"It is a lonely profession, at least it was when I worked on my pictures, but the loneliness, accompanied by much frustration and pain, was always outweighed by the excitement of seeing my creatures move in the same "reality" as humans. The thrill of breathing "life" into one's own creations and at the same time giving them individual personalities makes an animator's work uniquely exciting." -Ray Harryhausen Today I went to class and once again, I told my story, however I redid ALL my boards to look better, the way I want them to look, I thought they were pretty fucking solid. I mean there are a few panels I really need to fix!
You can see, maybe I am wrong:
This is some of the stuff my mentor fixed, but was not shown during class because...He's not really my mentor, he's just another awesome teacher. But anyway continue:
(That last panel means "end" in Chinese.)
So I mean, there's obviously some shots that you can see that I to need work on, but once again, they told me the same exact thing is that, "I need to think about it more." COME ON IT'S THE 3RD FUCKING WEEK, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! So I went up to one of the teachers after class and asked, "I can you tell me what I need to work on? What is it that I need to "think about." "
The teacher said, "Well, I mean if it is the newspaper you want people to see, then you have to hold the frame."
I said, "Yes, of course, but this is a storyboard not an animatic, so what is unclear to you that I should fix?"
He told me that basically the piece is too conceptual, people don't understand conceptual things and that I should keep thinking about it.
I like abstract, conceptual, contextual animations. I like people to THINK about what they are watching. Why am I leading your eye this way? Why is he doing that?
I gave the teacher one look that said, "I don't care anymore I'm going to do it."
I said nothing else, I didn't say thank you, I just left. I got so frustrated that I went up to the animation studio and started crying out of anger and frustration because I didn't understand what they wanted.
My mentor (Wai laosi) told me that I need to do it, I just need to start the animation and he could see my anger and frustration because he was the one helping me throughout the whole animation. He understood from the moment I told him the first version. He said a lot of animation teachers in China don't do conceptual pieces like that and only do animation in terms of "jokes" or kid animation.
So he told me not to listen to them and that I should start doing the animation regardless to what they are saying. Then show them the actual piece when I am done because that is the only way they will understand.
Usually I push the limits on a lot of things, I see how far I can get away with things in art. But here I am scared, I don't know what to expect. And they don't give good critiques. I feel I have pushed the limits anyway on accident, If you see on the 11th page there is a bowl with chopsticks in the middle of it. In Chinese superstition that means that you are feeding the dead. I used it as a foreshadow for whatever is coming up next, which involves death.
When I got to that page during class everyone started talking, and being really surprised that I put that in there.
I'm doing my animatic tomorrow, (apparently we don't have class tomorrow...to go and DRAW our storyboards.) we were suppose to have our storyboards today, the teacher gave everyone 3 days to do it and cut monday's class so they can finish it. No one did it except for me and this other kid who decided to do an animatic.
I'm trying really, really hard to understand the conservative ways of China, but coming from America it's really hard. I had so much freedom back in the states and now I have all these restrictions and no freedom to think. So far, no one has this idea that I have in my class. So I feel good about it.
