My interest in learning the various techniques that shape animation came both from admiring and wanting to produce work that encompassed certain techniques in the work I enjoy watching, and a strong desire to widen my knowledge of said techniques. Aside from my personal interest in animation as a commercial medium, I saw this module as the perfect opportunity to build a stop-frame platform from which my illustration work could shout louder.
Emailing the people in my community of practice proved to be a highly valuable part of my learning process. Directly contacting animation production company Frater, New Zealand based illustrator Sarah Larnach and animator and founder of ‘Broken Pixel’ Ashley Dean have influenced the progress of my learning journey enormously. I’ve found that without their knowledge of the industry and willingness to offer me advice, I can’t make adequate progress. Upon reflection, I believe I should've gone out of my way to communicate with more members of my community of practice, both animators and illustrators. This could've given me a glimpse in to the industry locally, and quite possibly provided me with the opportunity for other work placements in the near future. Approaching people, even if it's through email, is something I' am going to embrace more now.
After attending a very helpful animation workshop in the third week, I emailed the events organiser Ashley Dean, and he was more than happy to offer me advice that built on the knowledge that I had already gained from his stop-frame animation and armature-building workshop. After further emails back and forth, I saw no harm in emailing Ashley regarding a future work placement with Broken Pixel, and so it’s now probable that I’ll receive a work placement in January.
I took the skills I learnt from Ashley's animation and armature building website and decided to create my own moveable characters. Unfortunately, my success with my own armature building ground to an unfortunate halt when I found my plasticine-sculpted armatures were rather difficult to position, bend and pose. This came down to certain mistakes with building my characters, including the weight of the upper body and fragility of the feet, along with the lack of padding on the character's limbs (to keep the joints loose and bendable). Given a chance to go back, I would've reinforced my figure with paper as padding and epoxy to keep certain components fixed. I wish I had consulted Ashley more about making a good armature, and learnt a little too late from a third-year student about making an armature with operable joints. In the future I intend to push my armature building further to create a character that is easy to animate and manipulate.
Confirming myself as an introvert independent learner, I’ am naturally shy of approaching people for help and advice, which has acted as a dominant hindrance in my learning journey. In a bid to gain contact and advice from these industry professionals as well as the tutors, I found the best way for me to approach these people was via email. Emailing people gives me the confidence in verbalizing exactly what I mean, which I often struggle with otherwise, and has obviously allowed me to correspond with Sarah Larnach for example, who operates from New Zealand.
As well as receiving knowledge from these people living further afield, much of the help I received on the way came from peer advice and responses in my crits. For the first time I’ve also emailed two college tutors, which was a personal success. Receiving feedback outside of crits has proved itself to be extremely important and I’ve learnt this is something I shouldn’t be scared of doing more regularly in future modules.
Although I’ve made contact and reaped the rewards of networking over the last six weeks, I regret not asking for more help from more professionals, as well as approaching third-year students specifying in animation. This learning journey has allowed me to prove to myself there are alternatives to getting answers.
Getting answers is key to any learning journey, so without this process of finding solutions nothing can really be learnt. Outside of emailing people in my community of practice, I also turned to various other resources such as online tutorials to introduce myself to Adobe Flash, working through a beginner’s Illustrator tutorial with technician Simon and sourcing information on how to rotoscope.
I particularly found Simon’s beginner’s Illustrator tutorial helpful. It supplied a much-needed introduction to the basic tools and techniques of the program and how to use them simply to full effect. Soon after the afternoon’s tutorial, I wisely decided to take some short time out to experiment with Illustrator and it’s tools, using an existing image to trace and later colour, even if my finished illustration wasn’t a complete masterpiece.
Keeping my work digital, I took the logical step and turned my attention to Adobe Flash, a completely alien program that contributes to why I find working digitally sometimes daunting. I find safety in working traditionally so stepping out of my comfort zone has been a major theme throughout this module. I chose to tackle Flash using various beginners online tutorials, which happened to be a good place to start when learning a new piece of software, even if at first it was difficult to source Flash tutorials that felt like they made sense and were aimed at my "dummy" level.
Although I managed to learn the basics of creating moving symbols and editing objects in Flash, on reflection I would’ve benefited from more time with the program and exploring its potential further and to a higher level. Bearing this in mind, I wish I had begun learning Flash at the start of the module. Nevertheless, it has been an exciting stage of the module that along with Adobe Illustrator significantly changed my attitude towards working completely digitally.
Amongst the personal successes of this module, Communication Technology has also allowed me to recognise where I struggle, why this happens and how I get out of these struggles. Some of the most distinctive chinks in my armour have been my inability to prioritise my time wisely, predominantly before the mid-module crit. A good example of this problem comes in the form of my natural over-ambitiousness and enthusiasm towards producing large scale, highly intricate work to a finished standard that meets my approval. This is most evident in the hand-painted moving background I produced for my first section of the module, which unfortunately consumed valuable time at the start of the module.
In order to break away from the in-studio atmosphere and learn outside or at least in someone else's company, I chose to produce some rough "human animation" tests. This enabled me to direct my friend's actions in each shot purely by telling him, which took away the strain of moving an object intricately frame by frame. As my enthusiasm for this new form of animation escalated, we both agreed to take my existing idea outside to a local car park. After previously taking photos in the same car park the week before and learning that the car park's employees were unable to provide any permission for me to work on their grounds, I was advised in future to work secretively and as privately as possible. But when it came down to the one Saturday night we set up the camera to the tripod and began filming, we were soon advised to leave the premises if we were to continue.
This major hindrance in my plans and overall learning journey has taught me to go to greater lengths to gain permission from a higher authority before filming in a private building (however public it might be regarded). Given more time, I would've sourced the appropriate documents that proved I was legally entitled to work there on the night. Failing this I would've gone to greater lengths to visit other options and car parks within Leeds.
As a major dimension to animation, I could see it would be important for me to practice integrating my illustration work with a technique of producing drawn images as a stop-frame animation. This particular section of the module felt like a lethargic and uninspired effort, due to the fact I could see this technique taking a very long time to develop, especially if I wanted to produce anything aesthetically pleasing (which is of course the mistake I make in a lot of my work. What I did create were short, sharp and simple tests that demonstrated I was capable of creating a "hand-drawn" animation, evidenced in my rotoscoping test alongside other short videos seen on my blog. This area of the module failed to feel like it contributed to my learning journey, and so to improve the way I might approach this again I'd take more time in planning the animation out. I would decide exactly what I'd like to experiment and learn about in the hand-drawn animation, as well as ask for assistance from technicians early on.
An example of this comes in the form of my efforts to experiment with rotoscoping and the realisation I was in fact wasting my time, after my pivotal mid-module crit. Without this crit I might not have made quite so much progress regarding my learning journey throughout the final three weeks of the brief.
Progressively throughout this brief it has become apparent I' am used to working to individual briefs, and so feel as though I approached this module with the wrong mentality. Given a second chance I would experience the six weeks with a more experimental and tentative mind, dipping my toe in to learning techniques as a journey and jumping more frequently from one technique to the other as opposed to placing focus for a long time on learning one technique at a time.
In this module I’ve also been reminded about my streak of perfectionism and its tendency to project me as creatively stubborn, which has contributed to my choice of studying one animation technique at a time and my fear of using computer programs. I feel as though I’ve begun a journey in the second half of this module to shake off this perfectionism and to care less about polishing my work, and to produce faster and briefer. This idea of producing the finalised look stems from my automatic choice to compare my work against my peers and the self-reassurance that I' am "not behind" with my work, which if anything makes me work too hard and lose my focus.
As a learner, this doesn't come from competitivity, but ambition, and needs to be tamed. In that sense this module has taught me too not be concerned about how far everyone else is, and to throw away the concerns regarding how pretty my work looks. Communication Technology has taught me not to be scared of ugliness, roughness and testing ideas to a basic aesthetic standard, just as long I can evidence my progress as a learner.
