AM.3.11 Sincerity

~Creative Block vs. Technical Block? Pick Your Evil~

So far this semester, I had been feeling pretty good about getting beyond the major technical hurdles of 3D animation. However bad my first assignment was, I was at least grateful to the feeling that I could pretty much get the computer to reflect what I saw in my head (problem there being my mind couldn't see too much then). This last assignment, in comparison, has flowed far more smoothly in the acting and creative departments. I'm not exactly sure what clicked between assignments ~ I think I just decided to let go of the excessively conscious preoccupation with clarity, avoiding first instincts, avoiding cliche, and all those super important points that I was too focused with in my first assignment. I had overthought those concepts in my first assignment, rendering them complicated and practically incomprehensible. Letting them go to the back of my mind as a checkup/finessing pass after running brainstorms without limits in the planning stages worked magnitudes better for my workflow in my second assignment. It's too bad I figured that out pretty late, and I'm not sure it would work for anyone else, but I'm glad it hit me on the second half of the course.

Ooops, I got rambly...but that's what blogs are...back to my original point. Thanks to the better initial flow (and also to the server outage before Thanksgiving ^.^), I got plenty of much-needed time to really review my animation and ask for critiques on the splining and polish stages. My classmates offered awesome ideas and suggestions (thanks guys!) and I got a ton of "ohhh, ah ha" moments, but as I was finessing my arcs, spacing, and overlaps this round, I found it incredibly hard to tweak things to get exactly the kind of movement I was looking for. Peter's been suggesting for weeks that I try throwing in a better arc on one of my arm movements and Samy and Fernanda suggested that I offset the twinning. This week, I finally got around to re-animating those frames and spent a couple hours doing so, but when I was done, it looked exactly the same!!! I redid the whole thing, but even I can barely tell the difference. In the process, I also managed to freak out the rig a bit (where's waldo: spot the exploding elbow on one frame o_O;).

I'm back to that sort of frustration where you know what you want in your mind, but you can't find the right control to tweak it. On the plus side, I guess that means I've gotten way beyond the stuck brain points of the last assignment. And I have to admit that creative block was infinitely more threatening than technical block. Hmmm, I'm not sure what this post was about anymore...but I'm going to go run through campus now and check out all the crazy final anims everyone's turned out! These guys really rock!