The shadows that live in the corner of your eyes: Learning but not the right stuff at the right time

YEAR 1, WEEK 6 - Click - 02.23.2020

APPROACH:

I might have gotten a little lost in the reeds with learning everything I can about modeling I forgot that I needed to make myself a test animation to get acquainted with animating and lighting. this week I spent a bulk of my time making sure my models work when rigged, and funny enough they do, but my geometry (the shapes that make up the surface of my models) is really bad for animating. and I went down this rabbit hole of making a functional model that works well with animation, I forgot that this was a project mainly about learning how light works and that this isn't where the bulk of my time should be spent.

the shirt is far too many faced for something that could have been maybe 100s of faces as opposed to 1000s

while there is nothing inherently wrong with these meshes, they also aren't good for animating. these arms have a few issues with its faces coiling around the object

CHOICES:

So! after talking it over with my peers and instructor I decided to reorient was the way to go! downloading a working rig from another artist and using it for my learning process will expedite my work as well as blending 2D and 3D but using editing software to splice together my 3D renders with my non3D work instead of doing it in the 2D program itself. Thank you to Maria for pointing out tat function in 3D rendering programs.

REFERENCES:

while I'm learning I also have to learn to be less proud. a lot of the tutorials and info I'm looking into talks down to me as if I'm stupid. I know what keyframing is, and I know what motion tweening is and I don't need to be taught that, "I JUST WANT TO LEARN THE INTERFACE!" I yell at my computer at 12 am trying to figure out why my rigs legs keep exploding, and that's just because I parented them to a lamp by accident at some point. The reality of this is "this is a growth area" for me, and while the scale is scary big, I think I'm going in a direction that feels stable if a little slow. I feel dumb every time I can't do something that feels like it should be intuitive, but when I finally get to an understanding it, I think to myself "ah yes I AM a GOD of animation" as I get my character to drift from one end of the room to another with no other animation added to him.

as an exercise, I started fresh with a new model, not working on sculpting him but making sure his rig worked (also I got to understanding blend shapes and I really like them look at his face scrunch up!)

CURRENT QUESTIONS AND THE WEEK AHEAD:

The rhetorical question of "why am I doing this, 2D is a thing and you actually know how to do that" keeps ringing in my ear, but that's comfortable and safe, and I can't venture any farther with that. really the only questions on my mind at this point are, "Do I have the time to make the thing I want to make?" and "if I don't what did I really do with the time I had?" and "what was its value." This is meant to expand my knowledge of animation and in a meaningful way but it also needs to come out with a working product, and something I would be willing to stand beside and say I did it. at the moment all my thoughts are circling around should have and could have, not much time has been spent on tiny victories.

CONCLUSION

I am learning, but the stress of having a small packaged product might have got into my head. I didn't understand the scope of animation or 3D and I failed to do what I set out to do, what I expected would take me a week took 2, and staring down the barrel of a deadline makes you face some harsh truths about your ability in a specific field. I am not a skilled animator Yet. It was a bit of a no brainer as I only had some rudimentary knowledge of animation and expecting myself to understand the pipeline right off the bat was a tad overconfident. Reorienting and reassessing that my knowledge is not 0 but also not +55% I can see potential and I should have framed this time frame not around doing it all, but doing a tiny chunk, and I feel I was told this but was too stubborn to listen. (understanding everything about a complex thing like 3D animating isn't ever going to 100%)

The shadows that live in the corner of your eyes

YEAR 1, WEEK 5 - Click - 02.16.2020

APPROACH:

So after many bits of writing issues, with writing a proposal I'm now working on the story animatic for a Lil thesis exploration. I will be doing this in blender using some interesting things you can only get on Blender (and really expensive 3D modeling programs like Houdini), like auto architecture tools and material libraries to get my assets down lickidy split.

unfortunately, I had a bit of drama with my workflow, not for any other reason that Dyslexia is a real pain and I had to complete what felt like at the time a Sisyphusian task. That's neither here nor there, however, what I'm on right now is an animation idea I had when I let my foot dangle over the bed and was filled with an intense sense of dread and my mind began to conjure up horrible images of cruel monsters out to get me. So I decided an animation about that would be cool.

CHOICES:

I'm going, to be honest, this was a week of bad choices. I modeled some really bad bodies and put off fixing them for a while because I was stuck on writing (which was new for me so that's cool). I'm now looking into methods that can cut my production time in half if I can help it and maybe even work at altering my understanding about what is and isn't a success.

I'll never have both finished projects this month, is something I have to tell myself again and again when I think about the prototype for a card game I wanted to make that was going to be connected to the visuals of this animation, but that will have to be back burnered because I'm totally not on time with my deadlines and I need to get back to where I want to be.

so things done and to be excited about;

storyboads

character designs

things left to do;

models

animatic

animation

REFERENCES:

So because this animation touches on a very real personal fear I have no reference to draw on persay because I know it will actually get in the way of working and there are horror shorts I have watched that have left chills down my spine on youtube I cannot draw up right now because headspace has to be just right but I did find something silly that still capture the feeling of what I want to do.

CURRENT QUESTIONS AND THE WEEK AHEAD:

A rhetorical question I'm asking myself is "why did I think I could do this level of work in such a short time?" the answer, I don't know how long 3D animation takes, and this crashing and burning is a very real reminder that I am in a new field entirely. actually question for the road ahead are what is it I need to make to feel satisfied with the amount of work I put in, can I create rooms that look believable if I don't model the whole house? and finally. How can I make sure it's spooky and cooky. this is where I'm at right now at least. I'm focusing on modeling right now so maybe in a week I'll come back with a massive pile of pipeline questions. OH and I figured out what IKs are so that's neat! not really a question but now I get why 3D animations don't look the same as stop motion animation.

Remember your work does not exist in a vacuum.

YEAR 1, WEEK 4 - Lost Words - 02.08.2020

APPROACH:

OK! So I've actually completed something and it's not bad! but now's the time to actually work towards my thesis thread! Horror and things that make us feel bad, but for a good purpose. my first week is meant to deconstruct and understand why horror, both live-action, and animated work. I chose 3 contemporaries, as they are more likely to send chills down people's spine than classics.

CHOICES:

I've started to storyboard my narratives but had some issues with how to frame scenes in such a way that helps things feel scary. I've found actually that horror uses the same shots but relies hevily on aspect shots when it plans to set tension. and wides shots are rarely used, possibly because making scenes wider allows for viewers to see what's around. This makes me think about what if a scene is a big as the thing that the viewer should be afraid of. human-sized for slasher movies. city-sized for cosmic horror?

REFERENCES:

I've chosen several movies to look into, both in the adult horror genre and children's horror, where animated horror lives in the west. In that vein I have chosen, Coraline, Parasite, and the ritual, as well as horror game by the name of Dead by Daylight. In exploring these pieces of media I have found that when it comes to visual narratives unless the creators set out to gross out the viewers, they need to look into more than just visuals. framing is largely all about building to a scare. in interactive media, where framing isn't in control of the story-teller, it's more contingent on the audio and background narrative.

CURRENT QUESTIONS AND THE WEEK AHEAD:

right now the questions that lie ahead is "can I be scary?" I know the things that scare me but what if I'm just a coward? that's really the thoughts I'm on now. aside from that, I also need to know if my 3d models can be rigged well enough for animation and if I can write something that can fit in a 16-second narrative.