Character and Narrative - Evaluation

I really struggled to engage with this module, and felt thoroughly unmotivated and disinterested by both the set briefs and my own responses to them. The work I produced for Telling Tales was worse than mediocre - a dull story and visually very uninteresting. I find myself falling back on making work that I find easy to do when I am not interested in the brief or in my own ideas, and Road To Nowhere is an example of feeling like it wasn't possible to play or experiment within the confines of the brief, therefore resulting in a very safe and ultimately uninspired piece of animation.
Normally I find the process of animating much more satisfying than the end product itself, and am not usually worried about the outcome so much as the experience of making the work - but during Character and Narrative I found it a drag even to think about working, and have been more than happy to distract myself with less urgent business for COP or other modules. After the suggestion last year that changing projects to a more interesting idea after getting underway with another one was a waste of time, I spent a long time resisting starting work on a project I was not at all stimulated by, probably wasting more time in the process. I still believe that, as I am a confident and quick animator, my time would be better spent on long consideration of a project before getting underway with the work. I have often felt like there is a pressure or a rush to have settled on a story or project by the end of a briefing session, and I don't think that for me it is conducive to coming up with my best ideas.

In terms of the technical side of the Telling Tales animation, I consider the hand drawn elements to be a step down from work I have produced in the past, in fact there was very little actual animation involved, almost exclusively using line boil to bring life to a flat image. In the one scene in which I attempted to draw multiple frames (when the car drives off into the horizon) the animation is jerky, and the volume and shape of the car seems to warp and shift between frames.
Regardless of this I think that there were some small indications of a more interesting animation lurking under the surface of my Road To Nowhere. Had time constraints not played such a big role in my decisions about what to keep in and what to cut out of the film I would have liked to have seen more use of collage/montage and texture through the scanned elements.
Maybe the single achievement of the production of this piece is a growing familiarity with the intricacies of After Effects. I was able to very quickly transfer my knowledge of other Adobe software, particularly Photoshop, and through the use of adjustment layers, blending modes and effects was able to precisely tweak the look of the film, and to make sure each scene looked the same as the others, despite having been drawn with a range of pens on a range of papers.

I enjoyed playing with the puppet pin tool, mainly due to its speed, although I can't see it being massively useful to me. Similarly DUIK seemed like more effort than it is worth. The time taken to build the puppet in Photoshop, tweak the anchor points and positioning in After Effects and then rig it in DUIK seems excessive considering the limitations of the medium. I think in both cases I would prefer to use cutouts or traditional style animation. Both alternatives would allow me more control and a wider range of possibilities.

Strike A Pose was a fun exercise. I enjoy positioning and posing the puppet in Maya, but not building or rigging. Potentially I would like to try animating in Maya, in collaboration with someone who could provide the rigs. I found MOOM to be a bit of a fiddly character to manipulate, but was pleased with the facial expressions I managed to get out of him, if not so satisfied by the body positions. I found that sometimes looking in a mirror or at reference photos of myself was hard to translate onto MOOM because of the irregular proportions of his body. This is a consideration I will have to bear in mind in the future when modelling or animating in Maya.

In a wider sense I feel like this module compounded my feelings that the way I want to work (still not entirely clear to me) is incompatible with the university set up. I have often felt that the course in general is geared purely towards gaining a job "in the industry", with little to no compensation for those who are interested in animation as an art form (sometimes I forget I am at an "Art School" altogether), and this term has only bolstered those worries. Perhaps I don't want to sit behind a desk pushing a mouse around for Disney or Cartoon Network. Perhaps I don't want to tell tales with a central character and a clear narrative. Perhaps I don't want to write contrived stories which don't interest me just to fulfill the criteria of a brief. Perhaps this course isn't right for me, or I'm not right for the course.

Much soul searching to be done over christmas.