So, about 4 or 5 days ago i was checking my old email account (as some of you know i migrated all my accounts into one as i was sick of having several email accounts) when i came across a notification email from this blog saying that on the 26th December i had received a comment.....when i had moved all my accounts over to the new email it would seem that i neglected to change the notification email so i didn't receive it when it was sent.
Anyway this is now fixed so i will now receive any comments made on all my sites......so back to the comment, at first i was delighted to get a comment as i rarely do and its something i ask for a lot in my posts so as you can imagine i was rather happy, that was until i started reading it.
You see the comment was from an animation teacher (they didn't leave there name, they just signed it "An animation teacher") and this teacher had some questions for me about how i see animation and if i was being realistic thinking i could continue on this road when i find it hard to grasp animation even with me having a degree in it.....and this did hit me rather hard and it made me think about my life and where it was heading with animation, made me question if this career was the right one for me and if i should just move onto something else. But then i remember what i use to be like back in high school and how much love i had for animating and how i was in college when i would sit in my classes from the time it opened to the time it closed practicing and reading up on techniques to improve myself....staying there until the security would ask me to leave the building for the 3rd time. I ask myself where did that part of me go, it seemed as soon as i hit university the passion i had just went away, sure i would animate and do the assignments given to me but it no longer burned inside of me like it once did......the only times throughout my university life i had that fire in my was around the time of Animex when i would see the masters at work and run home to animate walks and runs.
After i had finished reading the comment thought and spent the night tossing and turning thinking about everything this person had said and taking it in a massively negative way i finally got the to point where i thought why can't i be like i use to be, whats stopping me from being the best i can be and getting that dream job i have wanted since i was 5 years old........nothing but myself and my motivation.
So i would just like to reply to this comment and follow up on all the points made to me and the questions ask.....
The Comment....
Hello, I've popped on here every now and again to see what you are doing and I sometimes use you as an example to students I teach animation to. However not in the best way so I thought it would be fair to send you a little message explaining what I think and I also have some questions.
Firstly, do you live with parents? How do you afford this lifestyle? Secondly what takes up most of your time as my students often ponder it, you don't mention a paid job so they think you animate once and a while and then watch a lot of videos and games on the Internet. You have Downloaded, shamelessly illegally a lot of tutorials, however don't seem to do any?
I would like to offer some advice if I might, you don't seem to be treating this like a full time job, I use you in class as you have an animation degree but very little animation, you follow animation mentor but don't seem to realise they spend 30+ hours a week animating in maya, you clearly do not. And they do this for 18 months solid.
A student suggested I messaged you as i constantly looking at your slow work pace but never telling you was unfair, another student suggested that I leave you a list of advice, otherwise this would be 'trolling'. So as you asked for advice then I will leave some.
1. Do you love animating or watching animation and the 'idea'of being an animator, if you find it so hard after doing a degree I may suggest a change of career? I like comfy chairs, I would hate making them..
2. How many hours a week do you spend animating? If the answer is honestly a lot, why don't we see more? I currently use you as an example of a lazy person who wants to be an animator without putting the hours in, I'd love to use your blog as something I could show my students how someone can be great at animation.
3. Go back to the basics, even just for a couple of months, timing especially, use more video reference to help you animate, some students are baffled by the graph editor, learn to master it, it's SO useful.
4. Get feedback ALL the time, don't animate without showing other animators, use forums like 11secondclub.
5. Act out your scene and record yourself before you touch maya, do a rough pencil test in flash before you start playing with models.
6. Watch more French animation like Gobelins and Supenfocom for inspiration.
7. I challenge you to prove me and my students wrong, that you're not a lazy aminator. Produce at least 3 seconds every week. An average animator in a studio in London would be doing 30 seconds a week. So after a year of work they would have several minutes worth.
8. Lastly, you have to treat this like a 9-5 if you're going to make it, you should not allow yourself breaks. Animators work at least 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. Do you? If not, you won't make it.
Please don't take this as an attack or anything like that, I simply wanted to say this to my students but can't all the time so I have used you as my example of someone who is deluded by thinking they can do a little and eventually make it, this Industry needs passion, commitment and sacrifice. The next time I show your blog I want it to use it to show how someone can learn the art.
I wish you all the best in your endeavours.
An animation teacher.
So you ask do i live with my parent and the answer is no, i moved out from my parent house after my first year of university as it made more sense to live closer to campus and now im finished university im living with a colleague from Uni and have been doing so for almost 2 years now, as for affording my lifestyle, im not sure where you are writing me from but in the UK there is something called Job Seekers which is a government run program to help people find work, while on this program you are entitled to an allowance to cover the costs of living and rent but it only just covers those things so doesn't leave much for anything else. On the 23rd February thought I will be returning to the hospital for further surgery on my legs and will be unable to work so i will be put onto Employment Support Allowance which is basically the same but your not expected to be looking for work as you are unable to.....so i hope that answers those questions.
As for what takes up my time, i must be honest and say looking for work, gaming, watching movies, socializing, watching tutorial videos on YouTUBE and Vimeo and also read a lot of Forums and when i have an idea for an animation; animating although these ideas are few and far apart.
I must say one thing though and that is you are right i have downloaded tutorial videos in the past most of which have been illegally obtained (although in a lot of cases those illegally obtained ones are from friends and staff members from university), but that was when i was in university and the resources at my university where very lacking and without those tutorials i would not have gotten through my course, thats not the say that the teaching wasn't wonderful but it was also lacking in a lot of places and it felt like only 3 of the many lectures teaching us actually cared about our education and wanted us to succeed in what we wanted to become.....sadly these lecturers where in high demand because of this so tutorials (no matter how they where obtained) where the only real options.
These days though all my tutorials are either payed for or are available for free online by the creators, i have downloaded every tutorial video on YouTUBE, Vimeo and ScreenCast that have been created by the account user, i have copied every article and forum post i can find on animations to word documents and put them on my harddrive, i have contacted animators and in some cases received tutorials off them that they might have made for a friend. Any of the tutorials i couldn't afford that i had from being a student i simply deleted as after my course was over i felt that i was in the real world now and i had to work for that content.
As for doing my own tutorials, your right i haven't and thats for the simple fact that i just dont feel that i could teach as well as some of the other animators out there on YouTUBE, Vimeo and ScreenCast (plus all the others), i dont feel i could add anymore then what they already are.....i have dont one tutorial on scene painting in PhotoShop and its had a few views but it was a simple tutorial that i hadn't seem on the net so i thought i would do it. But i guess i could do more tutorials and maybe make it a regular thing but as of right now with all the great stuff out there i just dont see a need for it, but that doesn't mean i dont give out advice and critiques on peoples work on forums like CGSociety and 11SecondClub i do this whenever i see an animator asking for help and i feel that i can give some useful advice. so please dont assume that i take without giving cos don't, i just give advice when i feel i can.
So on to the section about advice, now you're right i dont treat this like a full time job and i know that thats wrong and as i said somewhere above i use to treat this like it was my world until i hit university and it just became a chore that i had to do, the fun and excitement was gone and thats down to me......if things where feeling like it wasn't fun anymore i should have made it fun somehow but i didn't and over the past 5 years since then it just got worse and worse, but your comment helped me see that and i do thank you for that, and thats why im making a change but i'll get on to that in a bit. Now as far as Animation Mentor goes i know that they spend 30+ hours a week in Maya and trust me i did try that but i was trained in XSi and moving over to Maya was very difficult for me, i dont know why but i was like learning a whole new language...sure working on the Cerebus Movie helped work out some of the controls and talking to friends at last years Animex but there are soooooo many things in that package i just can't get my head around the the only way i have been able to do it so far is through watching those YouTUBE videos and seeing how others are doing it and reading forums and posting questions (sometime never receiving a response)....but i still try and use it and i still try and learn it but until i get a better grasp on it there is no way i could do 30+ hours of animation in it.....but as i say im working on that.
Now im going to break my answers down here into numbers to correspond to your questions.....
1. Do you love animating or watching animation and the 'idea'of being an animator, if you find it so hard after doing a degree I may suggest a change of career? I like comfy chairs, I would hate making them..
I do love animating and watching animations and also the idea of being an animators....these are not exclusive of each other and work well hand in hand. but i guess over the years the "passion" for animating has dwindled and i need to find it again, and i know that i will...sadly its taking this comment to push myself. I do still find it hard and thats through fault of my own and in a small case the teaching i've had but as i say its a small case....the majority of it is down to me, but this can and will change but thats not going to be a change of career because i know that with the right frame of mind an the right self motivation i can be so much more then what i am right now.
2. How many hours a week do you spend animating? If the answer is honestly a lot, why don't we see more? I currently use you as an example of a lazy person who wants to be an animator without putting the hours in, I'd love to use your blog as something I could show my students how someone can be great at animation.
Honestly, not as much as i should or could.....until your comment i actually didn't think anything of it but im actually now ashamed of myself for how little i do.....dont get my wrong i do still watch tutorials and sketch but i hardly animate, the last major thing i animated was the Dragon in the Cerebus Movie and that was back in November, i have been playing around with a scene using a sound bite i heard in an animation mentor students video but haven't uploaded anything on that since before i started work on the Dragon as i just left that it wasn't worth showing.....this was the last thing i uploaded but not the last time i worked on it here. But nobody can change this lack of work other then me and that what im going to do.
3. Go back to the basics, even just for a couple of months, timing especially, use more video reference to help you animate, some students are baffled by the graph editor, learn to master it, it's SO useful.
Funny you should say go back to basics, as i said at the start i wasn't until about 4 days ago i think when i got your post but before then i had made it a new years resolution to animate more and draw more so i started work on organizing my Guardian Training Course lessons that i had done back in 2009 into Text documents and adding the classes to my iCal so that each day i would have a lesson that i needed to do, these classes basically went over the 12 principles of animation working from bouncing ball to character movement. i completed the course once but i think i stopped uploading videos and updating blogs about it around around class 10 or 11, but this time around i'm going to be posting maybe every day or at the end of the week.
These classes ran for 3 months so as you can see my calendar is quite full....
Along with the classes i've also wrote out a little bit of AppleScript that randomly selects a text document from folder of around 50 on random days, these document have tasks in them such as "animate: a dog in a back garden in a kennel in Autumn" or "Draw: the three blind mice mounting climbing"....these could pop up every day or for 2 days and then nothing for the rest of the week. with this way of working im pushed into getting them done asap so that i dont have 3 animations on the go at once. As well as that some days it might randomly give me a image from my folder of over 1000 life models, still life photos and landscapes and i have to draw that in any style i wish, these will pop up instead of the tasks so not to give to many out.
So hopefully this will get me back to the basics and move me forward.....and if it doesn't, i'll just have to work even harder :)
(the script will be near to the bottom of this post)
4. Get feedback ALL the time, don't animate without showing other animators, use forums like 11secondclub.
I use to do this all the time, i use to submit my work to a load of different animation sites and send off my work to people i know in the industry to ask there opinion on work but i stopped doing, and im not to sure why i did but all i know is i did and i really shouldn't have....it was through those people that i learned more then i could ever hope to just sitting animating, they pointed me in the right direction and showed me where i was going wrong. so this is definitely something im going to start doing again.
5. Act out your scene and record yourself before you touch maya, do a rough pencil test in flash before you start playing with models.
This is something i do anyway but i never upload this stuff, i guess its just cos i get self-conscious or something, i never use to be....i was always the person willing to act out anything in the middle of a classroom but in University nobody ever really did that, we all sat at our desks and worked....it didn't real feel like you could just get up and act it out but i still record it and use it for animation reference in my own home.....just as i say i dont upload it, the most i do it upload a thumbnail sheet of the video from time to time.
As for the drawing things out in Flash, i use to use DigiCel FlipBook after i hear Eric Goldberg mention it and Jason Ryan, when i used Jason Ryans tutorials he would use FlipBook first and then move the 2d images over to Maya to work from and i just thought this was a perfect idea and started doing it myself....these days though i use Pencil which is an open source package for 2D animating, it gives a really nice traditional feel and it rather easy to use for quick posing sketches.
6. Watch more French animation like Gobelins and Supenfocom for inspiration.
I love Goelins stuff and im just gob smacked at how amazing it is, i can't say i've heard of Supenfocom but i will be sure to check them out. I never think to watch French animations though, i dont know why cos i know that the stuff the animation schools over there produce is phenomenal but it never crosses my mind to study there style in depth but i will be sure to from now on.
7. I challenge you to prove me and my students wrong, that you're not a lazy aminator. Produce at least 3 seconds every week. An average animator in a studio in London would be doing 30 seconds a week. So after a year of work they would have several minutes worth.
With the scheduled i've set out for myself this is a challenge that i could easliy accept but what i will do is i will do an animation separate to the guardian classes, if an animation task is selected at random then i will do that one otherwise i will create another one for this purpose but i will be doing an animation at least 3 seconds long a week.
8. Lastly, you have to treat this like a 9-5 if you're going to make it, you should not allow yourself breaks. Animators work at least 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. Do you? If not, you won't make it.
This is something i strongly intend on doing, my sleep hours ain't as normal as i would like them to be....for instance as im typing this its going on to 3:20am but i was adamant that i would get back to you as soon as possible.
But even if my sleeping pattern isn't "normal" i will still be sure to work the 7 hours (if not more) a day to ensure that i get the most out of what i know i can do.
You say at the end of you comment not to take this as an attack and as said before, at first i did take it as an attack on me but after a while and after sleeping on it i thought of it as a push as something i could prove myself to, i know i have the passion (even if it isn't as strong as it use to be, but will be again and more) and i can show i have the commitment and the sacrifice needed. animation use to be everything to me and i have given up and lost so many things in life through it.....pushed people away to work on animation and in turn lost them. so i know i have what it take to get to the level i need to be at, now i just need to show it and i intend on doing just that.
Thank you for your comment and thank you for motivating me, i really wish someone like you had been there pushing me like this throughout my university study and there after.
Your students are lucky to have you are there teacher and i hope that the next time you use my blog as an example in class its in a good light. unless of course your showing this post in which case it just me ranting on for over 3800+ words :)
anyway, all the best and thank you again.
An Animator
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So for the people who didn't just read all that (and if you did, wow you must love reading) i've been working on a AppleScript that randomly picks a animation or drawing task from a folder and thats your task for the day.....its a simple script that only requires a little editing to make it work for you.
Now as you've probably guessed with it being AppleScript this is Mac only so im sorry Windows and Linux users but i might be able to make a .bat file or something at some point but at the moment i use Mac so it made sense for me to make it on Mac.
There are 2 scripts to this and both really simple to edit to make them work for you....the first is a random image script that pulls a random image from a folder on your computer for you to draw..the second is one that gives you a task to work from...both are needed.
So heres the random image script....
So this code will select the an image in a folder for you to draw.....now to make it work with your computer place this code into AppleScript Editor and change the following lines that are in green.
if (count items) of folder "Path To Drawing Tasks"
Change this one to the location of the folder that holds all the images you want to be selected for random drawing tasks.......so if it was on your desktop (i would suggest somewhere other then desktop like Document so not to get accidentally deleted) you would put
"Macintosh HD:Users:<your username>:Desktop:Images:"
As an example heres mine....
if (count items) of folder "MonkeyBook Pro:Users:Monkey:Documents:Guardian Classes:Drawing Tasks:"
see how mine starts with MonkeyBook Pro, this is because that is the name of my harddrive, if yours is different the default "Macintosh HD" then be sure to change it as well...mine is also located in a different folder other then Desktop so mine goes through my Documents folder then the Guardian Classes folder and then finally to the Drawing Tasks folder...be sure to end it with :"
next line is.....
tell application "Finder"
activate
open "Path to Drawing Tasks"
this is the same location as the first one so just copy and past what you replace the green with into this one as well.
the next line we need to change is....
set randomImage to some file of folder "Path To Drawing Tasks"
Once again its the same path as before so just copy and past it in.
Finally (for this bit of code) we need to change the location of where the completed tasks will go, this is so you dont get the same drawing over and over again.
move randomImage to folder "Path To Completed Tasks"
so we need to put where the completed task folder is....for instance if it was in on your desktop like the image folder then you would put Completed Tasks instead of Images and you would get something like this...
"Macintosh HD:Users:<your username>:Desktop:Images:"
as an example heres mine....
now thats done we just need to save it as an application so go to File-Save then in the drop down that says "script" select Application and call it anything you like although i would suggest RandomImage and place it somewhere that its not going to get deleted. (Do Not Put It In Either Of The Folders We Just Created)
Now onto the second script.....heres the random task script....
So this code will select the tasks for the folder.....so same again, place this code into AppleScript Editor and change the following lines that are in green.
set filepath to POSIX path of "Path to RandomImage.app"
Change this one to the location of your RandomImage.app (or what ever you called it)...so if it was on your desktop you would put "Macintosh HD:Users:<your username>:Desktop:RandomImage.app"
as an example heres what mine looks like....
set filepath to POSIX path of "MonkeyBook Pro:Users:Monkey:Documents:Apple Scripts:RandomImage.app"
so we take this line.....
if (count items) of folder "Path To Tasks Folder"
and we change it to the location of the task....so if it was on your desktop you would put.
"Macintosh HD:Users:<your username>:Desktop:Tasks:"
and as an example heres mine....(sorry i keep taking like your 3 year olds but i want to make it as easy as possible)
if (count items) of folder "MonkeyBook Pro:Users:Monkey:Documents:Guardian Classes:Surprise Task:"
Next line is this one....
tell application "Finder"
activate
open "Path to Tasks Folder"
Same as the last path so just copy and past it in there and it should be fine...
Next line is.....
set random_file to some file of folder "Path To Tasks Folder"
and again its the same path so just copy and past.
finally we have this line....
move random_file to folder "Path To Completed Task Folder"
Now this one is the same as the one from the other script...its just the place that all the finished tasks go so that you aren't cluttered with the same thing over and over again.
and thats it, just save it as a script and place it in a location that isn't going to get deleted....if i could make a suggestion, i have a folder in my Documents folder called AppleScripts that i keep all my scripts, its keeps things tidy and you know where they are so you might want to as well.
Now comes the REALLY EASY part.....open up iCal and start a new calendar called AppleScript (or anything you like).
Then once you've made that new calendar make a new event...
and thats is your done....if you want it to end at some point you can change the end date under repeat. but thats it, if you've done everything right and if i've explained it well enough you should have a script that randomly run on random days to give you a random task to do.
at the moment the script is set to give you a 2 in 10 change of getting a task but you can change this in the second script by changing these numbers....
random number from 1 to 10
if result is 4 then
else
if result is 8 then
by default 4 is the random image and 8 is the random task.....if you want to make it 50/50 but the random number from 1 to 4 the first result to 1 and the second result to 2.
so yeah thats it, if you have any problems with it just comment below and i'll do my best to solve it for you....just be sure to leave as much info as you can and if images are possible leave them as well.
Thank you and since this is the first post of the new year....HAPPY NEW YEAR :D
What I'm Saying
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