so something as gimicky as a revolving turret would seem out of place. Like a painting that had one part as a hologram. It would never move the way I really wanted it to, not all of it anyway.
But I do sometimes think that I’d like to at least try.
Just something simple.
Maybe just a crane lifting out an engine.
Must go check the stash now.
