Animation & Deadliest Artist Lectures

When we had the animation lecture I didn’t really think we’d benefit from it being Art students but the guy who came in, actually worked on things like Star Wars Clone Wars is a big thing. He said things about designing characters and what not. He said things like when you’re designing character the limbs of them must be good to animate and he took us all through the process of how to go about animating which at the time I thought was very beneficial until the Gladiator project came along just a few months ago and we had to rig it.

I really struggled with the gladiator project; the rigging I thought was hard to do. Basically it’s about making the skeleton limbs all touch the necessary vertexes of the asset you’ve created. I honesty and truly don’t see a point in this, isn’t this what animators are for? I mean I’ve been told that it makes the animators job easier etc and it checks to make sure that the vertexes are moving correctly as they should but I still think the animators should do this, it should be there job, I mean trying not to complain or anything but I had hard enough time trying to design the geometry and texture the damn thing without this as well... I really don’t enjoy designing characters as anyone could tell.

Hope mine doesn't go this bad next time.

In the deadliest Artist lecture, well it was the Artists from Blitz just showing some their work and everyone just voting for who thought whose was cooler. It was interesting though, it taught us a lot about the importance of fine Art and traditional work. They showed us a lot of sculptures and works of other that they liked, and were inspired by. I remember one girl shouting: “No one really cares about fine Art! Everyone just wants to create cool stuff!” or something like that, I wouldn’t have liked to have been her after the lecturers and one of our tutors hearing that...

But anyway I thought that it was good and some of the works they showed us were just bizarre. I feel that you must first become a professional Artist before you can start producing things that almost make no sense but are seen as great? What I mean is, is that I’ve seen all different kinds of Art work like sculptures, traditional paintings, digital etc but some of it makes no sense to me as in 1998 an Artist called Chris Ofili won the turner prize by painting an image but making it out of elephant dung... I mean really?

Dung Anyone?

There’s lots of Art out there, but so much of it I just don’t understand, I guess things like that do have meaning but you’ve really got to look into it to understand. I remember being in college and thinking about painting I was studying at the time and thinking what they mean, such as The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali which is an image I’m obsessed with, people say there’s meaning behind everything in that image but is there really? Some people say that Dali could have just done it because he wanted to, but no one really knows... I think that’s why I like it so much but there’s questions there of what I think still to be answered. It’s kind of like gaming really, all the questions about it haven’t been answered yet and that possibly why I love it so much?

The Persistence Of Memory - Salvador Dali - 1931