Is All of It in Vain? Has Been Completed. Here Are My Thoughts.
To follow up on my progress with my latest animation, Is All of It in Vain?, my biggest announcement is that I am done with it. But I also have some thoughts on the process and what it has taught me about myself as an artist and animator. In this blog entry, I will be sharing those thoughts.
The first thing I want to say, right up front, was that this was a hard one to do. The biggest reason for it being so difficult was that I have never drawn an animation using pencil and paper before, always preferring instead to use Photoshop and Adobe Animate, (but I have always drawn my animations frame by frame, and that won’t ever change.) Using analog media was an entirely new experience for me, and I really like the result far better than the result I would have gotten if I had done this on the computer instead, in spite of the fact that it was more difficult to do it this way. Moral of the story: better results take more effort!
And because the use of analog media was, from an aesthetic standpoint, an improvement over digital media, it has opened the door to a lot of possibilities in my animation work that I had not previously considered. In animations such as Crazy Eyes and Single, I used Adobe Animate for the hand drawn parts, which worked well enough, but the difference analog media would have made is unquestionable. And now I know I can! (Although if there are any constraints on time or resources, I can always use the computer, even though now I prefer not to. It’s still an option.)
As far as what it has taught me about myself as an artist: while I can see that there has been a huge payoff in using analog media, I find that this animation deviates from the style I normally work in. I usually mix hand-drawn elements with collage cutouts, live action footage, and some claymation, and while this was a fun and interesting challenge, it doesn’t quite match my usual style. It doesn’t make it a bad animation by any means, nor does it mean I’m not happy with it. It just means I stretched my horizons quite a lot, which is ultimately a good thing!
Also, I will admit that I deliberately deviated from the sunny, silly, and positive mood that encompasses much of my work because I wanted to do something more heartfelt. I, like many others, suffer from depression and anxiety, and although I do have faith in a higher purpose, I realize that there are things in the world that can sometimes challenge that faith, and I’m certainly not immune to that. So many other people have the same existential questions, and I wanted to appeal to those questions in a sincere way, which means that sometimes I have to stop being crazy, happy, and silly, and take the time and space to show that vulnerability that most of us share. So many of us are adrift in a world that often doesn’t seem to make any sense, and I understand that, which is why I chose this subject matter even if it isn’t what I am usually known for.
As a side note, here is all the paper I used to create this animation. I must have gone through about five 100-sheet pads of sketch paper!
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