23rd April

This week I was probably the most involved with interaction and animation that I've ever been. Having produced my drawings for the animation during the holiday it was clear that to make a visually interesting work using the technique I would have to think hard about what materials to use - charcoal was quick but messy, pen was accurate but time consuming and acetate proved to be useful for backgrounds but brought up a new group of problems when it came to filming or wanting to change something in the animation. I found Hoogerbrugge.com a very useful website as it made the interaction side of illustration very interesting for me. The artist's ideas and drawing ability were equally high standard and very inspiring. The work showed me that there needn't be vast amounts of drawing and interaction to have a visually and interactively entertaining work.

The group work in animation and interaction has been limited due to the fact that each of us have our own ideas and goals. In animation there is the need to work in groups to get a sort of consistency throughout the animations but this idea has been very loose until now as it probably would have hindered creativity and caused students to worry too much about how things will look or work in the end. The interpretation and analysis module has required that we work in groups and begin to discuss presentations. This has so far been succesful as we all seemed to meet eye to eye and realise that we had to be open to each other's ideas and interests. Thus we decided to split up for the week and explore our own chosen areas of interest (film/music/fashion/costume/feminism/politics etc) in order to find some focal point next week which involves as many of the most successful ideas possible. In other words we know we aren't all going to get to work on what we were individually interested in so we are working together to find a subject we are all happy with.

Life drawing this week again demonstrated somebody's lack of organisation as both models turned up at the same time causing confusion for themselves and Simon. Nonetheless I set off with the intention as outlined in my last post - to exploit my mark-making skills and I seemed to do just that. I have found myself now naturally making more decisions about my work before jumping in - such as composition and the marks that I make. I am continuing to be confident in working on the figure and have been happy to know that after 3 weeks of no life drawing I can come back and produce one of my best pieces yet. Having drawn two other pieces this week I have given in to the temptation of tracing them in Illustrator and exploring them with colour. I have definately had enough experience now to know if a certain piece of work would be worth scanning in and digitally improving. My saatchi web page is always a good reason and motivator for me to do more of my personal work or improve work I have already done.

The process of filming for animation has proven to be quite stubborn when it comes to using acetate because if the room is not naturally light I usually get reflections on my work which show up in the frames on computer and obviously cause a problem. I have generally found animation to be a very time consuming and mundane process unless your subject matter is one which won't lose its form or meaning if it is moved or changed a lot during the animation. My subjects have been mainly moving people which has caused a lot of boredom and headaches. For this reason I am swiftly changing my intentions for the interactive postcard and using an illustration I did last week instead which will involve no movement of any kind of creature but rather the waves of the sea and movement of a boat. I am beginning to realise the distinction between work that I like and work that I wish to do. I hope to continue to understand this by asking myself more questions about a brief before establishing ideas in the future to avoid wasting time by realising my ideas will not be succesful.