Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Did it on purpose, why?

It is true with all of us, we make excuses about our animation.
Someone that is trying to help us make some in roads into our animation walks up and says "wouldn't it be better if you did this instead of this?" and we just look at them and say "oh, I did that on purpose".

First off, you haven't got anything to lose by trying to implement change, actually it makes you stronger. You should constantly be seeking what is wrong with your work and try to improve it. I have heard more than one great animator say "ask people for a critique" and what is so wrong about taking advice anyway? the person is spending valuable time that they could be doing something else instead, like animating?

Also it doesn't take that much time to actually find if it will look good or not, if you are animating traditionally, just put a page on top and start roughing in the suggested changes if you really think that nothing has improved you go back to the old drawings. simple enough? If you are doing computer animation, just save your scene and then start working on what the person has said and then if you haven't thought that it is not right go back to old scene.

Don't shoot people down in flames, they go out on a limb to help you out and if you don't want to actually step out of the "lazy animator" and see if they might be right and then tell them "it was there on purpose" then sooner or later they will know that they are not wanted and will not give their opinion.

The role of the animator is always to be wondering "why? why am I doing this? why am I doing that?" by not doing this you are officially letting yourself down by letting the laziness creep in under the doormat and dominate your animation.

I am sure that none of the nine old men was ever happy with their animation, they would struggle for days roughing out one pose so it looked perfect, yell at animators if they had something wrong in their scenes, spent every waking and sleeping second, living and breathing the art of animation.

Just remember that your only boundary is yourself. Go out there, learn, fail and then get up and start all over again. Animation is not for the faint of heart and so challenge yourself not let others set the challenge for you.

Over and out.

2 comments:

Ian said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ian said...

wise words my little friend :)

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