#re-discovery

Thomas Dolby- The gate to the Mind’s Eye

Full Album

Lockdown…..Time to recover and re-discover…..

I was fortunate that lockdown did not affect my professional life even for day . However, same could not be said of my social life. I spent the initial 15 odd days of after office time indoors.

Two weeks and I decided enough is enough, life has to get back on track. The fear all around was a restricting factor. I could not allow my evenings to go waste. I decided to use my ‘me’ time more…

The cheesy of the corniest...! But it made that moment. 

And we all remember the white horse and those other tunes, right? 

Re-discovery of the day, most definitely. 

I will quote from the training manual of Anime Studio Debut, which up until this morning was just not getting through to me, nor I to it:

"Congratulations, you’ve made an animation! Press the play button near the bottom of the main window to watch it go. When you’re done, press stop. OK, so it probably won’t win any film awards, but you’re off to a good start learning Anime Studio."

Therein lies the truth - it's a start. I am starting out. All that having enourmous, unrealistically absolute expectations of myself so far was doing was sabotaging these formative times, where small but regular explorative effort is needed.

With a new sense of resolve (and the ability to keep two browsers/tumblr accounts open at once, PLUS a little thing called Finally Having The Time and Emotional/Temporal Bandwidth To Focus On My Degree With),

I have re-discovered and re-connected with the core of why I want to learn 2D (and eventually some 3D) animation in the first place: To be able to intimately and imaginatively tell the stories I have been writing for the past twelve years.

They and countless more yet to be born (the world, and every day for that matter, is this constant battering together of thoughts, feelings, images and moods ALREADY - no creative effort is really needed apart from that of having the mere whim to put pen to paper or stylus to tablet) await, in a large 350 item strong list I spent a good portion of my time at my boorish APS job writing called 'List of Creative Works' - patiently waiting for my ability to bring them to life to grow until I'm ready in every way to do just that.

Please accept my apologies for the scattered, unstructured nature of my two Animation & Video blogs of late, Lucien and Kit, as well as any others out there who may have given them a second glance. My output from here on out will actually be a chronicle of my experimentation and animation production, as opposed to two, roughly similar and redundant repositories of re-blogs and low-energy, unfocused posts about the subjects of Animation & Video.

I've realised an incredibly important part of being an Animator and a Storyteller - it is absolutely vital to the health and wellbeing of your creations that they take shape in your own lovingly intimate world and creation space. That means away from expectations and too many how-to's, as well as art/animation galleries of other people and professionals.

Literally, their journey has nothing to do with and no comparison to my own, nor mine with or to theirs. It's a simple objective fact, and the sooner one ceases to hyperemotionalize about such an illogicality, the better.

I proceed now with resolution of purpose and a re-kindling passion for the journey towards gaining skill in this craft, whose roots are at the very heart of human nature - evolutionarily speaking, we are visual storytellers.