How long, how much more long?

Making animations takes forever. Ideas come faster than the work; sometimes that means the film changes part way through, as your ideas evolve, which is not helpful.
Make shorter quicker films? or be prepared for endless circular editing?
Or make something else: a stained glass doodah, a new design for the website, a mosaic.
I need shorter deadlines for a sense of satisfaction, for more joy.

My PhD tutor used to talk about the notion of "sustainable passion". There is something to explore in the tension between things worth waiting for/ things which are BIG and deeply satisfying, and things which are easily won and smaller. But can we have BIG moments more often? more quickly? Or some kind of middle ground. Is everything worth having, hard work to achieve? (Probably) But does it have to take so long??
What we all need is more joy. More of those profound and positive experiences. Sadly, most people settle for the more easily obtained anger and outrage. Creating things really is better for your mental health.

WHY?

... do we make art? Out of love? compulsion? habit? When one compulsion - the need to keep up a sturdy research profile for the forthcoming REF and impress your boss - is removed, the other imperatives rattle around a little before settling. Without realising, we can let our work be steered by external forces - the need to make a living, to comply with a client; even if we work only for ourselves around "a day job" it can still steer us away from creative experiment and towards the safety of a successful formula. So lots of experiments. A list of 4 projects - 2 waiting to be started and 2 that have been begun and swept aside in the excitement of the moment of starting work on a fifth. (and then a sixth) Not much discipline, but plenty of joy. I will finish them all. You probably don't need to read about them

Miki now in Xmas paper & a snowglobe

and then - christmas on the horizon. Everyone is asking me if I am doing another advent calendar. But it took so long last year...can I start another project? Yes apparently I can... with animation projects 7,8,9 and 10. An opportunity to have fun with pattern and stop worrying about realism. An opportunity to play with variations on a theme...using the research, drawings and ideas I'm already working on but without the pressure of a complex narrative. And these have the virtue of being short, so relatively quick, and a cast-iron date deadline, which none of the others have. And an audience. Actual feedback. closing the circle.
Happy Christmas/ Hannukah/ Solstice/ Festival of friends-and-family

Feed your Head - with Animation

I love film festivals. And Aesthetica/ASFF & Manchester/MAF give you 2 in one week which tends to make your head rather full. Also, strangely, it tends to give you a sense of existential crisis. (This film festival is full of film students. Only film students. We are making movies in order to train people to make movies. My life is pointless. sort of thing). Once again I was amused to hear some informed scoffing (Huh, its just a one-character shot. Too easy) and relieved to hear other people voicing my own confusion. There is always at least one film I get to the end of thinking "What? WTAF? I don't get it"... but sadly not in a good, "ooh this really challenges your assumptions and makes you think" kind of way but more in a "either I am really dense or this animator is just failing to communicate, and why the hell do ALL of these animations have funny little firefly things in" kind of way.  There was one which featured fireflies as protagonists, and one in which they were the metaphor that carried the plot...but about 8 more in which I just felt like animators were afraid of stillness so there had to be some kind of random movement in the background. Or, ooh, maybe fireflies are this year's big trend. And I've missed it. Again.

http://pepelemorse.tumblr.com/

There were some fabulous films, my favourite from MAF was probably Lucrece Andreae's Pepe le Morse /Grandpa Walrus (the story, the drawings, the believability of the characters) but there was also some really effective mixing of media/ style/ scene in Daisy Jacob's the Full Story - mixing drawn and painted images seamlessly with pixillation...(and that was something else besides bugs that was very big this year, live action pixillated)and Carlos Gomez Salamanca's Lupus, a kind of animated documentry/ reflection.
ASFF seemed to have more stuff that was visually dark and highly textured, but also with - well - JOY. The biggest hit with the audiences seemed to be Jack Bennett's Not the End of the World, because it captured so accurately the excruciating intensity of teenage first crushes and confusion. Once again the programmers appeared not to have anticipated that anyone might want to see all the animation programmes (rather than pick-and-mix through experimental, music videos and a bit of thriller, say) so trying to see them all meant travelling down on two separate days and a killer sunday schedule. Thank goodness for the nice warm teabar at City Screen.
And once again MAF co-incided with the latenight xmas market, so enabling shameless retail interludes in the gaps between my selected programmes. This enabled me to empty my head (aw look, baby penguin xmas baubles) before filling it again with ideas, questions, inspirations and enthusiasm for my next animation experiment. Hoorah!

Make a badger

Stress, tiredness, difficult things...can make you lose it. IT. Your Mojo. Your infallible creative wossname, that keeps flinging out ideas - some good, some hilariously unworkable, a few that are "meh" and every now and then, a really great idea. What do you do if you lose it??
Panic that it won't come back. Hope it's just stress. Remember what a friend told you 5 years after artschool - that if Picasso stopped painting for 6 months, it wouldn't stop him being a painter. and if you did something else for six months...
Fuelled by a half-formed idea about freelancing, making-stuff-to-sell and well, recreational art, I started making some glass things. Is it art? is it craft? is it therapy? Who cares. As an artist, it's sometimes just great to do something that doesn't have to be art, that doesn't have anything to prove...a birthday card, a thing to give as a moving in present, an infographic for a seminar on research informed teaching. Just to remind ourselves what joy is in drawing, painting, making...like we did when we were kids, watching Blue Peter and thinking "Ooh, Im going to make one of those...only maybe orange and with a funny hat on..." It's hard to do this as an adult; to use the same tools, and processes as you use for capital A Art, but without any expectation, without your inner tutor scoffing "decorative! derivative!". To do this - (and I quote from a long-ago degree show at Brighton, sketchbook entry of a sculpture graduate whose name I cannot now remember...)

Because its fun. And importantly, because it gives your creative wossname a holiday. The work can be a kind of meditation...a kind of sympathetic magic where the feedback from your senses - the movement of your hands and the smell of the safety flux (!), the mess - makes the ideas come. Summons the mojo.

Next time I lose it, Im gonna make a badger.