This year for me is going to be crazy. Between senior studio, this class, my electives, upcoming job stuff, and life in general, I'm going to be running pretty hard into the ground. Setting up these goals will not only allow me to keep a clear head of what needs to be done and in what time frame, it will also help me keep some piece of mind that there's a plan.
So to start, I'm going to answer the questions Jill gave us in class, and then move on from there.
1.) Why do I and for how long have I made art?
I've always doodled, ever since I could hold crayons, but I never really got into it until fourth grade. I remember vividly drawing a robot scorpion that fired lasers out of it's tail, and it was from then on I have kept sketch books to fill with ideas.
I never intended to be an animator, either- coming into MCA, I'd only made fine art, and had never touched a computer to do anything except look up stuff about video games. Photoshop, Toonboom, Maya: these were all new things to me when I came here. However, that challenge of learning those programs is precisely one of the reasons why I make art- I enjoy challenging myself and giving myself creative problems to overcome. It's a thrill when I have an idea for a piece and I set it out in front of myself to figure how to bring that idea into the real world.
The second reason I make art is to tell stories. I read comics obsessively as a teenager and watched animated films and movies since I was born. While I love fine art and literature when they are their own separate entities, when they join together in unison you get an entertainment that has a unique power to completely entrance the audience and build a believable world for them. The satisfaction of creating these stories is what I live for in my art making.
2.) What are the sources of my ideas?
I could say something along the lines that I draw ideas from everyday life, but the fact is that that isn't true. Where I get my inspiration from is usually the desire to escape from everyday life. I'll being doing the most mundane task (like cutting the grass) and, getting bored out of my skull, will create little stories in my head to combat the boredom. Sure, I'm influenced by every piece of art I enjoy, and the same can be said for movies, music, and books. But at the end of the day, the time I get my ideas is when I really want to escape.
3.) What do you want to develop for class?
My main goal for this semester is to nail down the techniques and aesthetic of my senior piece. Over the summer, I did a lot of painting and I want to carry over the aesthetic sense of what I made over into my animation. I want to create moving painting using 3D layers with natural light in order to give a real sense of space, and I really want figure out how best to utilize the program to create the ideas in my head.
4.) What skills do I bring to the course?
Besides already taking Dynamic Imaging 1 and having a pretty good grasp on the basics of AfterEffects, I'm also very comfortable with Photoshop and Toonboom and plan on using both in conjunction with AfterEffects. Also, I have taken courses in painting, life drawing, illustration, and 2D design, which will all inform my work.
To start this semester, I want a warm up exercise in making a diorama in AfterEffects, getting a handle on how 3d layers and lighting works in order to know how to set up the comps and effects to make a believable area. From there, I want to delve into the various effects of the program and how they work in order to fully understand the tool set. Finally, I want to take these lessons I've learned and apply to the creation of backgrounds for imported character animation for toonboom in order to see how everything works. I will use these assets in my finished senior piece.
Looking forward to the semester- gonna be a good one.
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