A little while ago, one of my favorite artists, David O’Reilly, published an essay about basic animation aesthetics. It struck me as being quite instructive and thoughtful. I have, in some very basic ways, failed to live up to his ideals in completing my thesis project, but I hope to live long enough to atone for my sins.
The basic message I got out of it is that in creating a world through animation, one must decide on the rules of your world, and stick to them. He uses examples from his brilliant piece Please Say Something.
An interesting subtext to his essay is that there is nothing wrong with a digital world. More precisely, nothing inherently wrong or ugly about digital artifacts in computer animation. In the same way that the artifacts of film are actually quite beautiful (lens flare and flash frames, for example), the pixel, he argues, is also beautiful. That case is convincingly made by checking out his work.
If you’ve seen the Grindhouse films, the best part of Robert Rodriguez’s film “Planet Horror” was the synthetic film artifacts. Which is a petty way of highlighting the real core unit of Awesomeness in this art form, which is Story. Whether you are telling a story, or deconstructing Story, Story is the air we breathe….
Which is why I suspect I should have gone into Radio.
Cheers!
Kristian
