I have officially completed my first year at MassArt! It has been a wonderful year, and I truly feel like I am where I should be, and doing what I should be doing. I feel like I really fit in with this school, this community, this area of study, and this lifestyle. All this newness has been at times a bit scary, but always exciting, and I think I’ve grown a lot by embracing it.

Bard feels so far away and long ago, but now I am able to look back and appreciate that time of my life, and look to the present and future with excitement. Being at there was not an entirely positive experience for me, but I had some good times and got a great education. More importantly, it really helped me to discover more about who I am and what I want to do with my life, and pushed me to take a huge leap which has brought me here. Now I’m taking charge of my life, doing work that I feel passionately about all of the time, and being a part of a community of passionate artists in a bustling little city, and I am LOVING it!

Yay! Is it next semester yet??

My full reel for Drawing for Animators! It feels nice to be able to see everything I’ve made this semester in one spread. This reel is mostly for grading purposes though, so I’m also in the process of compiling a shorter “best of” reel.

The figure dancing was a little bit I created today, since my professor suggested that we add some dynamic pose stuff to our reels. I used a snippet of old CSW dance concert footage for reference.

(Source: vimeo.com)

EXPORTING SHALL BE THE DEATH OF ME. Every second, it adds on a couple of minutes to the estimated time. I ALREADY RENDERED EVERYTHING SO IT SHOULDN’T TAKE FOREVER. WHY IS FINAL CUT SUCH A POOP. I’ve been holed up in this teeny tiny shooting studio (basically the size of a very small bathroom) for almost six and a half straight hours working on this final after working on it for 12 straight hours yesterday and plenty before that and I would like to leave to breathe some fresh air and take in non-flourescent/non-computer screen light and replenish my fluids and feed my stomach and rest my weary self pleeeeease.

The plus side: after today, I will be able to fully recover. This is my finals peak; it’s all downhill from here.

I’m finally back in the zone, and it feels so good! By “the zone” I mean the working zone.

During the past week or so, I was feeling really out of the zone; I would try to hunker down and work on my Time final and did all that I could to make my work environment and mindset optimal, but it just wasn’t happening. I felt unmotivated, uninspired, and unexcited, and as a result, the animating was extreeemely slow-going. But yesterday, somehow everything clicked into place.

I think it was because of my meeting with my Time professor. She wanted to have individual meetings with all of her students to check our progress on our finals. Before the meeting, I felt bad about only having two and a half flipbooks to present, and wasn’t sure if my professor would get what I was going for or find it entertaining at all. But the meeting ended up being SO uplifting and creatively energizing! My professor loved what I had done so far, was impressed with the amount of frames, and seemed excited about the final product. I’ve realized more and more that with in the case of most art forms, feedback is scary but completely necessary while you’re in progress as well as when you think you’ve finished. I’m always afraid and embarrassed to show people my work, but when you’ve been working on something by yourself for a while it’s easy to lose faith in your work’s effect on an audience, because you don’t HAVE an audience. You have to get feedback from others to see if your ideas are effective outside of your own head. Getting affirmation from others that your art DOES work outside of your own head is incredibly rejuvenating! And if it doesn’t work outside of your own head, then at least now you’ll know why, and can figure out how to fix it.

I animated like a beast yesterday; I did nothing but animate steadily from the afternoon until 11:30 at night. I feel completely recharged and ready to roll! Thank goodness, because I have fewer than two weeks of school left, and I’ve got stuff to do! I have to finish animating my Time final, record sound for it and compile it all together, study for a final Byzantine Art History quiz, write a final version of my script, go to the zoo and make a bunch of animated animal studies, re-shoot my charcoal animation, and finish my short and long animation reels with titles and credits. But it all feels so doable! Huzzah!

Also I did a DEEP CLEANING of my room today (we’re talkin’ vacuuming, dusting, window-cleaning, and scrubbing all of the charcoal, paint, and pastel out of my carpet), which has very much added to my good mood. I just need to admit it: I love cleaning, and I don’t care who knows! It makes me so happy.

My final project for Time is officially in-progress. 50 frames down, roughly 850 to go. I figure if I fill up one 100-page flipbook per day for the next 8-9 days, I should be golden. Which sounds wonderfully simple until I actually think about having to maintain that kind of diligence and drawing stamina…

Either this week or next week, my animation class is going to the ZOO to animate the animals!!!!!