Where do ideas come from (again)

willow pattern...mount fuji

Sometimes ideas just come, but sometimes you have to rummage about for them. Sometimes I envy people who see a beautiful landscape and paint it because 'wow!', but animation doesn't really work like that....so...I'm looking for a pair of willow-pattern earrings to replace some I lost, and found these worn fragments somewhere in the depths of ebay(?). They were the 'wow!' The story developed from china plates, from the idea that Willow Pattern tells a whole story and represents a whole world with a different culture, time, and geography. Then, as I had failed to plan the story got stuck in scones and cake, (possibly hungry??) So I started thinking about a resolution I had made to try to make art that had some kind of purpose. Not like a teapot, more like a Banksy. All Art as Propaganda. The story developed organically (artspeak for saying I wondered around blundering into ideas and discarding or adapting them on something of a well-informed whim) with ideas about climate change and world destruction. Those came from playing in a samba band associated with Extinction Rebellion, and from living for the past 3 years in the middle of hideous and large-scale roadworks on the M1. This was when the polar bear mugs (not traditional willow pattern) were introduced. The title came last...when I had worked out what the point of it all was...something Id seen on a placard at a demo (There is no) Planet B.
Obviously, I was never cut out to work in an animation house where planning is absolutely vital. But the process, the figuring it out as you go...that's the challenge and the fun part. Although drawing scones is also fun.

Home (again), home again, dancing a jig

caddis fly contemplates the nature of home

The film of HOME is finally finished, though I doubt it is more eloquent than the blog post about it from earlier in the year! perhaps I should write more and draw less. It happened. It was fun. I found time to untangle the stupidity of simultaneously
*working on 3 films at the same time - 2 finished, one still not, 
*recreating a 4th film which was lost (when you keep thinking, but wasn't there another version of this, with woodlice in...but you can't find it and start to wonder if you only dreamt it...and then find a crappy DVD copy in the bottom drawer-under-the-bed of the hard drive and manage to extract the soundtrack to go with the 3 million bitmap images)
*writing a narrative (NARRATIVE! No more sloppy organic evolution of non-linear wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey ..oh no sorry that's a quote from Dr Who) about a woman who is also a cactus...for which idea I am indebted to a wet afternoon at a craft fair and a Joni Mitchell track, and mostly 
*running. Which has kind of taken over my life until after September 8th (Great North Run).
From now on maybe stick to one thing at a time? Oh wait, I could make an animation about running. Finally a proper use for the walk/run cycle cliche.

So I finished another film ("Man")

... big news. Not really, but it has already created the need for another film. A follow-on, a deeper exploration of some of the ideas I floated past in this one:
1. the representation of gender and why do we put up with it.
2. the generation of ideas, how and where does it happen.
3. sorts of wooduct-ty marks and how to economically animate them
4. blah blah something to do with the presence of the artist within the work...the self-referential recursive fractal thingummy.
This happens when you have a tiny animation trying to contain several big ideas.
Your head gets full.
Sometimes of fish.

ideas...and how to catch them

(from a series "musing with mates").
What if ideas are just floating around in the air like Terry Pratchett suggests, waiting for a receptive mind to provide a conduit - an earth? When I was very young, I imagined babies as little souls, floating around over the earth waiting for parents to call them down and come and be born. That they watched, hopeful, in the skies when potential parents began to speak about starting a family, nudging one another - "you'll be next". This is what you get for teaching obscure tenets of Catholicism to children too young to understand...Similarly, what if ideas, like energy, like static before a storm, bursting to discharge, were hopefully seeking a receptive mind...like a hyperintelligent alien, having travelled millions of miles through vaccuuous space, and seeking someone to whom it could pass its momentous message from another galaxy...How to become such a mind...is there an artists' tinfoil hat or antenna? a drug as Carlos believed? a head tattoo, a magic sign like a crop circle which will attract them?

Or maybe, as Richard suggests, the creative mind is a muscle like any other which needs training, regular exercise, and a warm-up before getting up to speed. A warm-up like a series of bad, weak ideas you toy with and discard. Or a knockabout, a conversation with a friend, batting idea-ettes back and forth but neither trying to score a point... Or a blog... 
Do your scales, run through the exercises and get ready to Be Creative.

Like a visit to the gym, a visit to Being Creative needs some preparation. Empty your head. Transfer those things it is full of to paper, or sort them out - and they are gone. Drive them out with tiredness from a long walk, with the excruciating boredom of a staff meeting, with astonishment at some fabulous thing seen or heard that you can immerse yourself in, beside which the boring little idea of worrying about the leaking roof, remembering the laundry or caring why whatshername never posts on your facebook anymore will wither in embarrassment and shuffle off to a sleepless sunday night. Play with a ball of wool, a cat, or the garden.

Dress suitably. Comfortable clothes that will not restrict the free movement of ideas. Desperately chic vintage weirdness. Pyjamas. Your brother's old seacadet jumper which is too tight and unravelling at the cuffs. Does it help, if you look and feel like An Artist? Or just provide a handy excuse for days when the ideas don't seem to come..?

Always carry a pencil, a pen, paper; something to occupy your hands, something which provides sensory feedback - the sound of graphite scratching on paper, the vibration from the drawing action travelling up your arm. If you are chosen by an idea, if you spot one passing by, if you sense one bubbling up from some corner of your mind, write it down. Draw it. Doodle, expand, experiment...shamelessly. Ignore the CCTV, ignore everything...

Immediately, the idea will begin to evolve, to morph, to develop an attitude...it will decide who or what it wants to become. There will need to be a period of negotiation, which may be long-drawn-out and fruitful; your work may become a true collaboration between yourself and the idea... Like the characters in a novel you might try to write, the ideas will refine their personalities ; they will become confident and more assertive and eventually undermine your illusion of control. Help them to satisfying conclusion, to a narrative integrity, to a beautiful or a meaningful or an ecstatic expression. Help them communicate themselves and then, if you love them, let them go.

and afterwards, they schlepped

Yes...after the joy of making the film, hawking the finished product round, trying to get exhibitions or showings, doing the paperwork and creating special versions of the film just for one portal is deeply boring. and the downside of being a one-woman band is that you have to do all that, when the only bit you are competent at is long-completed and your head has skipped ahead to the next story idea

(There will be FISH. Inside someone's head. an expanding head. and people with REALLY long arms. and maybe dancers. and men which turn into women and women which turn into men. the fish might come out of a book. maybe the people turn into fish...why? why not?)

maturing. fermenting? or just preserved for later... 

Ideas crash together like in dreams, throwing up images from the recent holiday (black-and-white sea. mermaids. tiny ponds), Thursday's Dance performance (more anatomically-correct characters, so the distortions of a limb or a movement are more apparent?) and random things seen or heard (knitted sheds! pop-up cards, summerhouses on a mountaintop, an ancient man practicing the organ in church while the churchbell chimed 3pm. Running into an old friend and having a random conversation about cocktail dresses)

Something is needed to stir these up and precipitate out a useful narrative. Apparently, the annoyance factor of crappy technology (mine or someone else's) can in fact provide this. The screaming frustration of non-user-friendly systems with outdated technology (WHY do you still only accept onscreen viewers in 4:3? Hands up any animator not using 16:9?? WHY do you think it wont matter if you squash my movie to fit, just as though the visuals weren't important. It's a film, not Jam. Oh, wait...Jam??)

I understand some festivals operate on a tiny budget with harassed volunteers, and I am happy to support - with patience if possible - underfunded artist/filmmaker-led indy initiatives. But when festivals with a long pedigree and a big budgets, or festival portals which broker applications get it (the technology, the interface design, the dead links and translations-into-English which suddenly aren't, the missing vital information (we ONLY accept DCPs))wrong you feel like asking - AGAIN - why is it always artists paying for the right to beg to show their work? If the arts are big business, and Art is the commodity, why is the artist the one who doesn't make any money out of all this. If film matters, if animation is interesting, then how come all the ticket money doesn't provide the successful filmmaker with even a measly return of the entry fee?

and, instead of getting steamed up about this, can I make an animation about it?

15 second hero

I thought a minute was an interesting challenge but instagram gives you 15 seconds... and I've just completed 24 animations of less than 15 seconds for the advent calendar. Besides the strangeness of thinking so much about xmas in October, there is the challenge of a narrative that can unfold so quickly but which has some kind of meaning, isn't just a oneline joke. Something with a character - a "hero" you can care about and believe in. (15 second hero -better than 3 minute hero? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA-gTRqqTkM hmm.).

Definitely fun to do: normally animations take so long that one good idea lasts for months - even with
random sidebars and plot changes. Doing this meant having several ideas every day, discarding the weaker ones and the ones that are too hard to draw (well I did learn something from the squid-in-a-rubber-suit experience) and still having two left that I could run with. It was a good workout, another learning curve...and just hope some people will see them - especially since they have a limited shelf life! Although, I have been in discussion about a Channukah calendar...
UPDATE: having finished at least the first rush of these, going back to the film I was making before - and kind of stuck on...messing with extracts from it has helped me improve the "big" film (ooh could even be 5 minutes) and tighten up the storyline. A useful reminder of the creative power of playing, and of the need sometimes to look away and be prepared to follow ludicrous tangents in order to find the best direction...

Taking your ideas for a walk

...well no, nothing to do with fractals, tiny round islands or things not being what they seem. In fact the next film idea turns out to be about treadmills, repetition, and mechanical wind-up toys. Kafka and Tim Burton hang out in The Magic Roundabout. I suppose, if I had a brief...a client, a commission... I could start from there and it would be fractals all the way but if it's up to me then I can go any direction that moves me. The trick is not to dither endlessly or keep on the track if it has evidently become a dead-end. And here, perhaps the representation of rigidity, pre-determination and escape attempts owes something to a re-examining of my own routines. A need for structure. versus the joy of freefall. Well, watch this space to see whether the inner teenager or the inner parent will win.
But there is something so great about the wonky scale of tin toys - the massive heads, the tiny legs, the gigantic winding keys that makes even a kafka-esque nightmare landscape jolly. Even without the lurid, and slightly wobbly-edged colours.
I'm attempting a short movie that has NO pre-planning - taking a line for several walks (25 each second, but in slow motion spread over days). Free-range...No storyboard. No efficiencies or  "if I'd realised I wanted to wiggle those fingers I'd have drawn the hands on another layer". So time is wasted. But - I hear you ask - is time spent making art and learning how to do both the process and the end product better, ever wasted? I think not.

Rebooting...please wait...

Famous Five cottage on the lake

After 2 weeks away I feel ready to plunge into the next great adventure. It was what my friend described as a Famous Five holiday - little lakes, my own rowing boat, mountains, caves, beaches, endless lovely walks round 1964, a real fire and lashings of ginger beer. (OK, wine, Im not actually 8 any more.)
Although this time, in spite of the achingly beautiful landscape, the long walks and the blissful quiet and calm isolation...I didn't get a headful of new ideas and inspiration. Possibly because my head was so full of stress and crap that it took that long just to empty it. What I did get was some insights. of the "Jean-Paul Sartre I always knew that but have only just realised that I always knew that" variety. or maybe some questions to explore.
1.Utopia is boring. so Perfect is boring
2. so the perfect holiday location is actually enhanced by the experience of terrifying roads, nearly capsizing in the lake, and discovering that my phone wouldn't work - at all. These give it shape, pace...drama
3. but the trick is to view them as essential points on the dramaturgy graph and not as things which "spoil" the rest of the times - so you gasp, laugh, entertain your friends with the story, instead of  moaning about them. This is easier when you're 25 and invincible.

As I was just starting a massive loopwalk round the Mayo cliffs, a local man passing amiably remarked "another rotten day, what?" He wasn't wrong - if what you wanted was to sit in the garden enjoying the view. But for a strenuous climb, cloud cover/shade was a bonus, and the wind just made the clifftops more exciting. But perhaps his point was "another" - a sudden heavy downpour might make me feel like dancing in it for joy, but after 5 days... So variety is part of pace.

While we ask how to get pace into the story, the animation, perhaps we should also investigate how to get pace, variety into the working practice. Meet more other animators, have (pacey) arguments about the nature of narrative with work colleagues (but NOT on facebook). Read more. Watch more films. I've often worried that when people ask "what've you been up to?" my reply sounds boring. Work. Samba. Making another Shakespeare animation.

Wild, Farmed, Potatoes

But making that animation has so many different aspects, moods, the terrifying roads and the beautiful landscape. The bits that make you cry with frustration as well as the bits that make you grin smugly... Or - it does if you're doing it properly.

So did I come home with my creative axe sharpened?  I came home determined, in love with a new place, and with some visual & conceptual inspirations that havent yet turned into anything... but I suspect the next story will feature fractals, confusions of scale, & things that turn into other things (the coral beach at Ceathru Rua which looks like sand til you realise the scale is all wrong and then the texture and then the shapes - like tiny driftwood); tiny round islands (lough Corrib), the contrast between the wild and the farmed (Kylemore, Enniscoe)... something or other to do with how life shapes the landscape and the landscape shapes life (the stone walls of Inis Mor). That seems like a good place to start...

Thinking space

Holiday season...and the power of walking miles staring at mountains, lakes, fields, islands to generate new ideas for films. Emptying your head, disconnecting from the internet, the TV, the press for two whole weeks and listening to the stories floating quietly on the wind. Then coming "home" - to a temporary cottage and drawing them out; making visual notes. Is this a cliche?...It's not about "unwinding" but about creating a space for creative inspiration to happen. Sometimes, your head is full - of anxiety about referendums and governments - of is-that-damp-in-the-living-room-spreading, of friends and family in need of support, of timetables and workloads and oh yeah, of TV. News news news news crap crap distraction .
There are lots of ways that we get "inspiration" - drawing, reading stories, watching other people's animations, outrage and determination to tell the world something, experimenting,(which is just a posh word for playing with ideas)... but my favourite is this, sitting on the thinking stone halfway up the mountain and letting all those things mix and mature until an idea evolves from them.