johnhawk12

What does the world look like? Other thoughts

Okay. My first attempt at marking a journal on this topic didn’t go so well. I hated the first piece of reading given here so much I had to post a rant about it. With that done, let’s look at the rest of it.

Sadly I was not done with Hito Steyerl. I had to watch her short film “How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File”.

I hated it. It was Audio tourture (Sans using “When Will I See You Again” by Three Degrees and the end. That a great song and they deserved better than to be in this) And I didn’t care to try to interpret it. But it was still not as bad as ‘In Free Fall’. Other than that there’s nothing I want to say about it.

I also had to see a 7 minute short about Clive Head talking about his painting Leicester Square.

It’s neat. I don’t really have anything to say except he seems like a cool guy and he does good work.

With that done. Let me respond to the ideas presented as a whole.

There are multiple valid perspectives (Both literal and figurative. But I’m talking literally here) They don’t cancel each other out. Though some can be more valid than others. If one could see all possible perspectives at once, have a God’s eye or omniscient perspective you would have the most valid perspective of all.

So I don’t agree with the idea that all outlooks are equally valid. Nor the idea that you can just dismiss ones you don’t like. Though notice a lot of people hold both beliefs at the same time. Postmodernism means everyone is entitled to the postmodernists opinions.

I think said people are overstating how different perspective and real vision actually are. It’s fun to shit on an old paradigm even if it’s not an invalid one. It is a paramount tool in drawing and always will be.

I think the same thing can be said about the question of realism. Yes realism can be a real thing. And there are more ways than one in which something can be realistic. Lots of ways in fact. But you can grade realism on levels. Watership Down is clearly more realistic than Bugs Bunny.

Different things can be realistic in different ways. And yes realism can often, even frequently, become a parody of itself if often repeated. See how depictions of Medieval Europe have gone from actknowleging that people didn’t live the most hygienic lifestyle to making everyone an inbreed moron covered from head to toe in shit. But the idea does still have merit.

On of the big ideas that is used against the idea of realism or a scale of things being more or less realistic is Schema theory. The idea we can only recognise something due to previous reference. We need a schema or we either draw a blank or see the thing wrong. Or even the wrong thing.

I do think schema has value. But I don’t think it ends the idea that something can be realistic.

Schema is experience. Experience is what gives us reference.Fiction can also be schema. But that does not invalidate the truth of lived experience.

Lighting and texture always look real to us, regardless of culture, as they are the tenants upon which vision is built. Light is a universal schema. We always recognise natural light vs studio light when watching a film. No-one has ever said movies with natural lighting look less realistic than old films shot on sound-stages.

There are other universal schemas too. We do recognise realistic motion or a good representation of it even if we don’t know that we do. Just like how we can recognise someone by their walk even if we’ve never taken time to pay attention to how they walk.

This why animation works. You know if a character is moving, talking, and acting like a real person even if You’ve never analysed how these things look in your life. You don’t even know your reaction positively to good animation. You just do. Even a small child can feel the the animation in Disney’s Aladdin is more realistic than the 60s Spiderman show even though many of them they could never say why.

There is a limit to have far you can take it. At least if you aren’t super talented. But it does work.

Still. I have to ask. What does this have to do with the questions of what is contemporary art?

This feels like diversion.

In Free Fall by Hito Steyerl is Trash.

“Imagine you are falling, but there’s no ground” No thanks. That sounds cold.

For my second week had to write a journal on the theme “What does the world look like?”.

The first piece of reading we were given to read was piece by a Japanese-German woman named Hito Steyerl. Normally I’d put my thoughts on this journal into my response to the subject as a whole. But this is one of the things I’ve ever read. To lump it in with everything else we’ll be looking at would be to do the other speakers a disservice.

Let’s get this garbage out of the way now.

We begin with an untitled introduction about being in freefall and how it undoes our understanding of the world. Our senses. Our subject/object relationships. And the way we see things. It reads like ammatur mysticism. But seems harmless enough.

I just want to point out the changes experienced in freefall have probably less to do with the loss of social paradigms or new ways of seeing being open up than the fact

it’s more than our extra senses like equilibrioception and proprioception aren’t used to this kind of feedback and so much of it.

It’s dizziness. Not enlightenment.

So far it’s not too bad. But the pain has only just begun.

We move into Part One: A brief History of the Horizon. And the cracks start appearing

“First, let’s take a step back and consider the crucial role of the horizon in all of this. Our traditional sense of orientation—and, with it, modern concepts of time and space—are based on a stable line: the horizon line. Its stability hinges on the stability of an observer, who is thought to be located on a ground of sorts, a shoreline, a boat—a ground that can be imagined as stable, even if in fact it is not”.

I hate this smug way we have at looking at the past. “Look at this 16th century sailors with their sextants and spy glasses. So primitive. Relying on things like the horrorzenline and the sun on the stars for their world view!”

These people were smarter than any of you. They reinvented the world and often risked their lives doing so. How dare people from the past rely on a paradigm that was utterly groundbreaking at the time. Urgh!

But so far this is unremarkable for a 21st century writer. But it doesn’t take long for things to become extreme.

Then the attack on western culture becomes explicate. “The use of the horizon to calculate position gave seafarers a sense of orientation, thus also enabling colonialism and the spread of a capitalist global market, but also became an important tool for the construction of the optical paradigms that came to define modernity, the most important paradigm being that of so-called linear perspective”. Steyerl is talking about the sextant and perspective like they were evil magic made by a laughing dark lord Sauron thinking about how many people the orcs will kill with them.

Considering Hito Steyerl is of Japanese decent, a people bent on conquest of of nations and religious based genocide durinf the 15th and 16th centuries and have embraced captailism harder than most european nations I don’t think she should throw stones about how evil western socity was. Hers were and are doing fine on their own.

As a consequence, linear perspective not only transforms space, but also introduces the notion of a linear time, which allows mathematical prediction and, with it, linear progress.

We had the concept of linear time long before perspective! Augustine anyone!

“the spectator’s importance is also undermined by the assumption that vision follows scientific laws. While empowering the subject by placing it at the center of vision, linear perspective also undermines the viewer’s individuality by subjecting it to supposedly objective laws of representation”.

No, no, no, no, no, no! This woman has a PhD in Philosophy? I have to wonder how she got it. I don’t even know where to start. If she hates perspective this much may I suggest she go live on south sea island where she can live among people who never invented it. One may as well say the language is disempowering because you have to use the words other people invented. Or claim books disempower people because they are written from the point of view of the author and we are “oppressed” into seeing their worldview.

Perspective does not disempower people. It is a system that replicates vision in a two dimensional space. It only disempowers you if you think you can see the world in cubist vision if you’re just raised to do so.

And vision DOES follow scientific laws. Even people who consider themselves real world magic users wouldn’t deny this point.

Needless to say, this reinvention of the subject, time, and space was an additional toolkit for enabling Western dominance, and the dominance of its concepts”.

Hito Steyerl was raised Germany. Has western society been that cruel to her that she see any advancements it makes as just being a scheme to take over the world?

Does she know down history more advanced civilizations have always oppressed less advanced ones? When the Mongols invented a system of warfare than any other nation in the world they didn’t use it to invite people to tennis matches. The Aztec and Mayan empires didn’t use their greater science and economics give all the neighbouring nations hugs.

All of these components are evident in Uccello’s six-panel painting, Miracle of the Desecrated Host (1465-69)… [] The date of these panels shortly prefigures the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492, also the year of Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the West Indies. In these paintings, linear perspective becomes a matrix for racial and religious propaganda, and related atrocities. This so-called scientific worldview helped set standards for marking people as other, thus legitimizing their conquest or the domination over them.

You do release the racial and religious propaganda would still exist without perspective? It’s not like these things didn’t exist before. Rome excelled in using it’s writers to jusify racial and political genocide.

And again. Claiming that the most scientifically advanced nations in the world at the time were unscientific because she doesn’t like them.

In the second part titled “The Downfall of Perspective” she starts by siting The Slave Ship by J. M. W. Turner. Turner did use perspective. If you told him he didn’t he’d throw his arms up in dispair.

At this point I had the horrible suspicion that Steyerl’s “More scientific ways of seeing” are just infact less literal ways of painting.

And as we move into Part 3: Acceleration, she invokes montage in film. I was correct.

“Painting abandons representation to a large extent and demolishes linear perspective in cubism, collage, and different types of abstraction. Time and space are reimagined through quantum physics and the theory of relativity”.

Quantum theory and Relativity do not end the concept of linear time. They show on macro level time is not linear, But they do not change how life is lived or experienced. Testament for this can be found in Watchmen by Alan Moore. Doctor Manhattan doesn’t experience time in a linear fashion. But he is obliged to act as if he does by fate because Moore does not have the capacity to show how living all of your life at once would change your behavior if you had free will. The fact that all our phones have clocks shows that Linear time is far from dead.

Her argument that because we can look down in outer space or freefall end the tyranny of perspective is also bunk. We have three-point perspective to show such extremities. And that that photographs taken in these situations and they still follow three point perspective shows the theory is scientific and grounded in reality.

She also invokes 3D cinema. 1: 3D films still use perspective. 2: I now have to question her taste in movies.

As we move into Part 4: Free Fall, my will to live starts to leave me.

“ …many of the aerial views, 3D nose-dives, Google Maps, and surveillance panoramas do not actually portray a stable ground. Instead, they create a supposition that it exists in the first place”.

Ground does exist woman! What do you think you walk on?

In this chapter she double down on her belief that the simple act of looking on it’s own kills the merit of linear perspective. This article opened with Hans Vredeman de Vries, plate in Perspective. A plate showing the view looking down from courtyard. This was made in 1604. Just because we can now look down from greater heights doesn’t change how we are perceiving the world.

Why do so many people in these types of journals view subject to object relationships as the worst thing ever? Maybe it’s not a bad thing that we aren’t squashed into happy little ball like in the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Maybe us having our own identity is a good thing.

In Part 5 The Politics of Verticality we get so bogged down in philosophical-political jargon that I can’t understand her anymore. Assuming I ever did. And most of the parts I do understand I’m too tired to argue against.

I just want to point out that even in space pictures still have horizon lines. They’re just invisible.

Even using things like fish-eye lenses or multi-screens in film can only bend perspective. Not break it and we will always return proper cinema because coherent storytelling beats out visual gimmicks every time. Just as classical illustration still endures while abstract art has been abandoned by the art world for not being pure enough.

And even taking Steyerl’s word as gospel. That perfective IS dead. Has it ended tyranny, bigotry, and exploitation? No it hasn’t! Her ideas are worthless.

I suspect a lot of what has been said by Steyerl as going to be defended as metaphor. Is It? I don’t know. I doubt she’d complain if anyone took her literally and thought she was right. I need to get this done quickly and I’m not going waste time looking for some deeper meaning that might not even be there to this nonsense.

Here is a link to the original article if you want to read it. But I don’t recommend it. This was painful to read.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/#_ftnref1

Fuck!

Constellation year 2: Why even bother?

I was meant to have this journal up two weeks ago. But they never make these things easy

“Art is Dead. Art remains dead. And we have killed it” (paraphrase of some German guy. The Gay Science. 1882. Page 125)

Yes, I used that joke last year. But I’m using it again. It feels even more relevant now.

Also. Where is the point?

Remember back in English class when, if you had a good teacher, they would not only give you a text, would ask you to think about a certain theme or element in the text, but ask you to say if how those ideas were done or if they were well done or not? Oh I miss those days.

I have not one, but five texts and a slideshow to react to and no guidance at all on what I am supposed to say about them. Given all of these are deeply rooted in art theory and a lot of them cross over into philosophy i can’t react to every point in these texts. It would take me a year.

Let’s go back to why I was given these texts to begin with.

The question we we’re given two weeks ago was “what is contemporary art and as a whole, what does it mean to be contemporary?”

Two me the answer seems painfully simple. Was it made in the past 10 years? The unit of measurement by which we measure our lives and divide up our centuries evenly? If not then it is far enough away from the present to not be contemporary. But it wouldn’t be the modern art world if we could do anything simply would it? No sooner had I put out my theory than two other students spoke up. One posseting that even art 100 years old can be contempory if it hasn’t aged and is still in the dominant style. Using duchamp’s infuriating urinal as an example because that thing will never leave me alone. The other stating contemporary art is defined by dealing with contemporary issues. Apparently I will never be a contemporary artist as I will never dabble in readdymade or conceptual nonsense or talk about modern issues. The fact that I am alive now cannot help me.

Well, as the texts I’ve been given give credence to everything but the idea that contemporary art can be measured by when it was made (Simple explanations can’t be spun into money-making lectures and books) I guess I’m going to have to at least look at these other ideas.

Never have I read so much but gained or understood so little. Not just in terms of understanding the text. But in the questions of “What point is being made here? Why does this matter? How am I supposed to react to this?

I’ve hated theories of art before but here there’s nothing solid enough to latch onto for me to hate. I know I don’t agree with this stuff. But I can’t even say why I don’t agree beyond my above stated belief that contemporary art is measured by time. All I can do is shrug my shoulders at these intellectuals and say “Yes. That certainly is a thing you believe”. I feel like I’m being asked to critique a fanfiction of an anime I’ve never watched for if it’s faithful to the source text.

The first one I had to read was a german philosopher called Boris Groys. Reading him was hard. I think he means well. But I was reminded of a bad-faith debating tactic I’ve heard of, throw lots of questions of statements at an opponent all at once so they can’t counter every one of your points and hopefully get lost or scared.

I found Groys idea of wasted time, that it can have more value than a lasting end product, not only terrifying and depressing. But antithetical to what I am being taught here in Cardiff. If I waste all my time here and don’t come up with a good journal and artwork to submit the time just spent struggling wont have existential value,

And his theories about repetitive time were pretty lackluster as well. We live in linear time. We are born. We die. Trying to find meaning in art that shows time like a seesaw is hiding from the truth of our lives.

Granted I could easily have misunderstood both points. Reading this numbed my brain.

Also You CAN view video art as a whole. I like to just sit down in museum and go through the whole thing. I know you don’t HAVE to but i do find it rewarding. Most video pieces do make good atmospheric non-narrative short films.

Next on the list was Mark Godfrey. He was the hardest to get through. His work needed more line breaks and paragraphs.

A lot of the points he made felt tired and overdone for me.

Like complaining we are too western in our understanding of art history. It is fine for western people to critique art history through a westen lense! People in eastern cultures do the same. Many cultures don’t even have the concept of fine art as we understand it. You don’t know what you don’t know. Trying to expand our concept of the history of western art onto the whole world isn’t being progress. It’s vanity. It’s saying these other cultures fit nicely in our box. Be honest about what you understand and don’t criticize others for not following creed you could never keep yourself.

It’s fine when talking about art to talk about western art. Because that’s what you fell in love with to begin with. It’s fine to value your own culture.

Another tired point was the supposed irrelevance of museums and what a victory this is for artists. The fact that some more modern works of art require a specific setting or are too large to be put in a museum does not invalidate museums as a whole.

Not unless you consider all modern painting a sculpture worthless. Which i do not. In fact, modern, non-meseumable art can often be quite worthless in it’s own right. Don’t praise an artist for breaking a paradigm if by breaking it he makes something worse.

On a more original point, Godfrey also wonders why modern fine artists are less keen to embrace new technologies than their early to mid 20th century counterparts.To which I answer could it be simply newer technology is less conducive to fine art than it was in the 1920s? Anyone can make digital art and show it on the internet. It makes one very unspecial to do so.

And sadly these days most modern fine art is 99% showmanship. You need to make a big flashy statement like covering an island in canvas or fucking a dead pig live on stage. Making a detailed, nuanced and heartfelt digital painting doesn’t catch eyeballs the way painting yourself green and singing the USSR national anthem will. Digital technologies make us anonymous. Great for trolls. Not so great if you want the Turner prize.

I myself have often tried to compensate for lack of talent with size and spectacle. But I do at least try to make my things pleasing to the eye.

After that cam Kelly Baum. Hers was the longest. But not as hard to read.

Though she also broachuched some points I’ve grown tired of.

She did talk a fair bit about viewing art through socio-political lenses. I hate the need to see art as political activism. Yes art and politics often go hand in hand. But putting so much focus on it turns art from an expression into a civic duty. Cold and without the freedom to focus on things other than politics

She also really liked name-dropping people I haven’t heard of and sounded like she expected me to be impressed.

She talked a lot about the heterogeneity (a word I had to look up) of modern art and wondered why it is so. Why gut response is if it is so diverse (I’m dubious on that point) I’d say it’s because we have way more people now and proportionately more of them are doing art.

Suzanne Hudson didn’t say much I wanted to react to

Isabelle Graw did have some interesting points put I’m folding them into my final reaction.

She did however repete a falsehood that 20th and 21st century artist keep telling themselves that I have not only grown sick of, but I’ve started to hate. The idea that in the future all people will be artists or that all people WANT to be artists.

Why do so many artists think everyone wants to be a creative? No. They. Don’t! Talk to a taxi driver or a football fan or an animal lover just once. There are people out there who never even think about art! Talk about narcissism

But I agree with the bit where she says art has had a lot of expectations that it can’t live up to placed on it. In fact I think she doesn’t know how true that is. Art can’t save the world or BE the world. The world is too big and too diverse. Not ethnically diverse. But too diverse in terms of people’s needs, loves, and lifestyles.

Now with that done I’ve put together the broadest points I could respond to. A collective ethos from all five that I think I can respond to

Final response.

I think modern art is stuck in an existential crisis it doesn’t need to be in. And these people are not helping. As I said above. Having a huge debate as to what makes contemporary art can be very profitable. But it’s unfair to just dismiss these statements as money making schemes. But why does all this hand wringing about what is contemporary feel so hollow?

Well lets go back to that fucking urinal. You know that joke everyone has seen about modern art all being pretentious rubbish? Well ever notice how the joke doesn’t change? That’s because art hasn’t changed in decades.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Without historical context Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and Conceptualism do kinda blur together. I know making art that is truly contemporary to the moment is hard. Being scientific any moment is infinitely indivisible. So scientifically it’s impossible. But you can be in the experiencial movement. That moment lasts as long as you perceive it to.William Blake saw eternity in a grain of sand. And time does fly when your having fun. But there’s probably science that says how much we can perceive at a time. And thus how much time it takes to have a moment of perception. That moment is too small to make a work of art in. So Is contemporary art doomed to non-existence? No. It’s cool. If it’s recent enough it’s contemporary. But right now we’re not even trying to make contemporary art. We’re making old art over and over again. The quest for “truly contemporary” art is keeping us locked in the past.

All the people mentioned talked about the promising future in which art is all things and everyone is an artist that postmodernism will bring. People have been promising this for decades. Enough! Make something worthwhile now!

Mark Godfrey talks about how Modernism was all full of promises of a utopian future we have developed nostalgia for. I see no nostalgia for modernism. Just hate and spite. And hypocrisy given postmodernism has been making the same empty promise for ages.

And some of those promises aren’t even worth fulfilling. Some people talk about tearing down the binary between art and viewer. Please stop trying to tear down my identity as a person separate from your crappy art.

I feel like the quest we’ve been given here to define truly contemporary art is just a distraction. An intellectual cul de sac. Every instinct is just telling me this is just a dressed up version of the quest for “pure” art I was made to look at last year. It could be that I’m just not getting it and too tied up in my worldview to see the difference in the questions and why it matters. But I can only respond through this lens. I’m sorry if I’m being lazy and not really answering the question. But bare with me.

Isabelle Graw is very keen on separating art from the art business. There seems to be this great desire, and nor just from her, to cleans Capital A Art of capitalism. Or at least the auction house. Whether you sympathise with this goal or not, the fact is it can’t be done. If you make a site specific piece people will charge for the right to see it. If you “make” a found object piece people will put all their stock into the object rather than the thing it stands for, Duchamp’s Urinal might be supposedly all concept. But if a vandal smashed that urinal people would be upset. And even hard core conceptionalists would demand it be replaced because the idea is not strong enough to stand on its own.

And if you make a purely conceptual piece people will still make mercendizable books on the subject.

If you really want to be truly free of money in art, become a hobbyist. Earn you money somewhere else and make art out of passion. You can’t say you should just get money for being an artist and your work be in no way monetizable.

Instead of trying to make the purest art possible you should just focus on making good art.

This dislike of the auction house seems to tie into the aforementioned dislike of museums. Graw says “Lost from view is the fact that the art world is a highly elitist milieu that operates by means not only of inclusion but also exclusion”.

I’ve covered at length how conceptionalism works entirely off nepotism and has nothing to do with quality. The art world is more elitist than ever. All that’s happened is maybe the gatekeepers have changed.

Baum say art no longer serves as an enclave or ghetto. I couldn’t agree less. It feels like the postmodern artists are demanding to be seen as gods. There own ghetto of beings who deserve money and fame for simply being. The issue with the auctioneers and the currioates isn’t that they make art worse. But that they take money and respect that belongs to the artists alone.

I feel like the tenets of modernism were never really disproven. Everyone just decided that postmodernism was true because they wanted it to be. It gave the artists more divine power.

Maybe this vision of divinity is part of why the quest for pure art burns so fiercely within the postmodern artist. But it’s not healthy, or even possible. Anymore than scientifically contemporary art is.

I’m made to think about The scenes from Richard Linkladder films Slacker and Waking Life involving The Man who records everything and The Holy Moment.

We’ll cover the Holy Moment later. The man who records everything has video cameras pointed everywhere at all times so he can review anything that happens to him. If he goes outside his home and loses an event he feels he lost and out of control. A perfect metaphor for the modern artist here.

On that note. Could we please drop this obsession with if art does/doesn’t should/shouldn’t point to art. It’s pointless! And it only damages art as a whole.

It reminds me of my own struggles with OCD.

I’ve made it clear I feel all modern art is the same. The medium has stagnated. The people in these journals don’t feel the same

They point to the heterogeneity of art as proof of the difficulty in deciding what contemporary art is. Maybe proof that is doing well or stuggling. Regardless if it is doing well or not. If art trulley is heterogeneous then it will be harder to document and categorize. The fact that modern art is difficult to categorize doesn’t mean it doesn’t fall into categories. As stated before. Sometimes trends only reveal themselves when they are over. And I do believe postmodern art will die. All things do

Let’s talk about the Holy Moment now.

The Richard Linkladder film Waking Life is about a man in a dream full of people trying to find existential meaning in their lives. At one point he walks into a cinema that is playing film called the Holy Moment. In a theorist states that if God is omnipresent then that must mean any photograph is a depiction of God. And thus film can act as a record of God. Through God we are connected to the past Linkladder has shown, and so in all film. If not all art.

As Boris Groys points out, for a good post modernist, God is dead. They can’t take comfort in connecting to the past or be part of any holy moment like the ones Linkladder claims to have recorded. Human beings cling to eternity. We need it. I don’t think postmodernism has transcended this need. Just transformed it into something toxic and egocentric. They try to turn themselves into gods. Something eternal in spirit if not it truth. But like I said. This is hiding from the truth of our existence.

On the other hand Mark Godfrey suggests we are now more entangled in the past. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The Rhizome model of time is never going to take off. It’s decent for describing memory, But it has nothing to do with how we actually perceive time.

Anyone who Feels ambivalent about being “in one’s time” or being at home in one’s time doesn’t know Jack. Most people rarely look beyond their own little bubble of their own little life. And those that do feel very cut off from the past they’re looking at. We are stuck in time. This is our blessing and our curse. But if Linkladder is right. We do have a connection to our past. And all this posturing is for nothing.

We don’t make contemporary art by transcending time. We make art and being human makes us transcendent.

My drawing teacher once told me that if you’re not making art you’re not an artist. And I think that is all you need. Make good art. And the universe will do the contemporary bit for you. Trying to be pure, or contemporary will just drag you into the past because it’s an old dogma. One that needs to die.

A Final Journal

My term is done. I am free. But I’d like to write about my final week here before the summer holidays. Because if I don’t do it now I never will.

When last I wrote about my progress I had done four Key drawings in one day! Keys take a while because they are the drawing that tell the story, but not only did I do them, but I did them well! I could be going insane but I think I’m getting better and quicker at drawing. The next day I made two more Keys. And again they came out good! I talked to Owen about line testing and he said that I should just do the “Passing positions” and draw them in a very loose style. I tried doing this. But after a while I found it was easier to draw detailed in-betweens with Key-like quality. I kept at and after a while I started thinking “Lets add in an expression change here” or “What if I did an extra halfway point?” and I found myself doing something I hadn’t done in a long time. Taking the indicative and getting creative. I was giving myself more work than I had to because e I wanted to. I was determined to Show the full range of emotions Ezekiel goes through as he considers accepting the Loving embrace Hestia offers him before changing his mind and violently rejecting it.

I came in everyday feeling drained, convinced I couldn’t start again. But Not letting myself use the computer means over time I can work up the confidence to do a little. And a Little can turn into a lot. And soon I’m working away. Not that I didn’t have relapses. I wasted a lot of time on Wednesday on the computer and on Thursday I sent a lot of time staring at the celling. But was able to break the through the fear that’s been holding me back and on Thursday pulled a Midnight shift for the first time in Months. And at the end of it I had 24 extra drawings. Considering I have struggled in the past to get two drawings of this quality done in a day 24 in three days is a massive step up! The last ones where I had to use all the techniques I’ve discovered in the last month to show him breaking free where epically hard. I thought I would be able to do it at all. But somehow I did.

There were enough of drawings that when I put them all together for a line test on Friday (Today) on 3s (8 frames per second) in was good enough to pass as animation!

Her it is

It’s still just a linetest. On seeing it Morgan said the bit where he breaks free of her embrace should be quicker and I agree. Fast actions should really be on Ones. And the bit in the middle where he’s thinking needs to be longer. But that was always the plan. But I still think it’s good. Could use more movement though. And I wish I’d made Hestia’s movements more visible. Turns out really small movements just don’t register if they’re this small, or fast, or something else is the centre of attention, or all three.

But the thoughts and emotions are clear as day and the expressions are perfect. For a guy who hates drawing faces and expressions I think that is a real accomplishment.

I still hope to animate it for real some day. And maybe even draw the final scene of him walking away and Hestia looking sad. But for now, I think I did okay. Morgan sure seems to think I’ve come on by leaps and bounds.

Owen helped me render the thing. Looped the bits that needed looping. As well as colour correct the backlit parts that just look kind of blue. I am very grateful to him I would not have been able to do it on my own.

There’s enough here that when you put it together it tells a coherent story. So While it is not finished here is the animation as it is. I hope you like it.

And Now I’m done.

Fuck my life. I need a rest. I’m going to play the easiest Video game I own to unwind.

A Brief Look back over Storytelling

This has been an Odyssey.

When I started this I was still reeling from the disaster that was the Field Module. My desire to create was low and I was out of shape artistically. I knew this was going to be a big brief and I had to plan ahead. When the character design bit started I was angry about how what was presented as a mere thought experiment would actually dictate the rest of the project. I had to scrap on of my characters and start again to make one worth animating. But Years of coursework has taught me it’s best to plan ahead. And also to do what you love, even if it’s not a good idea. So I came as little shock to me I ended up creating a Fox-human mage thing and an Amazon warrior. Creatures straight out the Fantasy fiction I devoured as a teen. Classy? No? Something that would hold my interest? Yes.

On that same not I decided to do what I loved in animation. Full hand-drawn animation like they used to do at Disney or The Illuminated Film Company. Stupid. But something I could care about enough to gives it my all for. But I’d do it all in Black and White to save time (and homage the silent films I loved as a teen. Murnau’s Sunrise inpaticual).

In typical me fashion I Followed the design brief too the letter. Trying to make the most visually distinct and expressive characters I could, which lead to them being horribly over-designed. I tried and tried to make them simpler. But I could only do so much. As for keeping their look consistent? I have never been good at that. Even making a character sheet for Ezekiel the Fox (which I didn’t finish) didn’t help at all. My fear of drawing people with real faces and consistent appearance was crushing me. I would come in and do no work sometimes.

Then when the animation started things started falling back into place. I wasn’t back to where I was last winter in terms of output (And never did get there). But I started to find myself. I realized I had to TURN. OFF. THE COMPUTER if I was to get anything done. I kept it off at work and when at home I avoided social media so It wouldn’t drag me down emotionally (Or tempt me to turn the work computer back on. I also started to sleep reasonably (Or try to) and my output erupted! I was still struggling with faces and expressions. Sometimes I only got two drawings done a day. But the quality of my work shot up. I actually made drawings I’m not ashamed of. And they became part of animations that look like animation! I feel like I am actually an animator now rather than a failed art student just BSing through the course. Towards the end I even started enjoying it just a little bit. When I realized I could make something better it was like a switch went off in my head. And while I still fear drawing expressions. I notice More and more my drawings show the exact expression I want them to show. And I’m drawing them quicker too.

At some point in this module, I started to see a real future for myself as a true animator.

More Animation done

I’m Exhausted!

I’m hoping talking a little time to write about what I’ve done will at least give me a bit of breathing space.

Having finished the two hardest pieces of Animation I’d ever done the next piece on the table looked quite fun, albeit pretty difficult. I had to show the distant and melancholy Eziecal getting a big surprise hug from behind from Hestia. A chance to do something short but with a lot of movement.

As I mentioned here https://wordpress.com/post/johnhawk.art.blog/139 Morgan wasn’t happy I had gone ahead and made my last pieces without linetesting them. I waited till he was free and talked over everything that was going to happen. We mimed out the motions several times and found several “key” moments.

The Start (Obviously)

A small accent of her arms going up before going down, an industry standard called: Anticipate

The arm swinging in: The Swing

The Arms making contact: The Contact

Hestia’s arms pulling together tight: The Squeeze

Ezekical’s head going down as an anticipate of his reaction: The Down

An intense physical and emotional reaction from Ezekiel: The Overreact

A moment where the Overreact is finished but not totally over and Hestia’s arms loosen: The Release (Which ended up being the Key drawing)

And finally a shot where her arms are loose and he has finished reacting: The Settle

If this seems like a lot of info. The scary part is this is (I think) just standard practice for any piece of animation.

With our key moments picked Morgan told me to make a very simple (read, shitty) drawings to stand in for each key drawing. I did so. But I still tried to make every head an opportunity to get better at drawing foxes, 3D space, consistent size and shape, expressions, and different angles. I’m never going to get good at any of these things if I don’t try.

The Linetest drawings came out looking pretty funny. I went completely over the top with the Overact and drew something straight out of Loony Toons with bulging eyes bigger than his head. But I liked the effect so much I put it in the final animation. Morgan found it funny too.

With the linetest keys ready we guessed where they would fall on the timeline and filmed them. The result already had some kick to it. But the hug didn’t have enough impact to it and we needed more precise timing.

Suggested putting the Down and the Squeeze in the same drawing. That would keep the impact from feeling too rubbery. For the second bit it was clear more was needed.

I’d been planning on doing this on Twos (12 frames a second) from the start. Threes (8 frames a second) just wouldn’t convey the action at all. Fast motion needs a high framerate. But it was clear the delicate timing and spacing meant this would have to be a mixture of Twos and ones (24 frames a second), industry standard. I hadn’t animated like that since last November. But If it was what was needed I’d do it!

Morgan and I wrote down the new timing on an X-sheet (Something he is keen I use more often) And I got down to work. My first job was to turn the linetest keys into real Keys. Most pretty easy. Except for Ezekiel’s damn face! I regret giving Ezekical a fox’s face. Human faces are hard enough for me, But as a human I have an inherent understanding of what a human face is like and where everything is. Everytime I had to draw his face I had to go into Google images look up pictures of foxes. Finding new ones that had the fax at a similar angle to where Ezekical was at that moment. And I do mean EVERY! SINGLE! DRAWING!.

I didn’t help that I had chosen to have him at a new angle each time rather than keeping him and one pose and expression I could easily trace over and over. But given what a fluid piece of animation this was that would have looked awful anyway. Given the piece his head would have had to have been moving around. I did the right thing even if it made my life hell.

I wonder If making him a fox was a mistake? But given my fascination with humanoid animals I know I’d end up doing this sooner or later. And he is a pleasure to watch for me. So maybe it’s just as well.

Working on Hestia’s arms was a lot of fun. I got a good and logical movement out of them. I also got pretty creative animating the Overreact. Adding in some secondary animation. Add to that the way I somehow (Maybe accidentally?) got Ezekical to slam back into her made this probably the most lively piece of animation I’ve done yet. I know I’ve said this before. But it feels like the first piece of real animation I’ve ever done. Like cleaned up, coloured, and better drawn it would be okay in a movie.

The only downside is that the last few drawings, around the “Settle” are awful and it shows in the final product. It’s true. A bad drawing can’t hide in a piece of animation. I guess I was just tired and off my game,

But On the plus side I think I’m actually getting better at drawing expressions! I can’ be sure but it feels like I’m spending less time rubbing out my old expressions and starting again. I can only hope.

With that done I could look forward to something easier. The reaction shot of Ezekiel looking up at Hestia. This would be so much simpler because only one thing, Ezekiel’s head, is moving. Unlike on the hug where everything was moving, meaning I had to change a redraw everything everytime. Here I could push about a third of it into a background boilline, and most of the res of it I could trace. Something I’ve become very good at by now….. I hate my life.

The other thing that would make this much easier is being a simple and slow movement i could go back to working on Threes. Beautiful, work-saving Threes!

Morgan was keen I start using “ladders” when planning. But I’m having a lot of trouble understanding the concept. So he felt we should just try mastering the X-sheet for now. I tried using the X-sheet. But quickly found it was such a simple motion I could just do this on straight-ahead animation. Morgan wont be happy.

I might be crazy, but I think I’m getting better at drawing cartoon foxes (touch wood). The animation came out fine. Unimpressive. But fine. Where the trouble is is lighting the damn thing right when filming it.

I’m used to filming with the paper lit from above. See almost any of my previous pieces of animation for examples.It looks a little harsh, but it’s fine. But the multiple layers of drawing Morgan is asking me to use require backlighting (Lighting from underneath) for all the layers to be visible. I wouldn’t mind, but it gives the animation a blue-ish quality that will be horribly at odds with the rest of the animation when it’s put together. I decided to film it three different ways to see if one worked better.

I started off with the standard backlighting and it didn’t look good. Too much light shone through and you couldn’t make out what was happening at all. I then tried lighting from both above and below, but that just made things even worse. Now the footage was so overexposed your couldn’t see a thing almost. I then tried a lighting just from above. Hoping the thinness of the paper would let the background show through. No such luck. The Background was almost invisible.

I made a fourth attempt, just using backlighting again.But this time I used an extra piece of paper underneath the other two. My reasoning being that when I did this before I’d had a background and a foreground under the main drawing, but here I’d only had a background. Maybe the third sheet was what had given me slightly better results in the past? I gave it a shot, and yes, it made things better. Not massively better. But it helped. If I can’t find a better way of lighting it I’ll use this version. Or maybe I’ll try it with two sheets of paper underneath!?

My course is nearly over. And I am tired. This morning I felt like I couldn’t do any work at all. I amazed myself by doing three Four Key drawings. But I feel like I’m running on fumes. About to fall apart at any moment. Even writing about the challenges I face costs me a huge amount of mental effort. Whenever I start it feels like my brain has turned to cotton wool. I keep on waiting for things to get easier. To have a breakthrough. To get my second wind. But I just feel more and more drained and my mind feels more and more foggy and I feel like I’m getting less done.

But on the plus side, I think my drawings are getting better. In my Keys my fox is actually starting to look like a fox!

Weird Drawings

This is not a quintessential journal for me to write. But given this is meant to show my learning process I thought It might be relevant to talk about how I’ve been using extra drawings to improve my animation.

I’ve been doing preparatory drawings to figure out landscapes

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Poses

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Positioning

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Testing out with partial-stick figures.

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Or just testing small movements using stick figures.

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I also write out animation nots on some of them. Specailly if they were just being used for small changes,

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And for testing and developing faces, facial expressions, and what angle the face should be at

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I use many of of these things to make simple drawings. But they are beyond valuable when making Keys. The big drawings that act as the bedrock for each new piece of animation. The Keys are what make the animation what it is. Morgan tells me in the old days it would take an animator years before they made their own keys. You’d start out doing someone-else’s inbetweens and then move up tp breakdowns and passing positions. A Key Animator was as important as both these people even if he made fewer drawings.

I might not have the skills make real Keys, but I have no choice but to make both Keys and inbetweens and everything between those two. Let it not be said I don’t do hard work.

I have found rather than trying to make perfect Keys it is best to make lots of messy drawings (including but not limited to the types shown above) that in time can be sculpted into what I call a “Messy key”. Brutal drawings not unlike those of Leonardo or Henry Moore. These Messy Keys feel less like drawings than acts of sculpture. I feel myself carving and chiseling into three-dimensional space with my pencil and paper. It is laborious work. But when it is done I have something that looks right in all the important places, and that I can easily trace over to make a final Key. Occasionally the Messy keys are good enough to be used in the animation itself. Here are my Messy Keys.

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Sometimes messy keys ar needed even mid animation. Like here when I was animating the downwards swing in two arms getting ready to embrace someone.

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If I may brag, I think some of these are or have lead to some of the finest drawing I’ve ever done. Or maybe i’m just going crazy from all the work.

And Just to give some context. Here’s how over time all these things come together to make something worth looking at

Starting

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A bit of detail

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And now its a real Key

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Even really simple drawing can be invaluable.

When I was doing my woman walking a a three-quarters angle In was able to plan her movements with these two arcing lines representing how her feet would move (Which strangely, do look a bit like shoes)

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Simple, but beyond useful. I asked Morgan and drawing out arcs like this is a really useful thing to do when animating and planning. There’s a line at the bottom of each arc with a Capital C and a number next to it. These represent her feet making contact with the ground at the end of the step. Again. really useful. But so damn simple!

And after what feels like a lifetime of drawing, my 2B grade pencil has been used so much it’s too small for me to hold anymore. Look at it!

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It’s been quite the year.

The Hardest piece of Animation I’ve ever done

I promised I would write about the making of the piece of animation where I showed Hestia thinking about going over to Ezekial. And now it is finished I will do just that.

When I started Morgan was firm with me that I start animating on layers. That it would save me a lot of time not having to draw the whole thing over and over again. Knowing I was pressed for time, I acquiesced.

I made three master keys based on my storyboard, I went through the process I’m getting used to by now, Proto-keys, messy keys, and finally something worth looking at. I also made some semi-keys/inbetweens that would be cleaner and thus easier to trace off of.

That done I got to work making layers.I figured out what would be in front of Hestia and what would be behind her and made separate layers for both those things. Her shield and some blades of grass in front and on one layer, and more grass, the horizon, the stars and the tail end of her dress on the background layer. Once I had this going I copied both out twice so both would be on a boil line, taking notes from earlier https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/152561916/posts/134 and evolving the process, I would now have both real time animation and boil lines going at the same time. How’s that for layered animation!?

But That still left most of Hestia on the main layer of animation, and she would have to be fully animated. My use of the boil line had only saved me so much work. This wasing to be very hard.

The scene had Hestia looking into the distance (Ata an off-screen Ezekiel) looking sad and concerned. She raises one arm up, letting the other flop down, looks at her hand in uncertainty, looks away thoughtfully, makes a decision and steels herself, straightens up and begins to smile with hope, and then lets her arms down into a position of easy and openness, ready to give Ezekiel an embrace.

It might sound simple. But I’m showing off a thinking process and a lot of emotions just using pose, body movement, and facial expressions. That’s a plan of planning to do and act out.

The whole thing would take at least 6 seconds. More drawn animation than I have ever done for a single shot.

As if that wasn’t enough this would require me to draw faces and expressions constantly. Two things I am terrible at. But I vowed I would give my all. Plus This was a change to improve on a mistake I made years ago.

When I made my first animation I broke a big rule I didn’t know about. You should never have a major change in facial expression when a character is moving a lot. It makes the change impossible to read. Not knowing this I ruined an important moment of a character deciding a ghost he is looking at is just brought on by drink by having all change from fear to mirth happen while his head was moving. I would fix this mistake. This time my expression changes would read clearly!

I knew I couldn’t do this on straight ahead animation. Not when this would require at least 46 drawings.i would have to do this pose-to-pose. I went to the library and reread a chunk of Richard Williams “The Animator’s Survival Kit”. I re-learned quite a few things I’d forgotten. Extremes, downs, and passing-positions where all things I had forgotten about. In my mind anything that was not a Key was an Inbetween.

I took all of this back to heart and got to work I made my Extremes first. As knew from earlier in the course that if you don’t show the parts of the movement people need to see then it will look like the subject skips in a flat line from A to C, missing that B section that makes the movement right instead of wrong. I mentioned this problem in this journal https://johnhawk.art.blog/2018/10/26/looping-multi-media-animation/ Stating that in my small piece of classical animation the spacing was all wrong. So yes. The extremes had to come first,

I chose to just focus on the first two seconds of footage first. The space between the first two keys. With my extremes done I then did my passing positions (Thought sometimes they were one and the same thing) as the piece cannot work without them and having these halfway points would make inbetweening way easier. I then did any downs or ups I could find, acting out the motions myself time and again. I then did some extra ones for things like changes in facial expression. With ALL of that done I now found I had few inbetweens to do considering I was still animation on threes. All I had to do was decide where to put them so the timing would be right.

The Inbetweens seemed easy. Fun almost. But when they were done I was only half way to the second Key out of three.

What happened next is mostly a blank. But I went through this process three more times. A full two weeks of work. Even improvising a bit where Hestia’s eyes dart from one corner to another that I really like. Also adding in blink that was unplanned. I looked forward to reaching the final Key. Not because it meant the end, there was another 2 seconds of footage after that. But because I felt I could do all of that in straight-ahead animation, which I did, and it felt like a holiday in comparison. But the animation on that last bit wasn’t quite as good. All I had to do was wait for Morgan to set up the Lightbox.

But he was very busy and I wasn’t always awake when he was free. So in the meantime I moved onto the next bit. Hestia moving forward to give Eziekal his embrace. No sooner did I finish drawing the Key than I panicked. Not only was she walking. But she was walking forwards at a diagonal angle. Something I had no idea how to do. The small bits of walking animation I had done had always been them walking along a 2D plane. But I’d made my bed and decided to go for it. It was only a second and a half long.

This involving scaling along with everything else that makes a walk cycle hard I went totally pose-to-pose. Nothing left to chance. It was some of the most rigid and methodical animation work I had ever done. But it also meant I would have to redraw Hestia everytime. Meaning the animation would have a lot of life and movement to it by default.

It turns out that walks with a character at a three-quarters angle like this are one of the hardest things a 2D animator can do. Morgan, Tom and Owen have all said this to me. Once again I had jumped into the artistic deep end without even considering if what I was doing was normal for people of my level. And once again it worked out okay for me.

When Morgan was available he set up the light box for me. He was a little cross that I had done the whole thing. He’d wanted me to make a line test first. I promised I Would do one next time if he’d help me (A promise I kept. But that’s another story).

We put the different layers down. I actually found I had to put the top layer underneath the image of Hestia. She became too blurry otherwise. Morgan left me to film it and I got to work. Taking a shot, removing the old drawing, changing the boil lines, adding the new drawing, over and over again. I felt physically sick with nerves. If this turned out awful I’d want to kill myself. But when it was all done it was okay. Not great. But still the best animation I’ve ever done. Truthfully it feels like the only piece of real animation I’ve ever done.

Here’s Hestia thinking

(Pease go fullscreen the video quality isn’t great)

And here’s her walking towards Ezekial.

Ezekiel is on a boil. He doesn’t need to move here. I put him on the top layer because even though Hestia is moving and he isn’t it would feel wrong if she was in focus when he is nearer.

And there you go. 3 weeks work. The hardest animation work I’ve ever done. I hope it was worth it.

Animatics and animation

It has been a month since my last journal. And what a rollercoaster of emotions it has been. I feel almost dead on my feet. Turing my story boards into an animatic was one of the most draining processes of my life. I should have written something about it at the time. but when it was done my desire to ever think about animatics again was non-existent.

I needed a lot of help just getting started. Morgan had to scan the story boards in and turn them into PNGs. Over time I got involved in this process and even learned a little bit about how to do it. But then we had to put all the PNGs into Adobe Premiere and crop them, and this is where the pain started.

Premiere is the worst program I have ever used. It is counter-intuitive. Impossible to navigate. It can become unusable. And it crashes all the time. I needed constant help from Owen, Tom and Morgan to get anything done. The second they left the program would do something new that would leave me unable to work. I felt like bursting into tears. But in the end I got everything into the timeline in the right order. Now I had to time each still to see how long it had to be on screen to read right. manipulating the timing to get all the right length was a fresh hell. The program was very fiddly unless you were doing everything just right. But I started to get the timing right, and then the problems started to emerge.

I had broken a big rule of filmmakimaking, I had broken the circular line. A complex subject still don’t really understand. But boils down to only showing characters from one side in a scene. I flipped some drawings around to address this. But there was still a linebreak and Tom and Owen were not happy with it. At least Morgan didn’t mind too much. And it was clear that my animatic wasn’t fully reading. I need to draw new panels for my storyboard. I wanted to die. But I did it, and uploaded the new stills to Premiere. But now i had extra stills I had to adjust the timing for all the other stills to make it all fit! It was pain. I hated my own drawings by the end. But in time I had an animatic.

After this I fell into a depression for two weeks where I barely worked. Only making small efforts. I had the timing. But Now I needed to turn my storyboard drawings into animation keys. Not only is this hard work, but I had drawn my storyboards in square panels, but the animator’s paper is rectangular. Meaning I have to change the composition for each one. This taught me a painful lesson. Draw your storyboards at the same aspect ratio you mean to animate at! It means you can scale up with ease!

Weeks passed. But eventually I started animation again. And I started to feel better.

I had to animate a seascape first, I decided to try to make an animation loop. The result was crude, but gets the idea across. This one was hard as I redrew the whole thing everytime, Winsor McCay style. I knew I’d have to get smarter.

I had to film it now and I couldn’t get the camera to show the whole thing or stop it from showing too much. It turns out the camera was in the modern aspect ratio, widescreen or 16.9, but classic handdrawn animation was made in 4.3 ratio. Owen had to change the program setting for me. I must remember this for when I make my own films. Draw in the ratio you mean to film in or it will throw the composition of the whole thing off. I’m just lucky the program I use had a 4.3 option. At least I have been told this technical side of the process wrongfoots a lot of newcomers. Clearly you need to be up on how you mean to film your animation before you even think about drawing frame one.

After that I had to draw my fox, Ezekiel, staring out into the distance. At last all the reading I did paid off. I remembered reading about a technique called “The Boil Line” where you redraw something a few times and film the few drawings on a loop. The tiny differences between the drawings mean that even though the figure is motionless it still looks alive. I talked to Morgan about using this and he said it was a good idea. He said three drawings would give me the boil I wanted. It is a sign of what a bad place I was in that it took me two days to just get the three drawing. But when it was done the boil did look good… okay it looked passable. But seeing your own work animated does a lot to make you feel better.

Next I had to show my amazon, Hestia, looking at Ezekiel from a distance. I decided to apply what I’d learned and opened the shot with a boil and it works. I also started animating on 3s (8 frames per second) I had Hestia draw her arm into her for comfort. Animating it was slow. But I started to get my groove back. I wouldn’t say the animation is good but it works. And I found a method of being able to make my work contestant from frame to frame. You would not know from looking I redrew the background every tim. I did it by making master frame and drawing of them each time rather than creating each new drawing based on the last one. You can see the shifting background if you look for it. BUT if you are looking and Hestia it works seamlessly.

This not only made my work more consistent but also quicker. But Morgan thinks It can be improved. For the next bit I will have the background on a totally separate layer using a boil to give it live. This has saved me a ton of work in the current piece. I hope it looks good.

As I have worked on the current shot, of Hestia deciding to walk over to Ezekiel, my output has exploded. I’m nowhere near my past peak but It’s felt like a blast. I’m even enjoying my work a little. I hope that the quality of the work has picked up two. But the process put into this will have to wait for another journal.

Peace be with you.

I always jump into the deep end first

It’s been a while since I published anything. Work’s been slow. But I have something new to talk about.

The final term is upon us and we have our final project. We must make a short scene of two characters interacting. We have to use the two characters we made last term. As I covered in https://johnhawk.art.blog/2019/03/05/a-bad-case-of-the-mondays/ and https://johnhawk.art.blog/2019/03/11/archetypes-shapes-and-cutouts/ I went for a warrior woman with a shield and a half man, half fox mage with a magical mask that let’s him look like anyone.

As stated earlier, I designed them to be characters who I would enjoy playing off each other. I wanted a male and female who would have a positive dynamic, maybe even be friends. My Shield Maiden is a nurturing type more interested in peace than violence. Someone looking for something positive in the world. My Mask Maker is a self-hating loner. Trying to find peace by hiding in other-people’s identities. Both are high fantasy characters with valuable skills. I could see them working as spies or mercenaries. I like what I have come up with.

For the current Brief I have to make a short film, at least 30 seconds long. Showing the two characters interacting. But also showing them thinking and going through emotional change.

“-a series of drawings going through the thinking process…. [That] is the real aphrodisiac” – Richard Williams.

I’ve done my best to comply to this brief. Thanks to trying to make characters who fit together from the start coming up with dynamic was easy. She’s a nurturer and comforter who is confident in her power, and he’s a misanthrope who distrusts others. She would be way to close and touchy feely for his liking even if he would respect her kindness. It would be like trying to hug fire. It can only burn or be smothered. Even there is no malice on either one’s part.

I first had to name my characters. I named the Shield Maiden Hestia. After the most under represented greek goddess. And the Mask Maker Ezekiel. After the Biblical prophet. One name from Greek mythology and one from the Bible. Keep things balanced.

Then I decided to write a script. Have all my ideas fleshed out before even putting pencil to paper (Also I was going through a phase where I was terrified to draw anything). The scripting processes was easy (it does only need to be 30 or so seconds long). I actually had more trouble coming up with the character names.

Here is the final script

Exterior: Night: A cliff face overlooking the sea.

Ezekiel, the Mask Maker looks out over the cliff. Sadness in his eyes.

Hestia looks at him from a distance.

She feels concern.

She wonders what to do

A smile crosses her face

She walks over to him

Ezekiel finds himself hugged from behind.

He is surprised

He mellows

He looks thoughtful

He the closes his eyes and grits his teeth.

He shakes Hestia’s arms off him and pulls away from her.

Ezekiel gives Hestia an annoyed look.

He then walks away. Hestia looks on

Ezekiel walks out of view.

Hestia continues looking after him.

She then looks down at the ground.

Her expression looks sadder

In total, 18 lines of text to be turned into 18 panels for the storyboard. Nice and simple.

We’ve had the importance of storyboarding drilled into us hard for the past few months. We’ve had side-classes, extra reading material, and even a film-class storyboarder as a lecturer. They want us to take it seriously. If what I have been told is true then storyboarding is every bit as important to animation as daily exercise is to a boxer preparing for the big match.

So had to take these seriously . It was advised that we should make series of thumbnails (Rough drawings the size of a box of matches) before doing the storyboard proper. But this is where the title of this journal comes in. For some reason I thought the others where using postit notes for theirs. So I decided to make my thumb nails the same size, tracing around a pad of postit notes to get them the same size and shape.

The result is I had a lot of extra space. Enought space to make some very detailed drawings. With shading and gradient lightwork and all. So when I finally showed them to Own he thought it was my storyboard. Morgan seems to agree. They are storyboard quality (At least for my skill level). Once again I have jumped into doing the hardest part first. Like how I often seem to approach art. Running before I can walk. And it’s just as well. According to the brief the storyboards were due to be finished yesterday.

So I guess there’s no point doing the thumbnails now?…..

Here are the storyboards as they are now.

Untitled by Hawkbittern

I considered photographing each panel. But right now my ability to upload photographs is a little compromised and really this is more about evidencing my work for the future than showing off my lackluster drawing skills.

With that done I am now ready to start turning this into a film. Tomorrow I will begin making an animatic of these storyboards. Which can be used to judge of long each scene in the film should be. That should get me ready to create an animation.

I had lengthy talk with Morgan about the process of turning storyboards into animatics. He thinks it will be fine. But he was also keen that I alter some drawings to change the composition and add in some closeups. He says both will me it read better to a new audience. I can’t say I want to. I have a rhythm and vision planned out in my head. I don’t really want to redraw things. And I hate doing closeups. Drawing faces is the hardest thing for me. But it is good to actually get some hard constructive criticism for once. If I decide to add those bits in I’ll write about it here.

We also talked about my habit of jumping straight into the deep end. My odd little blunder made me thing about when I was younger and planning to make the greatest animated film ever. I had long ago given up such dreams as overconfident nonsense. I’ve been trying to aim small and manageable. But my work has lacked passion and I’ve suffered from bouts of paranoia where I am scared to draw anything. I wonder if my habit of doing crazy things I had no chance of pulling off was what gave me my drive to begin with? It certainly kept on helping me make my best work. Maybe I need to start dreaming big again.

Certainly as I remember a lot of the dreams I used to have a weight of tension seemed to melt away. I felt… free….