#10 New Work from November 2023
An update of recent work from the past month.
ANIMATION: BE SPECIFIC AND ENTERTAINING
I spent this month diving deeper into animation, now animating with proper characters instead of bouncing balls. Our final assignment for this term was to animate a character turn.
Our teacher - Phillip Hall - encouraged us to push beyond the assignment and actually give a reason for our characters to turn around. Personalise the shot, give them a soul, and be as specific as possible. This all influences the actual movement of the turn.
It was more difficult, but a lot more rewarding. We’re actually thinking about entertainment now, instead of just completing an assignment with a character in an empty void. In doing so, you can actually feel the hand of the artist that made the shot. This has become something that I can show people without the need for caveats - it can just exist.
We've been learning the workflow of animation - taking a shot from idea generation, gathering reference, blocking, splining and then all the way into polish. I've learnt that I really enjoy the beginning parts of the process ("wouldn't it be funny if..."), and taking a shot from blocking into splining is very, very frustrating and hard.
Here's where the shot is at - it's currently towards the polish stage, so it’s still a WIP but it’s nearly done!
I also learnt a few handy tricks with making an appealing viewport playblast in Maya - turns out its pretty dang easy! Crazy what you can get away with with just 1 light and an HDRI.
This video on constraints was also really handy when trying to attach the headphones and the pizza slice to the character. I've been getting a bug where every so often the headphones bug out and animation that was previously clean end up clipping through the floor, but I'm pretty sure it's something that results from me re-animating the gimbal of the egg and that then breaks the headphone animation.
Big shout outs to the other students in my class too, there are some really great ideas and takes on this assignment that I’ll share when they’re done and if I can.
COMPUTER SCIENCE: EXPLAINING MY OWN WORK TO MYSELF
I spent some time this month continuing to work through CS50 - Harvard's free Intro to Computer Science class. It's maybe the best online education I've seen so far - it's extremely well taught by the faculty, with assignments that are really well made and thought out.
I'm currently on Week 4 - Memory, where I've just learned about pointers, memory addresses and data manipulation. Working through the problem sets on my own has involved a lot of conversations walking myself through my own code to debug - surprisingly effective!
Using C has been hard, but really good in illustrating the fundamentals of Computer Science. I'm really eager to move on to python in a few weeks, though.
ART: TWELVE TOASTERS FOR CHRISTMAS
I've been drawing from earthsworld a lot on Instagram - they take really interesting and unconventional portraits of humans, and I've been diving into drawing with just pencil.
i've also been following along bit by bit with Tonko House's painting class on Schoolism, painting two studies in neutral ambient light:
Finally - I've just started exploring Victoria Ying's Intro to Visual Development. Vis Dev is a field I've been meaning to explore for a while, and i'm finding it very, very satisfying!
It crosses a lot of separate disciplines that i've been working with for a while - motion graphics, graphic design, drawing, painting. At the base level, it’s thinking about harmony and contrast running through all of these fields.
It's knowledge i've read and heard before, but for some reason the way she describes it plus watching her design a bunch of pencil sharpeners really made things click for me. Here is a page of thumbnails of impractical but aesthetic toaster ideas I came up with:
INGEST: THINGS I’VE LOVED LATELY
I've been listening to FreeCodeCamp's podcast lately as i've been diving more into Computer Science - here's a really good episode with an interview with Joel Spolsky, the founder of Trello and Stack Overflow.
I first read Range by David Epstein two years ago, and lately I've been revisiting chapters from it. It’s a compelling and inspiring book that makes the case against narrow specialisation.
Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
Here’s a really interesting read regarding the state of ownership in the modern era, piracy and how the choices made by monolithic tech giants are harming consumers from Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic. It’s an especially relevant essay prompted by the recent revelation that Sony will no longer allow access to content people had previously paid for. Pluralistic is a brand new blog find for me, full of juicy essays I’ll spend a lot of time gleefully digging into.