Invaluable Notes

This comes from a guy who has been in Animation industry for quite a long time and writes regularly about storyboarding, film making and art on his Blog. One of the greatest resource for knowledge. Here is one of the most important note I read on his Blog. Oh his name is Mark Kennedy.

This is so true!

"Simplicity is a wonderful thing and I believe simplicity lies at the heart of making something appealing. The ironic thing is how hard it is to be simple. We resist it because it seems too easy, that nobody will like our work unless we smother it in layers of complexity, and that way if it's bad, at least nobody will be able to tell because they won't be able to penetrate all of our layers of complexity!"

excerpt from his post Splashing Around.

Invaluable Notes

I have decided to post some thoughts and notes I read/hear which I feel are invaluable and will help me improve myself a lot. Hopefully it will also help other people.

I was watching Ratatouille bonus features. There was an interview with an American chef Thomas Keller. Following is a paraphrase of what he said in one of the scenes.

"It is not about the perfection, it is about the quest for perfection."

So true and ironic.

Character Design for a Project

For the 3d-character setup project we had to design a character for following projects. This is what I came up with. I had some other designs too and it was confusing. But finally I decided to go with this. I may model and rig other characters later on. The hair in the side view is not drawn well, I had a hard time visualizing it. I am currently working on modeling of this character. I will post some 3d work once I have progressed well.

Back to Cooking

After I watched Ratatouille, I got my spirit for cooking back. I was thinking to make "bhaji" (an Indian dish with mashed veggies) for some time. So finally just yesterday I cooked it. It might not be the tasty one you find in famous food places in India, but it was tasty for me :)

First Animatic

This is an animatic I made for my Motion Studies class at SCAD. We were given different scenarios in the story and we had to create an animatic for that story. This did not come out as good as I had wished. Especially in the beginning size of the character is changing weirdly. And the end is almost abrupt. I could have added more details in the end. Rendering is not good in some frames too. But yeah i had enjoyed the assignment.

Can you guess what could be the story scenario? :) Thanks for watching.

Ratatouille

I wanted to watch this movie on DVD since I missed it in the theaters. Fortunately our college organized the show for this movie in the college's theater yesterday. So I could watch this movie in theater. I was expecting high quality visuals and a quality story from this movie. And I was not disappointed. From the first scene of the movie I was so impressed by the feel of the visuals and the details. It was realistic but not photo-realistic. I liked that a lot. The whole environment of the city was very immersive for the story. Apart from that I enjoyed this movie so much because I love cooking. And it was amazing watching all the different kinds of ingredients and different items being cooked. I loved the humor so much. I was laughing throughout the movie. Even subtle movements had so much humor.

It was kind of difficult for me to decide what to enjoy in the movie. Being a cooking lover I was lost in the kitchen world and I was also impressed with animations. At the end of the movie I felt like cooking something new. In a way I was happy that I saw this movie since I got my interest back in cooking. I was getting lazy at cooking in my break time. But that passion is back for cooking. Also it was good to see one of the best animations to make my inner desires of animation making come out more. Thanks to Pixar for making such a great movie.

Height of laziness

I feel very sorry for not posting in one of the longest breaks. I have the lamest excuse to give, I was lazy. But I should tell that there was more to it. I did not feel motivated enough. After doing a very bad performance in last quarter (I got B in all 3 courses), I figured out that I have lost my focus and my motivation. Human mind plays tricks all the time to get you out of focus. Mine does a lot. Before the end of quarter I had decided to do a lot in this 1.5 month break time to cover my lost in the last quarter. But eventually I ended up passing my time on my laptop and movies and working on projects to earn money. I was so confused and frustrated thinking that I was wasting a lot of time. Finally I decided to take a full break from all my study and goal thinking. I just want to chill for a while without any worries of how I will reach my goals. I have decided that once my quarter starts I want to forget all worries and focus on my study real hard. I am already excited since I am going to start doing hand drawn animation and may be a character rigging class. I have also decided to manage my time well in next quarter to give enough time for my sweetheart and food (to be healthy enough to do all things). I am planning to post some of my work from the last quarter, but I dont have any work scanned or ready to post. Once I have them ready I will definitely post them.

More on failure

Success or Failure

Kumar made a very good and important point about failure.

Fear of failure

Why do we afraid of failure so much? It seems that one of the greatest fear on earth is the fear of failure. My drawing professors always say that do not be afraid to make mistakes. I totally understand it why. But sometimes I just can't help it but feel that fear for a while. I know that it does not help at all and by taking failure as a milestone for success I can become better. Life is really challenging this way; even if you know something is good or bad, you sometimes can't just do what you know you should do. It is very true that the person who can control his/her mind can do anything in this world.

My Fall quarter has started and there are lots of things happening. As usual the pressure of performing well has started to build up. I dont know if it is my own expectation or not. One more thing I realize is that we are afraid of what people would think about us or what impression would we make if we do something. Sometimes we really become conscious and concerned about our impression on others that we start feeling that fear, we start feeling the pressure. It lies in person's strength to take failure as a part of success, as a part of the journey and not the destination. This challenge will keep coming in one or the other form. I want to be free from thinking of my impression on others and my own expectations. I want to be fearless.

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