End of the Semester

The semester has ended (so I’m late commenting on this) and the grades are slowly coming in. Very slowly.

Before this semester started, I was iffy about some of the classes I took and stoked about others. I knew I had to take Time, Motion and Communication; it’s required for my concentration and it’s something I should take either way. I was worried that, it being an animation class, I was going to hit the grounds in flames. I’m not very good with the abstract. When I look at something, I tend to see it for what it is, not what it might be. If I create a video about two people playing video games, I’m not making it with the intent of something else. The basic idea is “Eric and Glenn play Final Fantasy VII”. If you find that the video might represent brotherly love or childhood nostalgia, great, but those thoughts aren’t with me when filming.

This is the big reason I was and tend to be worried. I’m definitely in a major where it helps to be abstract and think in hard to compress thoughts. What happened though is that I actually learned. The Eric that went into TMC was not the same Eric that came out of TMC. If you look at my first work with typography to my last, or compare my first animated short to my second, the jump is ridiculous. I’m still not where I wish I was, and it’s a pain in the butt to be in a class with so many talented people, because I’ll always be behind just scratching to get to the middle class, but it was great to see real progress in my own ability. It was even good to be surrounded by talented people, to have to push myself and learn from their success. It’s a really cool thing to write a script that reads “General Zaroff is on his giant riding mole” and know that I’ll see it.

Which is another thing I learned about myself; even with animation, I’m a storyteller. My work is abstract or symbolic because my work is very much a story-centered one. Yes, my stories tend to be sad excuses for the medium, but they’re still a beginning, middle, and an end type of project. When I animated “A Most Dangerous Game”, I went in on how to tell the story best; camera shots, dialog, scenes, end joke. All I had at my hands for animation was just a tool to tell a story I normally couldn’t tell. That was the great realization about animation, and about my own style. I’m not so ashamed by skills with After Effects or Illustrator anymore because illustration isn’t my focus. The story is.

I was going to talk about my other classes, but that might run this a bit long. I’ll finish them up for the next blog.