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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...

Persistence of Vision

Having undertaken to illustrate a children's picture story (that's a separate category from picture book, who knew?), I thought it would be so much easier to make a simple series of 30 images instead of 1500 per minute. How much more time I would be able to spend on each, making it perfect. How intricate and endlessly fascinating each image could be, like the best of those I remembered from childhood. Those which allowed you not only to enter the image, but wander around examining flowers, delicate grasses and textures...and imagine the backstory; look deeper and invent more stories. The liberating ability to include random extras, red herrings and decorative details.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
In fact, I have wildly underestimated the demands of a different discipline; I am struggling not to assume that each illustration must be exactly the same size and shape, filling the "screen" , even though some of them are detailed close-ups and some distant views. The shift from landscape to portrait orientation is easier so far - possibly because coming from painting into animation I found the transition from portrait to landscape was quite hard in the first place.

I failed to anticipate the scariness of trying to draw something well enough to withstand that lengthy scrutiny instead of hurtling past at 25 images per second. Weirdly, this means I am sketching on paper and scanning the sketch in a desperate attempt to get the process going...Not only all of this, but more importantly I have also underestimated the power of persistence of vision. Every image I see in my mind is a "scene" - an animation, and I can't read "the tree was about as tall as a person" without seeing the tree grow upwards, a person peer around the branches and then wave at the reader. Trying to build that sense of movement, of energy...trying to develop the dramatic pace that will match that of the original story...without using animation? Will I be able to complete this project without having accidentally created the e-version, the flickbook, and the interactive animated ebook first??
Watch this space.