striving for mediocrity

Today during my animation class we went through all the assignments we handed in last week while my teacher gave his critique on them. What is looking good, what we should avoid, what we are doing right, etc.

As he was going about the critique he seemed to emphasize how important it was to have a nice clean final animation. While I do agree with that sentiment in general, the animations that end up being clean tend to be lacking in quality while the nice rough pieces of animation had more energy, better acting, superior draftsmanship and full understanding of the principles of animation.

I find the people who had the cleanest animations animate clean, meaning they do not actually work out the animation until it moves properly to the best of their ability, but rather tend to leave a lot of mistakes in the animation because it is a lot harder to fix a clean animation than a rough animation. The difference between clean and rough animation is that there is gesture in rough animation that is essential to capturing the life of your character. Just look at glen Keene’s initial drawings in an animation, you can hardly tell what they are, but they are alive!

During the critique he compared two of the animations, one, a nice rough piece with good acting while the other was a stiff, poorly executed clean animation and said that he would be more likely to hire the less skilled draftsman because he would probably get the job done.

just get the job done. who cares if it looks good?

Now, I do acknowledge that it is important for portfolio purposes to have clean animation but in a learning environment I would like to think that quality would be the focus in an arts program rather than an emphasis on production.

Essentially, we’re being told to strive for mediocrity. Its not very inspiring to say the least.

sketcheroo

heres a layout project that i did a week or so ago. we were given a general idea of what everything looked like so i cant take any credit for the design.

i liked the original drawing though so i brought it into flash and went over the lines with the line tool... only problem was when i exported the image all the lines somehow went to the same width destroying a lot of depth...

as it stands its pretty flat, i tried to color it but it looked like shit, so heres the lines.

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I've been playing with the comics medium and seeing what i can do with just photographs. this is just one of the mock pages I've made and it has no sequence. i was just kinda going for design.

since doing this I've come up with a project I'm working on in my spare time using this idea. its for a certain someone but i don't think they even read this blog anyway so thats okay. hey! if anyone reads this blog drop me a message!

graphic stuff

I’ve been doing some designing in flash and I really like the freedom that it gives me. I’ve been trying to go a little more abstract and just play with shapes in my drawings and this is no exception.

This is for a short animation that I have to do for flash, I’ll post the final if I like it.

layout

So this is what I spent pretty much all tuesday night working on. Its supposed to be a layout for Frankenstein’s lab. There are a few things I’m not that happy with, most noticeably is the warp in perspective since I really didn’t give myself any room to warp it at all… and I just covered it up with a large beam. Also, I didn’t get a chance to really flesh out the back wall to create a better atmosphere that like I would have wanted due to time restrictions.

I am happy with some of the perspective that I whipped up, because to me a lot of the ellipses and such look relatively solid and was freehanded meaning I’m getting better at drawing. Woot! It’s just a shame I didn’t leave myself the time to fully render it.

sketches

So yeah, a few sketches. There’s a lot more but I’m giving you quality over quantity I guess.

back to school

Today I cried. It kind of felt good in the sense that it released the pressure that was building up. The constant finding something to do to not think about myself just crashed. I talked to Lisa about it, which was good even if I didn’t want to.

So I guess I’m pretty fucked up lately… I don’t know. These last couple weeks away from school have taught me what I don’t want in life I guess and left me wondering what I do want. Really? I have no fucking clue. I never really have known what I want so I just pursue my hobbies and try to create art. Will that make me happy? Probably not but its something I want to do.

Speaking of which:

Just a couple quick sketches I did with pencil and a brush pen. They’re supposed to be a caricature of me for a short comic strip I was hoping to do this break but ran out of time. I’ve been thinking of doing a web comic for a long time and I might give it a quick shot this summer just to keep myself busy and work on something creative for myself. I don’t know, try to say something.

Another thing I’m in the process of is learning how to play bass. I bought a bass guitar over a year ago and I tried to learn how to play but after not enough effort or practice I gave up. What a damn pity. So, I’m trying to pick it up again and considering buying a cheap practice amp if I can find one… because it’s hard to be inspired when you can hardly hear the damn notes you’re playing. I want to stick with it this time, the only thing that might get in the way is school. I think I should find someone to practice with too.

I’m feeling good right now, this is nothing new <3