Mitch's Animation Anxiety Attacks

I can see by ~Ludichrist on deviantART

Blame this flash on kuru for making me feel insecure about my disability. -hides in shame-

Nar I'm quite happy with who I am and this is a nice little attempt at explaining why :)

WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS



I'm a little iffy all round about this movie.

The jokes were hilarious granted, but the visual look of the movie conflicted with my expectations of the film. A lot of the rigs looked like stereotyped charicatures of famous people, but unfortunately with them being fictional characters, the joke of the charicature style was lost. I found I was a little creaped out by the extreme amount of detail that had gone into skin textures of the humans, like dreamworks was trying to prove a point to the world.



As far as the characters go, without Bob, Dr. Cockroach Ph D, and the President, the movie would have been made up completely of very boring characters. Ontop of that, apart from Ginormica and The Missing Link, everyone else were complete 2 dimentional characters. Bob was "although hilarious" very stupid throughout the entire film, he was remained the same right till the very end, every other character was the same "unchanging". Link didn't even NEED to be interesting and yet they showed a rather sad and exposed side to his usual macho visage when he realises he's not as tough as he thought he was. Perhaps these character stereotypes are becoming THAT stereotyped that you don't even need to give them depth anymore. I noticed this with the antagonist, Gallaxhar, At the beggining he was evil for no reason and I was thinking "here we go, generic evil character no. 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999" but then dreamworks surprised me with his wonderful and perhas even deliberately vague and constantly interrupted monologue explaining why he was evil to make fun of the stereotype. I think Dreamworks took us for a ride with this movie, threw in a bunch of stereotypes, some big names to make the fans happy, put in some good laughs, AND some cheap ones "close encounters of the 3rd kind parody, merging with a stolen joke from Space Chimps", and make it a 3D experience.

The movie was hilarious, but the story had the emotion and depth of a rich 13 year old emo's song lyrics.


and now I've got that out of my system, I wanna talk about the animation.
Yeah, it was alright, but I don't think they thought about it enough. Susan is supposed to be HUGE. You'd think with your body becoming larger, the earth would seem ultimately smaller, thus giving you the illusion that there is less gravity. A scene with her being chased by a giant robot through the city, you watch her jump from roof top to roof top, and she seems to jump like a normal person. my understanding is that the bigger something is, the slower it "seems" to fall from a distance. Galileo was probably rolling over in his grave when they were animating this scene. The story has close to no depth but they have a perfect opportunity to make up for that with some well thought out animation and they put together what looks like a normal person running through a miniature city "which may have been deliberate but I doubt it".



Something that seems to be a pattern in dreamworks movies, animals and monsters etc always seem to be rigged and animated much more entertainingly that humans. They squash and stretch more, and they move more convincingly. "eg, mega-susan moved like a normal human being and yet Insectosaurus was moving like a snail, despite sharing the same trait of being massive characters"

All in all very hit and miss. BUT being a biased fan of comedy I'll still probably enjoy it over and over again despite its downfalls.

Or have I missed the point somewhere?

So. I was the opening piece to a 4-men-1-woman oral presentation. So I thought I'd give people a bit of a show. Sell my idea of great standards in animation to the fellow students of my class. And what better way of elaborating on that then a display of pictures of high standards and quality. But when I show them a whole bunch of slides which looked like they were drawn with my left testicle, I was applauded. Sure I'll take any compliment thrown at me. But I feel like after all the planning of sweet irony, the joke was on me. Should have my intentions been a little more clear? I feel its patronising to explain intellectual humour. I feel alot like Jim Carrey from 'Man on the Moon'

I started this course with a clean slate. I thought I knew what it was about... and with a good 4 months of Ian drilling it into my mind I eventually figured it out. I didn't know how to use flash, I didn't know how to use maya, I didn't know how to traditionally animate. I never really thought about how something moved, I was just more impressed with how cool they looked with their spikey blonde hair and kamehameha waves. from day dot at tafe, I was learning something completely new. I didn't want to own up to the fact that I knew nothing about it, mainly I guess because it scared me a little. I decided I was going to do animation for the rest of my life... and then to find out that I knew nothing about it, it made me feel very VERY small in comparison to everything else.

So the first year was all about me learning these bizzar and specifically non-idiot proof pieces of software. So I'd been thinking to myself, "ok, I'm a big bad 2nd year now, watch me roar" and then it dawns on me like an ice cube down your coin slot. I'm back to square one. So when setting my goals I think of what kind of job I want as an animator. The games industy is big in brisbane, but I don't want to keep closed minded. I've decided to work on a narrative for end of year, working with the main focus being a 3D character with simple props to play around with, but I want 2.5D flash characters occasionally interacting with him to show both sides of my skills, one as an animator, and one as an illustrator.
So with my narrative, I'll not only be able to show this to a games studio saying "look at my awsum three-dee skillz"
but I could wander into somewhere like liquid, and say, I can draw, I can animate, I can create a story structure and use more than one piece of animation software.


what I need to do now "because I've realised how complicated these processes can be" is polish up the script and animatic as promptly as possible so I can get to work early in the game on animating my narrative piece. once I finish writing it up

I need to learn how to use the graph editor in maya properly because that will surely be my achilies heel in all of this.

I'll need to install maya "somehow" on my computer so I can work on it at home.

look after Bill "my EAT"

Also I really think its important that I work more on animation with emotion and dialogue. Its something I personally believe I wont be perfecting any time soon, so the more I work on it the better I can be at it. "me thinks the 11second club is the place to be for that"

Ontop of that, I've got my 30 seconds worth of animation to your dialogue thing going on, on my deviant art website
I'm working on a strange UNO joke that a friend sent me... things like this could keep me animating and not playing around with games and watching cartoons.
not sure if its a good idea doing this and my narrative piece at the same time.

after all of that, I'd like to get a little better at my illustrations, but I'm aware animation comes first.

So without talking about other goals to do with outside my life as an animator, it sounds like I've got a long year ahead of me.

BALL IS ON THE LOOSE! SQUARE FACED MAN YET TO APPEAR IN COURT!

late thursday afternoon, a one Linus 'ping pong' Mcreevy went on a rampage in TeleTubby land. "He snuggled up in my lap even after I told him not to... I feel violated" said an emotionally, and sexually scarred Tinky Winky. "He was very disrespectful and he reaked of Irish Whiskey", said Laa-Laa. "He laughed at my hand bag" Said Po. "I'm used to balls, but he went too far", cried Dipsy.
Mr. Daniel Goodman, owner of Linus ergo ultimately responcible for the balls actions refuses to say anything on the matter at this point and time. More news on the Linus case tomorrow at 7.