My First Steps
Putting art into motion is something I’ve dreamed of for years. I’ve experimented in many different mediums of art, my favourites being charcoal, gouache, and pottery. My plan for this semester in Studio is to hammer out a collection of animations and to show people my art. I’ve always struggled with giving myself time to create art and especially struggled with keeping my art to look back on my progress. So a goal of mine is to keep everything I create even if I look back at it and it doesn’t reflect my work anymore.
Inspiration
Hayao Miyazaki is the founder of my favourite animation studio, Ghibli Animations. He believes that “Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions,” I agree with this statement wholeheartedly since when I create art I want to create things that are relatable. When your drawing from other peoples experience and not your own you have less of a connection to what you have created.
Progress
At this point I’ve created approximately 75% of my first animation. I don’t know how happy I am with this piece but I don’t want to abandon it yet! A problem I encountered early on, luckily, was the first program I used had a cap on how many frames I could add. I panicked when I couldn’t resolve the problem within that program but I was able to move the 6 hours worth of work into another software. I haven’t run into any issues yet with this software but I’m worried that the drawings will look worse when I see it on a larger monitor than my tablet. I’ve encountered many things that I’ve had to teach myself specifically about anatomy and how certain joints move. Honestly my work around for this is just by taking a video of myself and studying the movement in it to recreate it in my drawings.
The End of the Beginning
Now I have finishing details to add to my initial loop for my animation. Details like audio/music and where I could hold frames for longer. The more time I’ve been able to let my work marinate in my mind I’ve thought of more scenes I can add and how I could’ve done things better at first. It’s too late for me to change too much to the work I have done but now I know how to make the next animations I make better and more engaging.