Sorry for not having any doodles lately, but I rather have my thought right now.
So I started animating at work. It's quite simple character for kids (nealy primitive if I could say), each episodes run about 1 min, my buddy made a model and rig, I'm taking care of animation but I also have to do rendering as well. So given time for me, which is 3 weeks by now, is not quite enough to get my satisfaction. I was used to spend 3 weeks to finish 300 frames for class. Guess how many time I got here for my first 350 frames. It was 2 days. That sounds more like insane actually, but that's exactly what is happening to me right now.
There's one thing that school never taught us, Efficiency. When I was taking Pixar class at the Academy, the whole environment was so ideal, just so ideal. We got 3 weeks for 300 frames, getting great critiques from teachers, spend some time critique each other and discuss about animation all day long with my friends. I guess not every production has such an ideal environment while they are having multiple projects going at the same time.
Plus, a quality that client expects us to achive is quite low I say. It may not be for all TV production but maybe because I'm working at Japanese production. Sadly but it's true that Japanese 3d animation is poorly executed over the years. I was surprised at the fact that some of supervisor laughing at the importance of Illusion of Life. man.... Japanese should honor the fact that we *do* have great talented animators in 2d production tho.
I would consider myself as lucky just because I still can have fun animating character for kids (well, I like cutie fluffy thingie more than dragons and warriors and stuff). In fact that's really great thing that I can make money by doing what I really want to do, u know.
If some of you found my experience interesting, cool that means I didn't waste my time writing some thoughts on my blog. I would write more of my experiences if my time allows.
I saw some of movies btw, Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums, Nacho Libre. Man, Rushmore is such an incredible piece of work. I saw Royal Tenens first, and kinda hooked, not strongly tho. Then Rushmore, it's already been added to my list of the movies that I think I'm happy to see before I die.
So, I've been pretty busy for bunch of reasons. But actually my life is getting slower. I pretty much got used to my working place by now, having some good time with friends, nice food, movies and drink and stuff. Yeah having some fun. There's a tendency that we could forget the real reason why we are making some art when we are in a stressful situation. So I'm hoping this fun that I'm enjoying brings me some good inspiration for my next step.
