Rambling ahead – Beware

Posted by Avner Engel in Animation

Every now and then I like to read through my “Technical Notebook”. Basically it’s a simple book full of scribbles, quotes, thoughts and anything I find useful about animation and art.

I remember I read an article by Shawn Kelly and it got me thinking, what do I do to keep my creative juices flowing?

Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, hang on a minute what is this junior trying to tell us here, that he already has some advice to share with the world?

Well the answer to that is no (I hope you didn’t get your hopes up J), I still have a tone of stuff to learn before I will consider myself knowledgeable enough to give any piece of advice about animation.

However what I can tell you though is that I had an experience at work where my animation batteries were put to the test somehow.

Basically I was asked to change a bunch of sequences, completely. We are talking about three days worth of work here. It was alright by me because I trust my supervisor to know what’s better for the game. I took it with a grain of salt and got straight back to work.

What helped me though apart from having the right attitude to the critique I was given was finding the right inspiration. This time around I achieved it by talking to one of my peers about dynamic figure drawing. I know it may sound like I’m completely going off track but bare with me and let me explain.

Sometimes when you are spending a lot of time on a shot and then asked to change it its hard. You feel like you put all your heart and soul into it and now it’s not good enough. By doing other things outside of work hours or over lunch you allow yourself to refresh and trigger your inspiration. What helped me go through all these changes I had to make was something completely different to the task I was required to do at work that kept me motivated. It helped me take my mind off my work tasks and concentrate on something a little bit different.

Anyhow I hope some of my rambling about the matter of “keeping your batteries charged” made a tiny bit of sense, and if not I apologize in advance.

Thanks for stopping by if you are reading this; I promise that next time will be less text and more visuals.

Av