Today was the first presentation for all final year animation students. People from companies like Lucasfilm and Double Negative came by to offer critique as well. It was a pretty big affair. And we can probably expect a few more of these throughout our final year.
Needless to say, all of us didn’t get enough sleep. For me, I was awake since noon on Wednesday. Right now, it is 11pm on a Friday. Minus off the four blissful hours that I’ve had the chance in snooze-land this morning, this makes about fifty-five hours of dying neurons so far… and counting.
(Okay, so I deserve it for slacking off for the whole of Wednesday to only start editing my animatic at 4.30am on Thursday, but still. And srsly FYP was on my mind for the whole of Wednesday yo. I was merely paralysed by the thought of it. Yea. That’s it.)
For those who say they never see me post my work here nowadays, here’s the stuff that I showed for presentation, i.e. everything that I made yesterday to show for something for my FYP:
Concept art x 4
And a mock up claymation showing the locomotion of an earthworm and the various methods of animating fish surfacing from the waters (all unsatisfactory methods, I may add. Have come up with a new plan to animate these nasty buggers).
The guy from Lucasfilm asked how long I took to animate this, and I hazarded a guess of 2 hours.
Well I just checked the EXIF data and apparently I did it in one hour and eleven minutes. Wow! Considering that I took lots of breaks in between to lie on my bed and mould the clay absent-mindedly, and including taking time off to consider how I could animate the f*ing fish (damn hard), this is not bad, not bad at all. It was defnitely the longest one hour and eleven minutes of my life though.
The presentation itself was blah. I got tongue-tied in the beginning from being so nervous (hello, one whole row of tired angmohs plus a stern-faced asian guy as critics? No tq!!! Hahaha actually the angmohs were friendly la).
After I presented, I was painfully aware of the silence. For a moment I thought that they had nothing to comment because I didn’t offer enough information, or my animation sucked so much that they were stunned into silence. And then the questions came. Boy, was the platinum blonde scaryyyyyy! I really had no intention of attributing meaning for my animation, but she somehow managed to make me crap out some semblances of meaning on the spot– the one where I randomly spouted that the shot of the baby birds eating the mum and then turning into a book could probably be taken as a commentary of Singapore’s strict education system was seriously off the top of my head. Random crap is random.
Now I need to conjure up more of such ‘meanings’ and incorporate into my animation, possibly even changing the whole thing. Because being a simple visual aesthetic animation isn’t good enough :( Also, she accused me of with-holding such meanings from them, pretending that my animation was merely superficially interested in aesthetics.
But I am innocentttttt! I also dunno why I use clay! And I really thought that a book would be cool that’s why it was there… Lucasfilm guy laughed when I said that, and said he at least appreciated my honesty… he also said that the meanings in my choices could probably be subconscious. But random choice is random…
She even said that she wasn’t trying to be horrid to me, because she couldn’t do the beautiful things that I did (er okay?), but she merely was tired and hungry… lol that disclaimer only served to make me more traumatised. Dunno la, overall I still respect what she said. It’s always the harsh critics that get me going I guess. Btw she was as fierce as my primary school English teacher. Scared stiff? You bet.
After I presented, Jerms and Kenken asked how my lungs were doing, because I smoked so much. I couldn’t hear them at all (probably selective deafness from the after-shock of the presentation) until Shasha repeated what they said and then translated the lame joke to me. Because in Singapore lingo, ’smoking’ has another meaning besides the literal Marlborough kind. To ’smoke’ is to pull the wool over someone else’s eyes, i.e. to crap the shit out of a presentation/exam etc. Think of a smoke-screen and there you have the meaning ^^; And then a few other people said I was power lol tqtq! But lame animation is still lame :((((
I suppose this is my wake up call to getting serious about FYP. Time will tell how my motivation fares.
At the end of it, I really do work best under stress and deadlines. As quoted from a cute stamp printed from a gift shop in Australia many many years ago when Ti and I wandered into a shop to buy some stickers- Hassle me, I thrive on stress.
Now I go to sleep.
Recent Comments