No work of animation is ever truly finished. But we, as artists, must have the focus and personal insight to know when our idea’s original intention is communicated. To have a career of creating a lot of art, we must be able to treat our current creation as a singular attempt at getting things right. Perfectionism is the fast track to incompletion. Our magnum opus is not something we intend to create. It is something that happens after we gain the experience to finish a lot of really small things.
To Do list for the students:
For Wednesday:
Export the following: 1 A rough composite of your film.
List!: A list of sound effects and music descriptions needed for the film.
Check: Your current progress vs your personal schedule for completing your film what do you have left to do?
MAKE NOTES OF: YOUR PROGRESS ON YOUR "ONE THING YOU HAVE WANTED TO DO ON YOUR FILM!"
(Remember: In art, we don’t have problems, only challenges we have not found solutions to yet.)
To answer those challenges we need to find solutions that reflect
- our creative ambition
- (I have _____ much time left to make a short that does ______)
- support the time we have remaining on a project with practical solutions for big challenges
- (See below)
- ask ourselves what is most essential to making our project’s idea “complete.”
- (what are the “big picture” things that piece of media is supposed to do? are the elements there? what’s missing? what’s the least of each of those elements I need to accomplish that goal?)
- developing an aesthetic we can reliably produce with our remaining time
- I have A-level shots, B-level shots, and C-level shots in terms of quality. Where do my A-level shots need to be? My B? My C?)
- use each day to support the intended “experience for the audience” we planned when designing our project.
- (I wanted my film to make people think ______. I want them to laugh at _____ cry at ____, and think about themselves at _____)
- know when to modify our “intended experience” to insure the original idea is completed on time.
- (Do I really need those in-betweens on each and every shot?)
A list of practical SOLUTIONS for your CHALLENGES:
When entering the third leg of animating a short, beginners are most likely to:
- spend most of their time animiating a few select scenes because they are “never perfect/finished enough to their liking”
- SOLUTION: For whatever scene you have you know you’ve spent a ton of time on… stop that scene and don’t work on it again until you have every Extreme Keyframe you need on every other scene.
- Reminder: EXTREME KEYFRAMES (Extremes) Are the least number of key drawings we need to tell the story. If we composite a film’s shots, where every extreme keyframe is drawn, and all of those shots have reached the same “stage of completion,” we will technically have a complete film experience.
- stages of completion in this regard: lineart, color, sound, fx, sketches, cleaned art, art that has all necessary details: faces are drawn in, or mouth movements are made, etc.
- avoid the parts of their project that they are weakest in, saving for the end because they will “have enough experience” at that time to tackle them.
- SOLUTION: start working on those parts now and write down your process for achieving them in the form of a “short list you can easily replicate.”
- example: coloring your film.
- 1. Remember the tools you have.
- 2. Make your color palettes ahead of time. (select your colors. know their rgb values.)
- disregard other processes like sound design and color because they have not finished animating yet.
- Soluton Above: List and create audio as you go! Small doses!
- refrain from compositing because they are still busy making individualized shots
- Composit your product now so you don’t have to make a composite from scratch!
- have one scene they really like their production of, and feel unsure of how to create the others.
- Dive in!
