Practice Makes. . .

What is my daily practice like? How often do I practice animation? What do I do to practice? How have I improved?

So I'll be honest daily practice doesn't happen in my life. Well conscious daily practice doesn't happen. I don't set aside thirty mins to an hour everyday to practice animation. I should. I should also write a paragraph a day, read a script, sketch, blog ideas, exercise and eat healthier, but I don't. I'm not really sure why I don't. Actually, I do know. I take five classes. Three media arts. One graphic design. Random history. By the time I finish doing the work I have to do for these classes, I don't want to work anymore. I understand animation is something I like to do and I should find great joy out of doing it, but it really is a lot of work. So by the time I finish everything else, I don't want to think about things. I just want to relax and enjoy some mind numbing tv and video games. I know this is just an excuse, but hey, I'm being honest.

I have had to practice animation. It's not like one day, POW, I'm an animation master. Not that I'm an animation master now. I'm more of an animation one time wonder. Anyways, I've learned things in class. I've watched videos about how to use animation programs. I've googled [I'm pretty sure that's a verb now] different animation styles and techniques. Then I just get to work learning how things function and what works and what doesn't. This isn't an every day occurrence, but I do practice animation. Like most anything you learn in your life, animation is about discovering things as you go. When I started my first animation, I had an idea of how I was going to do it and got to work. As time went on, I discovered some layering issues and things that I could have done differently that would have been much easier. So as I got toward the end of my project, I was a lot more proficient and the animation technique was smoother. I'm still not very good at animating objects. I spend most of my time trying to figure how things move and if this moves, what else would move? This is something every animator has to go through and it's really frustrating which is usually why I work scene by scene. I do a scene, take a break, do something/anything else, and then come back to do the next scene. This way each scene I have a fresh start.

On a side note, I do believe I practice animation everyday unconsciously simply by watching other animations. Ever since I started animation class, I find myself studying animations more. I look at how characters move and what's different depending on the type of show and animation. I watch how the compositions are different moving from scene to scene. A lot of the time I'm wondering how did they do that. I watch kids cartoons with my nephew and find myself analyzing the movements and making comments when something doesn't work. On one hand, this has ruined my animated movie watching experience, but it does help me become a better animator. I can only get better.

Making Progress

One week left until my first animation is due for my MART571 class. I'm not satisfied with the progress at all and there is a lot of bugs to fix and timing/animation to work out, but I have the basic process down. Long and tedious. Blah. Here is a video to how it's going so far. I have a week to make it much better. Wish me luck.


Progress - Scarred For Life from Brandi Palmer on Vimeo.