*A still from the animation "Joy Street" by Suzan Pitt*
*Revised concept file* Approach: This week I began to consider why I am spending so much time on researching the idea of existentialism involving humor, to create an animation from such, and the consideration of how we choose to live compared to others. I also questioned why my project was important to myself or to anyone around me. In the progress towards understanding humor more, I realized that humor (from my readings) was often just a coping device to hold ourselves together in a tangled world of emotional distress. It's a release of chemicals that we need to balance, but is also an abusive relationship between our own chemical balance and feeling secure with our minds. I feel lost with this project, I feel like my own sense of humor has now dissipated exponentially based on my readings. As I had found before, having knowledge can correlate to having less of a sense of humor, but this could also be a change in what I determinedly find funny in the first place. I didn't get as much work done as I'd hoped (aimed more towards my creation of a solid script and animatic), and some books that I wanted to investigate were either checked out, or were too 'rare' for the library to lend to me. But, seeing as what these initial readings have caused, I don't feel like I should go any further just yet with my research, and focus more on creating. Other classes have definitely helped with creating more and finding a calming atmosphere in the realm of animation and modeling, but don't feel as rewarding as doing my own work and exploring the connections that I could be making to my creative output and myself. Choices Made: I've decided that I overloaded myself with the amount of readings, and have some apprehension reading more into the topics I have decided to explore. I think the current mental state of our beings is often conducive to the quality/the type of work that is created. Being in the correct mindset makes all the difference when attempting to convey mood, acquiring the 'zenith' and immersion of our technical skill, and abdicating ourselves completely to the mundane/archaic routines that may be holding back our process. My professor suggested some short films for me to watch. Many of the films included dark themes associated with death, life, personal tragedy, hallucinogenic happenstances, and ludicrous actions that revolved around the ignorant nature of humanistic actions and the caveats associated with our own self-preservation. Many of them were beautifully animated, making them all the better to analyze and extrapolate the necessary elements needed to cobble together a reasonable/completely ridiculous theme behind the actions. Something that stood out to me, was the loss of others versus myself. I've had many relationships between friends and family gone due to death, suicide, and distancing ourselves altogether. Something that always came back to my mind was my Grandfather, Wayne. When he died, I found only one aspect to remember him by: a single silver coin that had been rubbed down till it was smooth...abnormally smooth, like someone had been holding it for years and years. I asked my grandmother if it was his, and she hadn't a clue whether or not it was. I didn't care, it reminded me of him. I want to take that coin and find the largest frame possible and place it right in the center, just to give some sort of feeling of wholeness and closure to a memory. Something larger than myself and what I could hope to understand; relating back to my topic: something existential and humorously small that it still holds a large emotional impact on myself. Relevant Sources: Below are the [completed] notes that I compiled from the readings of Stephen Leacock, articles relating to finding humor in animation, and some quick notes on the animations that I found relating to darker themes in animation.
Questions Raised & Needs:
My next steps include really hammering down a script, getting Chuck to a comfortable point of where I feel like he can be utilized in my 2D/3D crossover, and pushing towards feeling okay with how this animation is going to look. I need to drop my reservations about how this animation will turn out and being to create. I think having the drive to create and analyze after it has been done, but also reflect on an in-progress bias is the way to go at this point. I'm not necessarily sure how I want to proceed now, but that shouldn't stop me. -Taylor Olsen Comments are closed.
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May 2020
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