Rough magic

So i realised i should be talking more about what i thought about the lectures. Well that first lecture was actually quite inspiring, it was eye opening to see that art and technology both came from the same word, skill. The fact that both of these things are just skills that can be enhanced and learnt. I person can learn to draw just as they can learn to fix a computer, sure one may take longer then the other but it is still a skill that requires dedication and patience, this is very good for me as at the moment i feel that i am more technically proficient but my basic art skills are lacking.

It struck me that yes we are all magicians in a way or illusionists, my job as a character animator is to make the audience feel like a bunch of pixels is alive, or maybe some sheets of paper are alive, either way, i have to fool the audience into believing in this character (they don't have to think its real or that it exists) but to WANT to follow that character and learn about its characteristics and personality, and learn about the story this bunch of pixels is going to imitate. Looking at it that way its kind of crazy, i mean we all pay £6 (dam odeon) to go watch lots of tiny lights, and wen u put them together we think they have emotion and feeling, heck sometimes we get scared by these lights, or feel so sorry for them we cry (never watch Bambi in front of your girlfriend, unless your going for the caring sorta guy of course). So it must truly take a heavy amount of skill from both the technical and artistic sides to create this effect and power.

But of course its the merge of these two skills that has set new boundaries for what has been created in the world of media, and more specifically animation. It wasn't that long ago that to create a 3d animated movie you had to stare at a bunch of coding and nothing more, typing numbers and random letters that apparently made sense, and in the end make something looks pretty, this was the case for tron the first feature film to have 3d computer animation, it came out in 1982 and the first time the developers got to look at it was after it was all rendered, as before then, it was all just messy code. This film however at the time did not receive too well by the general public and did not make the large bang it had hoped for.

But soon after came technological advancements to the world of 3d animation. Lucas film (the production how soon to be behind star wars) was very keen to push it further and further, eventually they were able to see what they were doing there a viewport, now by this point this technology was just crying out for an artists guidance. This is where John Lasseter stepped in (yeah i love Pixar) he joined the developers and created his first 3d animated short. When the short was shown a Siggraph (the largest computer imaging and graphics festival in the world) it shocked the audience and caused a huge amount of hype, before this all that had been shown was very basic tech shots and tests, no one had put a narrative behind it like he did. John Lassater was previously a 2d animator trained by the experience of Disney, so when lots of people came up to him asking him what program he had used they were asking the wrong question. It was not the program it was his artistic ability and the ability to work with those with technological skills in harmony. The addition of artistic animation and good story telling made a huge difference and is still obvious today if you see the animations done by pixar.

I watched the Pixar story that tells you all about how they became to be, and the gathering of artists to the new medium and John Lasseter says in this "From the beginning, I kept saying it's not the technology that's going to entertain audiences, it's the story. When you go and see a really great live-action film, you don't walk out and say 'that new Panavision camera was staggering, it made the film so good'. The computer is a tool, and it's in the service of the story"