Moving Gracefully

I would draw your attention to http://animationseven.wordpress.com wherein this blog rises Phoenix-like from the net.

Procrastination

I have once again left it a bit too late to seriously be getting into working on my shot for AM. I know that there are a lot of excuses that I could bring out at this point - always being tired after work, for one - but essentially it’s a lack of motivation on my part. I also really need to get more involved in the school, post more on people’s workspaces, to not be quite so shut out from it all that I think I have been recently.

I sometimes wonder if I procrastinate from starting because I’m daunted by trying to produce something good. That I worry about being rubbish at animating, that it’s not something that I’ll be successful at. The ever-present fear of failure and making a fool of yourself. I guess that everyone struggles with that but I contend with it alongside my usual reticence about considering my own abilities to be nothing to shout about. My first at university I put down to being good at writing, or at least being good enough to stand out a little bit higher than everyone else around me. Truth be told, that first shocked the hell out of me. I never know how to react to success.

I was never one of those people that excelled at sports, that did well at things at school - average, would sum it up I suppose. I want to be good at animation. I want to be successful. It’s trying to maintain that drive and that desire for longer than an hour or so that I don’t seem to be able to maintain. That I somehow lack this ability to focus and I’m not sure how to train myself to not be quite so useless at following will with action.

Anyway - I’ve an hour and a half before my deadline, and I’ve uploaded the latest version of my shot to my workspace. I’ll dive back into Maya in a little while, and from somewhere, I hope I’ll pull a little more motivation.

Quiet

It is incredibly peaceful here in my little part of the world. It’s a Saturday evening and the air is calm and still; you can hear, far off in the distance, the combine harvester out in the field, so far away it’s almost nothing more than a murmur. The sun is setting over wispy clouds, with the red light glowing off the hazy distant shapes and the horizon. For once I’m not willing to break the silence with music, as I normally would. This is one of those times when I’ll just enjoy living where I do, in the quiet of the countryside.

There are many, many times, when I wished I lived in a city like London; the hustle, the energy, the life that comes from so many different people all on top of one another, with all their different lives, troubles, stories - their own little triumphs and setbacks, victories and failures, the trials and tribulations that make up a life. All those things that make people, people. So many different things would be easier, better, simpler, if I wasn’t living out here.

But right now, I’m just grateful that I am.

iSuck

As someone has (affectionately, I think) renamed my iPhone to the iSuck, I felt it would make a good title for this blog post - because essentially, I do suck at writing blog posts, anyway. I’m not overly convinced by the layout of the Google Blogger I have to say, I keep seeing sites made in Wordpress that look a lot better. Anyway, I shall be endeavouring in future to not have quite such a terribly long time in between blog posts.

What to say? Things are interesting on a personal level, things are interesting on a studying level, and frankly things are interesting on a business level. I just wish they were interesting on a work level but at the moment I’m not going to complain hugely about that. It could be a lot worse, I could be not working at all. As it is I’m counting hours and anxiously waiting to find out if they’ve decided to keep me on a little longer (temp contract already extended by a month, I’m hoping will go longer than the end of August).

So more news to come, really. At the moment this is more a signal of intent. More will follow.

New Term

A new term – another blog post. Really have to do better than one a term. Was talking to my mother earlier and was saying that I’m almost as excited about starting the new term as I was about starting Animation Mentor six months ago (I can not believe that time has gone by so quickly). I’ve been reading up a lot about character design and other material to do with this whole industry recently and the more I learn the more I want to learn. This term I’m going to do my best to get my public reviews up early, write my blog a little more regularly (Animation Seven will become more than it has been) and really put the time into this artform.

Not to mention the life drawing classes that start in April – hopefully they’ll kickstart my drawing as well. I spent my lunch hour sketching people in the atrium/cafeteria at work, and intend to do the same for every day at work that I can.

More to come soon – and if you’re reading this, then why not give me a follow on Twitter? Buttons to the right.

Update

So it’s been another long time since I last updated – most of February was spent doing really long hours at work, trying to help take some of the pressure off my colleagues and sort out things at the studio before my time was up, which officially happened on Friday. I’m starting March officially unemployed. This is pretty scary, admittedly, with the future looking a little bleak and the economy being a regular on the news on the basis that it’s being given chest compressions at the moment. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to turn some of my disparate collection of skills into something that’ll get a bit of cash in the bank.

Animation Mentor is still providing the weekly dose of self-doubt and personal recrimination that I find seems to be part of the process at the moment. I do get that animation is hard, and not an easy thing to wrap your head around, and I also get that frankly in the last two weeks I’ve had no time to devote to it at all. My last two assignments have been crammed into the weekends, in a desperate attempt to get something finished before I have to get into the working week. Now that I no longer have that pressure, I’m hoping that I’ll really be able to put the time into it that it deserves, and that I owe myself as well.

If I’m going to talk about working for Pixar, and talk about a career in this field, then there’s no one I’ll be disappointing more if I don’t get there than myself – especially if it’s because I didn’t put the time in, or I didn’t do absolutely everything that I could have done to get there. I think that’s the attitude that I have to take, in every aspect of my life, whether it’s my course or my work or my health or anything. Pushing that through is the tricky part.

I suffer from the winter blues, or that general thing known as seasonal-aggravated depression (or disorder) – basically, winter is a time that I have trouble getting motivated, about not spending hours sleeping, when I really have to make an effort to keep functioning the way you should. Once the sun starts making more of an impression and hangs around a bit longer, life gets a little easier. Until then it’s a struggle staying awake in the evenings, especially after the long hours at work.

Which brings me to getting back into working out, and trying to improve my health, and hopefully get my energy levels up. It’s definitely on my list of things to do. Unfortunately, my list of things to do is ridiculously long at the moment. It’s not like I have a particularly difficult life, there are no huge obstructions in my way, like crushing poverty or disability or anything like that. There’s nothing in my way except me.

Animation Mentor has been one of those experiences where I want to get the work done, and I want to get on with it, and it’s frustrating because I want to be good at it straight away. I know, intellectually, that I need to work at it, and it’ll be hard, and I need to practice. The same way I need to practice my drawing, and my 3D modelling, and my writing, and everything else. But it always seems to be the same thing of wanting to just fly without the walking, running, jumping that has to come before, the difficulties that the other people face when they’re trying to get into any of these things. Accepting that it’s not just going to come overnight – that nothing ever does.

Musings 001

Just as a general note, I feel like I understand the principles of animation as an idea, a concept, but the application of that over the whole process of animating a shot is where I start to fall down, usually when I'm embroiled in Maya and up to my neck in colour-coded lines in the Graph Editor – when I'm fiddling with curves and smoothing things out I find it kind of difficult to keep in mind the relationship between curves and the movement – and I end up with visual mush. I don't know if that's something that comes with experience or just holding in your head a very clear idea of how you want something to look and sticking to it over time. Animation is one of these harder-than-it-looks deals, there is no magic button to push to make everything somehow spring into action and do exactly what you envision.

On the other hand, this week I feel like I’ve really put in the hours into my blocking, and I’ve got something that isn’t actually that bad, at the moment. It’s more what happens when I get beyond blocking, and I’m looking at the motion that I’ve got, and I start adding in splines and all that other stuff that at the moment obscures the fundamental stuff that I’m trying to get across. In this case, it’s a silly dance move, based on my own silly dance moves and my general lack of co-ordination on the dance floor - something I discovered that I’ve inherited from my uncle, uncoordinated energy on a gigantic scale seems to be the order of the day for my mother's brothers.

So here’s the trick, taking the twelve principles of animation (printed out in big letters on paper, directly over my head when I’m working thanks to the slanting roof of my loft-converted bedroom) and bringing them through this really long-winded and unintuitive (to me anyway) process of changing shapes of a curve that represents a path of motion. But each element is not controlled by one curve, but by multiple curves that interact and change things around. This is the part that’s challenging to me at the moment, dealing with the interface and working through the software and putting those principles as I understand them into the work.

Application of the idea I guess is the trick that every animator has had to struggle with.