For the ‘points of entelechy’ workshop, we’re encouraged to engage in spontaneous and experimental animation, allowing ourselves to be loose and fast in our processes and caring more about the journey than the end result. I felt that this would be a good workshop for me, as I tend to focus a lot on the end results of my projects and somewhat neglect the importance of a varied and polished process behind creating what I do; for example, I went straight on to my animation for my 2nd year final project instead of refining the storyboard more, valuing the end result more than the equally important processing and planning stages. I felt that an ability to work loosely would serve to make me less rigid in my process, and more willing to explore ideas to their fullest potential.

Unfortunately a timetable clash meant that I missed the first session, so I’ll be writing about my experience on the 2nd one. The task this time was to create an infinite loop animation; we would keep it at 12 frames and work straight ahead, making random shapes turn into other random ones to create the illusion of a never ending loop.

There wasn’t much of a planning process for this animation, which intimidated me at first; there were no rules as to how it should’ve looked, and we didn’t get the chance to draw any keyframes or rough planning; it was truly a spontaneous piece. Although I felt unsure of myself at first, I decided to let loose and just have fun with my film; I kept it abstract, not worrying too much about any character designs, narrative or composition, and focusing on creating something unique and spontaneous in the moment. I gradually kept on adding to my film until the space was all filled up;

Overall, I feel that this was a very helpful and informative session for me. I was able to leave my comfort zone a bit; my film doesn’t feature the clean and simplistic line art of my usual pieces, or the polished character designs, but in a way I feel this served as an advantage. I was able to escape my usual creative process and state of mind, allowing me to think outside of the box and be more loose; rather than considering how well the piece would come together, I focused on keeping it constant and spontaneous. I feel that if I apply a more loose thinking and animation style to my pieces, I can avoid becoming too rigid and one track minded about my creations; I can prevent them from all feeling and looking the same by allowing myself to be loose and rough in my process. I think I’ve learned through this workshop that not everything I create has to be super pretty and finished; some things can be rough, experimental and even unsightly, as a means to my end. Being less sure of what I’m doing can sometimes work in my favour, as it allows me to experiment and push my work visually to it’s full potential without any predetermined idea of what it should look like. I’ll definitely apply my learnings to my future work, and I look forward to trying out more unconventional ways of creating an animation in the future.

Update: Workshop 1

As workshop 1 ran for a 2nd time, I attended to catch up on what I had missed. The first thing we did was watch some animation films that made heavy use of loops; Although the motions were looped, the animations remained engaging and never felt too repetitive. This made me think about the fact that sometimes, less can be more; sometimes, using methods that save time can be just as effective as doing something that takes a long time, and effective planning can make the production process run smoother. I think I’ll definitely constantly try to refine my ideas and make them simplistic without making them too basic, to save myself some time when making my film.

The task for this session was a chill one; to free handily make marks on paper based on music that was played to us, without thinking too much about what the end result would look like.

My first drawing came out like this. Although there was no planning or meaning, I think it looks interesting; I feel like it could be developed into an interesting animation effect, using a similar straight ahead technique to the one I used in the 2nd session. I think drawing freely without worrying about what it looks like is useful, and could be a good way of coming up with unique structures and effects for an animation.

This was my drawing for the 2nd part of the practice, where we had to do the same thing, but develop any shapes that we felt we could recognise into fuller figures.