First, my BFA is coming along fine. The last bit of animation I have should be colored by Thursday. Music and sound effects are the next thing I have to tackle.
Besides the progress of my project, some deep and serious questions have been brought to me concerning my artist statement. I am being challenged to answer, "Why do my ideas manifest best in animation?" and "Why animation is the best medium to involve Suspension of Disbelief?"
These questions have brought me to a lot of thinking and reading. I am I very competitive person. I take challenges seriously. I like to win. In order to prove my point, I must study rigorously and I must be very logical. Animation is a medium that I am very passionate about, so I must understand it on a professional and highly intelligent level.
I have been reading about Cesare Ripa and Marshal McLuan and their thoughts on medium, message, context, and concept. I have also returned to my animation books by Don Bluth, Richard Williams, Eric Goldberg, and Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.
With what I have learned from them, I'm taking this challenge.
I need to clarify the ideas I am trying to convey through my animations and I need to define why animation best delivers those ideas. I need to really breakdown the function of animation. But I think I'm going to re-study animation first. I'm breaking out the old notes and the old books.
I need to rethink the intent of my statement and organize my thoughts so that my artist statement may be structured in a logical and informative order.
Following this statement are my thoughts on animation and how it functions as an illusion of life and how it differs from specifically film. What I have written is honest and raw. Most of the knowledge written here had been acquired years ago in the rise of my interest in animation, before I ever animated. I'm glad I studied then, because the information is very useful to me now.
I know that both drawings (when I refer to drawings, I am referring to drawings in animation) and actor's bodies are instruments that play a range of emotions.
Drawings are emotional symbols. Drawings are a medium in which we can express something, profound, human, and universal to human understanding. Therefore, animation is about acting. What I find different between actors and animation is that the actor's bodies already exist. They are real and ready to be directed. Animation on the other hand is completely made from scratch. These drawings depicting emotions are fabricated from the start. Not only are the emotions fabricated, the drawings depicting them are fabricated as well.
Now, drawings are emotional symbols. Right? As I have said, they are fabricated, abstract, human-made. The word animation comes from animus which means "life" or "to live." Animation is about investing a character with life. Drawings are known to be just symbols, depictions, renders of something real. Drawings mimic real life. They are just pictures. Even a painting can depict an object so well, that the viewer almost believes that object actually sits before them. How does animation better achieve this suspension of disbelief? Well, to animate is to bring to life. It is more amazing to see a drawing come to life than it is to see a human body go in character when it is already known to be a living thing. The whole embodiment of animation is fabricated. It's appearance, anatomy, structure, personality, and emotions are all imaginative and fabricated by human hands.
With drawings, we can push the envelope. With these character drawings, we can give them all of he accurate human proportions and correct anatomy, but once this character begins to move it's all about exaggeration. These drawings can portray exaggerated movements well beyond what any ordinary human could do. The characters expressions and feelings can be exaggerated in the same way. These movements and body gestures can be simplified at the same time they are exaggerated. In the words of Don Bluth, these broad, exaggerated movements magnify the emotions, give the character sincerity, and move the performance from ordinary to unusual. An audience want the unusual. These drawings are caricatures. They capture the essence of a subject in it's simplest form. These drawings abstract something from the real. They are simpler, cleaner, sharper, and BETTER, than real life.
It's time for me to breakdown Believability vs. Realism in animation. Animation is not about imitating realism, even when delivering a realistic message concerning moral virtues or what have you. According to animator Eric Goldberg, "-- it's about observation and caricature, utilized in such a way that it convinces an audience of your character's existence." The goal in animation is to convince your audience that the character exists. It is important that the character's actions are a result of its thought process. All the character's actions and attributes must come from its unique personality. I character's walk may not be realistic in terms of physiology, but it is believable as it is a result of the character's (fabricated) personality. The character can be a ball with half a face, but still show a thought process driving emotions and actions. When these drawings, these emotional symbols act upon their given personality, they come to life.
Not only are the drawings and actions and emotions in animation fabricated. This illusion of life only works with spacing and timing that the animator has to create. The audience wants to see the character think and react. Anticipation, action, and reaction all must be created and established by the animator to make a character come to life. Drawing is very personal. It is so human. It is up to the animator to work from the inside of this fabricated character and recreate through drawings real emotions that will manifest themselves on the face on body. Drawings are emotional symbols as much as they are a language that simply is understood universally.
I'll start of with the exact conception of the ideas for these animations starting with the first one, "Undressed." The idea for "Undressed" was conceived my last fall semester at MCA when I was taking Dynamic Imaging. Midterm was nearing and the homework assignment was to come up with a narrative or idea for the BFA project. As you can find the post for the idea in my Dynamic Imaging class blog, I came up with the concept in class, the morning the idea was due. Despite my laziness to do the homework before the day it was due, I don't think I would have came up with the same idea any other way. But like most of my epiphanies and great ideas, they result after a dumb idea and realizing it was dumb, forcing me to do something smart. Here's a link to that blog if you are interested in what went through my head that morning. In that blog, my concept developed as I wrote it. I end up writing that my focus is on pleasure, self-gratification, which led me to the concept of sin and destructive pleasure. In the next post I write,
"I have this story set in New Orleans because this is the area where I am from and the sins of lust and gluttony are two issues I had struggled with over a certain period of time in my life."
So, that's where my concept started and it hasn't drastically changed since. The past four years of my life prior to last August, I was a really "lost soul." I'm a Christian and a religious person, so in that sense, I didn't really have God in my life the way I used to. I was making bad decisions, I was pleasing lustful appetites, I was lazy in my school work, and I have a known fetish with food and I love to eat. For personal reasons, I can't get into great detail, but I can say that i was a slave to sin. When you sin, you become more distant from God, and you can't see Him as clearly. "Blessed are those who are clean of heart, for they will see God." "Whoever sins, is a slave to sin." When I got tired of lying, hiding, being disrespectful, being dishonest with others and myself, and when I felt very hurt, I turned my life around. After one night of being upset and beating myself up over my unwise actions, I challenged myself to decipher why I was acting a certain way. Once I have recognized my motives being caused by lust, sloth, and gluttony, I was able to correct those attributes and amend my life. I owned up to my father for everything I have done, for my actions had been revealed by another person out of spite any way and my new life began there. In a Christian light or not, my story can be seen as a fresh start in life. Maybe a more descriptive write-up of my experiences in morality may be the best thing for my artist statement, but much of my experience is very personal so I'm unsure of how much to put if necessary.
So, I'm going to get some what "deep" here. Very deep. I'm just gonna be raw and honest. I may sound like a dumb ass, but whatever. Life is a gift because knowledge and wisdom do not come easily. What makes life precious is that knowledge and wisdom are not easily handed to us but acquired through hard work, pain, turmoil, hardships, and yes, moral struggles. The experience of learning to attain truth and a higher understanding makes life very grand. It is funny how animation is all about life. This is a medium I was destined for and I do not question EVER do I question whether I am meant to animate or not. In my two BFA animations, some of the sins that people struggle with in life are of focus in a medium that gives life. What better medium to choose than one that literally means bring to life.
I looked up Cesare Ripa as I was advised by a professor to do so. Looking up this man gave me a better understanding of allegory and icons. Thanks to stumbleupon, I found a web page about unsolved problems in philosophy. It seems like a weird fate for me to find this page. It mentions Essentialism. It says, "In art, essentialism is the idea that each medium has its own particular strengths and weaknesses, contingent on its mode of communication." The article on this page described that a chase scene would be better depicted in film than in a poem. This may be more of an opinion than I fact, since poems function to convey not a point but an experience. In the next paragraph, Marshall McLuhan is quoted, "The medium is the message." Then the article states, "The study if the medium can yield greater results than the material of the medium seeks to communicate. That in studying the way an idea is presented, one can understand the intent behind its presentation and thereby conceive the nature of the piece." I'm very interested by this theory. I can see my animation as the embodiment of my message, since animation brings life and my characters are the manifestation of actual human traits and the story focuses on issues of morality. My project is very life themed.
So, have to ask myself these questions. Why animate? Why not film actors or use illustration to get my points across? Is animation the best medium in which my ideas can manifest?
Personally, yes and in general, no. On the personal level, animation is indeed the best medium for me to work in. It is an art form I love and passionate about and one that is very appropriate for manifesting my ideas. I believe that animation best gives life to characters over film, illustration, and fictional prose. The medium is all about giving life, and the content of my piece deals with real life subject matter and involve characters that give animation the reason to animate. So, I answer the question "why animate?" I animate to create what cannot be done in reality. Yes, hot sausage patties and loaf of french bread can be brought to life in a fictional written story can and they can be illustrations in a comic, but what animation brings to the ultimate illusion of life where viewers can witness, believe, and accept these characters as real beings with visible emotions and unique a thought processes driving their actions. Maybe it is just my opinion based on my love for the medium, but I cannot see my idea presented in a more suitable medium than animation.
No comments:
Post a Comment