We had a lecture that was centred around excerpts from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, and in particular the six steps to the process of writing comics (which can be applied to art in general).
We were asked to consider our idiom, which McCloud describes as “The ‘school’ of art, the vocabulary of styles or gestures or subject matter, the genre that the work belongs to… maybe a genre of its own.”
Right about now as I go through university I am working upon my craft, learning skills and techniques directly related to what I want to do. What I want to do is create animations, particularly 3D animation. In theory, anybody can put time into learning the skills and technicalities behind animation so considering my work’s idiom is important to distinguishing myself. Idiom is its purpose, why am I wanting to animate this? What gives my work identity as opposed to another animator’s with a similar level of skill in the craft? What stops me from being “replaceable”.
With animation it could be a number of things: the story or subject matter that the animation is trying to convey, the identity of the animation style, the ideas being conveyed through the animation. This is something I am beginning to touch upon and will hopefully realise in the future, hopefully through the help of this project.
Animation Style
Like any other art form, each animator has a style, a way of animating something that makes it there’s. Often its through one of the 12 principles of animation. For example Genndy Tartakovsky has a distinct animation style, often focusing on squash and stretch and exaggeration, which gives his animations a comical and elastic feel.
Looney Tunes has such a distinct style, lots of cartoon elements such as stretching, anticipation and over exaggerated action where no-one gets seriously injured. Each of those things contribute towards an animation style and it makes it worth watching, sets it apart from something else.
Animation Content
What is it I’m animating and why is it worth watching. I’d like to think an interesting narrative coupled with good animation is in itself worth watching. The narrative doesn’t have to be deep or long, maybe its just something humorous that an audience can relate to.
I like to think I can conjure up some funny animations, they often poke fun at things or are simply a product of a very strange imaginative thought. Throughout university I keep forgetting to return to this idea, the idea that I’ve always worked towards and that’s just entertaining, to get a laugh out of someone.