-Doz

After a week of hardly any sleep, on a list of 15 technically failing shots on corpse, rendering and animating whenever I could find the time for Popavich’s Dinosaurs, I was roughly 8 very simple shots away before they were all pulled from my list of revisions. The ones I had finished were fine. There were simple things like cloth animation that someone had forgotten to do, unfinished set modeling, lighting, and texturing… little things that break scenes for a film like ours. But these confuse me. There were scenes that could have been fixed in, oh I’d infer, 24-36 hours. Buildings needing bricks, boarding school yards needing poly grass, characters walking on that grass needing effectors on their feet so they could flatten said grass, etc. etc. etc. In the schema that are the pangs of animation, these are simple technical ventures that take longer to set up than they do to implement, which all the more confuses me because these aren’t things that are going to be phased out. They have to be done at one time or another, if not now, then later… and my major point is that later, I might not be able to work on the project. (shrug) I guess that’s just the force of nature.

INSTEAD however, I have been given scene 96 in Corpse. OH THAT SCENE. (-___-)
This scene has history.
This scene has drama.
This scene has a lot of anger and angst attached to it.
Want to know why?

A team of 30 people couldn’t do it correctly. THIRTY PEOPLE. I gave them frame sheets, paragraphs of explanation, exact timing, moral support, drawings, comparisons to similar scenes in other movies, everything you could give a team of animators. They still messed it up after handing it from person to person to person. Why? Chinese workers, animators especially, don’t like being told what to do. They find it disrespectful. This is why teachers over there are known for their harsh and explosive natures. Everyone is stubborn, everyone is their own island capable of taking care of themselves, yet they share everything. How odd, how disproportionate, how absurd, but -i digress.-

I’ll take the scene. I’ll look at the edit, play it out in my head, start the frame counter, time out every key, extreme, and breakdown frame, jot them down on a chart in my notebook, and knock this out, just like the old timers did it before there was a 3d. It’s not difficult… just a guy fighting a rhino. It’s just time consuming, and in a world of people who are the most greedy with the miniscule of time they need to dedicate to do a good job on something to collect a paycheck, there are few who will give even that at even an acceptable level of interest.

And this is not to say that I don’t have feelings. I know they are people with lives and personal interests that supersede their cog-like insertion into the world of animation. On the surface I am cold, robotic, even mean at times. I’m only this way because I’ve defined myself as a person of utility and skill, and at least expect people who are in a position to apply a skill to apply it in a way that is standardized by observation of works similar to occupation they’ve chosen, but this gives light to an even greater concern honestly when I look at the world. In our western world, people are growing lazy and apathetic. The thought of “I should aspire to be like this heroic ideal” has been replaced with “I should be accepted for who I am and where I am,” and the result is a generation of individuals who don’t really try hard at life. They don’t attempt to get steady jobs, don’t attempt to sustain enriched relationships or friendships, don’t conserve the family values passed down to them, and definitely don’t dress well. Too many times, I’ve come across a straggling animator that wanted to jump on a project with me, and as soon as they presented a reel or a sample or a resume and I made any form of constructive criticism, they were gone. That was the end. A friend of mine is the same. He asked me to get him a job. I asked for a resume and what skills had, and he became almost offended. “Why do I need skill? Just get me a job” (shakes head) Ah, but what can I do. It’s just the force of nature, the dismal tide that will pass and reap what it came to and then depart again, and those of us who are strong need only hold ground till it passes….

… like the supreme low in work I had a while back. Now I’m busy again, and saving up.

GALLERIES ARE STILL DOWN

SO MANY PHOTOS, SO MANY SKETCHES, SO MANY 3d RENDERS…. and I’m possibly only about an eighth of the way through organizing it all… roughly 8 years of content piled up waiting to be sorted, resorted, sorted again, deleted, edited, etc.

I swear, I do this thing now, where I grab an old sketchbook, turn to a page with an incomplete drawing, complete it, then turn to another, complete it, and so on, and so forth, when I’m bored. It’s become one of those things now.

If you want semi-current stuff, go to my deviantart:
http://arwingxl.deviantart.com

It’s 2 days before all work ends on Living Corpse the motion picture, so I’ve been a bit out of commission, doing anything possible to keep my edge up. Try this mixture of foods spread out through the day:

-Almonds
-red grapes
-swiss or mozzarella cheese
-baguette
-spinach salad

Oh yes. Coffee. You must have coffee. Delicious light-roasted coffee. A ratio of 8 cups to 3.3 table spoons works fine, though it’s wise to know my spoonfulls are rather on the heavy side.

That vibe isn’t very friendly, but then again, I’m not very friendly. Over the last year, I have stayed away from dating, visited very few friends, and gotten several shades lighter from avoiding the sun, despite my initiative to want to go to the beach. I say initiative to want, because I never actually got up and went, and regardless of that, things have turned out quite alright. I’ve become a lot more self-reliant in the past months, learning a few things about this life of semi solitude that I would formally have not stood for… letting oneself go every so often and laugh maniacally is one of them. It feels great and if nobody is around to witness the stereotypical sign of insanity, nobody can indeed accuse me of bearing that title, so all is well and good. Everyone should learn to laugh at themselves. (OH I CAN NAME SOME PEOPLE) Without humility, pride sets in, and soon enough, mortal vices and sins begin to grow. (which is another article altogether)

I’ve learned to laugh at my own mistakes and build upon them, I have taken to reading the works of Nietzsche, Voltaire, and Camus even more in these days that seem to blend together, and adapt a bit of their nihilism to my mode of thought. Why?

I need it. Too much of my personality is based and copied from others, and not enough is self-derived and truly creative. Look at the work I did at the beginning of Corpse compared to the scenes that I created near the end and you will see a much broader confidence. Oh wait. it’s not out yet. Wait until Holloween. I will post pictures, but you’ll have to buy it yourself if you want to WATCH it, or if you’re fucking CHEAP, you can pirate it….

…I guess. Just don’t let me catch you doing it, or you’ll be missing a few teeth.

Anyways.
Later

Also, what is it about people who try to drive all of their thoughts with emotion? Having any sort of sane debate with them usually ends in them jumping topics, breaking rules of logic just to make themselves sound right, and eventually getting offended and leaving the room. Usually, a conversation flows this way:

SPEAKER 1: views
SPEAKER 2: conflicting views
SPEAKER 1: delivers proof of argument
SPEAKER 2: delivers proof of argument
(proofs are weighed to see which is more valid)
SPEAKER 1 or 2 is the winner of the debate.

Instead, with an emotionally unstable person, it goes this way:

LOGIC: views
EMOTION: conflicting views
LOGIC: delivers proof of argument
EMOTION: delivers proof of argument
(proofs are weighed to see which are more valid)
EMOTION: defends argument if invalid
LOGIC: holds proof
EMOTION: defends argument with brute force
LOGIC: holds proof behind a defensive object
EMOTION: continues brute force until things get out hand/refuses to acknowledge LOGIC any further/walks away from situation
LOGIC: wonders what just happened

The point in all of this is not to say that emotional people are bad at debating and decision making. It’s that they treasure trust and face value over accuracy to such an extent that the moral attachment itself produces fear and manipulates the debater internally. To them, to be incorrect in a situation is to be distrusted and to lose the favor of the apposing party and onlookers, which in itself is a logical fallacy, admitting one cannot differentiate between being less knowledgeable on a subject than another and having a lower intrinsic worth as another. Emotional individuals will cling to this fallacy with a seemingly relentless grasp until the apposing party either closes the argument to any resolve, or admits that the individual in question will not lose any social worth.

What does this mean to me? *shrug* People are crazy. They break rules of communication because they are either bored or lazy. Pick one.