Community of Practice Revisited

animating painting...

Last week I had a random tutorial with a Masters student... from a course I don't actually teach on.
From a different subject area.
Except that we are both painters now trying to make animations. Trying to animate paintings.

OK, it was his first and my Nth, but while I was talking I realised both how much I had learnt since MY first - and how much I still had to learn; how many things I had to try and to explore...

He was doing things "properly" - storyboards, pencil tests, animatics (I had to look it up to even find out what an animatic was); I seem to have made an artistic career out of doing things improperly. But what was interesting was not which set of processes we each were using so much as how the process affects the form. In painting there are always happy accidents, interesting marks and ways in which the paint reacts with the surface, the solvent, the other paint.It isn't so easy to see but there are ways in which a technical or computer process also affects the form, and offers opportunities for random accidents of inspiration. Where the problems and frustrations - or the need to save time - generate creative solutions.
We talked about the different demands of learning as much as possible through the project, and of completing a fabulous movie...that old thing of process vs product but somehow still hugely relevant, hugely important to remember. We say that the learning is vital...that it's research...but are we maybe too keen to steer our students  - and our practice - towards the perfect product?

We always say - especially to the students - that teaching is an exchange, that we learn from the process just as the students do. That this is a community of practice in which we can all help each other to grow and develop;  to reflect on our own practice and where it fits with other peoples'. So it was nice to be reminded that that does actually work. Cheers, Christopher...

MacBeth/ Macbeth/ mac beith ...

...is turning out to be enormous fun. Read Learned Papers! Disagree with them! search the internet for mad German woodcuts of what Choleric temperament looks like;confuse yourself with Elizabethan/ Jacobean customs, attitudes and belief systems; wish you still had a copy of "1066 and all that".

Some of the papers I found were student dissertations and essays; some of the evidence and rationale was scanty. But all of it was interesting. Put it in a sack, shake it up, and pull out some mildly controversial fragments which I hope will encourage people too look at and enjoy the plays. For those "forced" to study them at GCSE/ A level. For those frustrated by the deeply gender-divided and unequal world view of the day but looking for a way through it. Or bored by the passnotes which are just that - notes to get you a pass, but not necessarily to make you think deeply/ or sideways-on. (yes, it's "about ambition". but also the pointlessness of war, gender politics, philosophy, Brechtian devices, "Mock the Week" and the perils of patronage. A cultural mash-up) (maybe...you decide)
And now, even more fun, I get to draw woodcut-esque and intricate Black-and-White images with a vulgar disregard for perspective, anatomy... or anachronism.
God, I feel Shakespearean!

Toonies Bar...the club for People.

Finally. The latest experiment - working Hi-resolution - is completed. This has been a major challenge technically but also because the film has a larger cast of characters. ..many of whom have no obvious or unambiguous gender. Some of whom - being robots, blobs and scribbly yellow things - don't need a gender anyway.

It has been very difficult to keep gender and sexuality assumptions out of it; to establish two characters being friendly or even intimate but "not in a sex way"; and to establish simple identifiers of masculinity which operate as clearly (and as annoyingly) as long eyelashes or hair-ribbons do for femininity.

Also problematic is how to suggest the shrugging off of gender - which is so central to human identity - without simply suggesting transitioning between genders. Is is even possible to discuss gender-freedom in a way that is not overtly political and essentially "queer". Or NOT to be defined by gender, nor in relation to it nor by its absence?



I suspect this will be the first in a long line of tries and possibly fails - but that is sort of the point of research, no?

FINALLY!

...finished the last movie. Soundtrack still to come but it feels like a big achievement. The big deal with this one was finding the right ending - needing to show passage of time without resorting to cliches or making it take too long...finally realised the point was that the story was - kind of - cyclic, so the obvious way to end it was by echoing the scenes at the beginning. In fact the narrative changed a lot in the attempt to balance "the story" with the right visuals, images I wanted to show, (just because I liked them) and trying to encapsulate a thought in an image in the most effective way. So it isn't literally cyclic any more; but doesn't need to be. The sense of future and the desirability of repeated events is there...well, I hope so. This particular story presented quite a challenge - but that's why they call it research.