Empty Week :O

Well everyone else seems to be away in bradford, so there's very little to be said here really... i've done a little bit of playing with Maya using rigs i found online and things like that, but since Maya and myself are still looking upon each other as mortal enemies, none of that ended with successful animations, just silly little things that weren't worth uploading XD

So instead i thought i would fill an entry with talk of the past ^_^ What i did before this stuff and how bad it was XD


My animations Prior to the course were... bad. Primitive little frame by frames done in MSPaint and GIF Animator 1.0 because that was all i had access to really. Well i had better art programs but anyone who has used old GIF animators knows what happens when you put a good quality image into it. It looks like a mess.


This one stemmed from my friend making a joke about how you can injure someone on the other end of the internet...


This one stemmed from someone wisecracking on the previous one that they would rather someone thre pudding through the screen at them.


That horrible thing was an avatar for someone -_- i hate the way it's done but it was a number of years ago.

I have done other small animations, but they are all much the same as these, primitive and old fashioned.

The again i say that but i still play Monkey Islands one and two... in their gigantic pixels of dooooooooom. Feh, i guess i'm just strange in that i will judge animation not by how shiny it is, but by what is contained within it. It's why i cling to films and animations from years and years ago, ones that everyone laughs at because they're old.
Then i like to point out that things like Akira are not exactly stonking new and that generally makes them realise how judgemental they're being.
That's how it is... animators work with the times, and when new times roll around they leave the old ones behind. Kinda sad when the old ones contain such artistry as they often do... rather than having a computer do all the work.

When people ask me what my drives are to do things like that, what inspired me really to go into animation, i can name the exact moment for me that it happenned.

It was the second year of my film degree course. We were studying out Postmodernism unit, which had until that point had strictly real action films. But today as i approached the classroom i heard something that made me look up in surprise. Something i had never heard anything like before, something so eerie and unusual that it actually gave me shivers.

We were studying 'Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence' that day... and the sound i had heard was the theme music that was on the DVD menu as the lecturer set up the film for the screening.
I knew then that i had stumbled onto a film that was going to change something in me. And it did.

As a film it was not that groundbreaking at all really, but i had never seen a film acheive such atmosphere before this one. I'm not sure what was different about it at all, but something was, and it made me realise that all of the studying i had done of real action films had paled in comparison.

Here's a youtube vid of the theme responsible.


The re-edit and such are not my work, but it's the only vid with the full song in good quality. It's still just as eerie for me as it was when i first heard it.

Anyhow... i feel i have waffled long enough, so i shall call that it for this week.