Animation is Concentration

That is so true. I've been so caught up with trying to get my senior project done as quickly as possible that I seem to have forgotten that. I've been really unhappy with my work all quarter and now I know why. I've been focusing on drawing as fast as I can rather than really thinking about what I was doing. I even brought my ipod to Monty a couple of times and listened to music while I worked, which is something I usually never do. Big mistake! I think that made my problem even worse. The beat from the music was distracting from my imagined timing of my shots and displaced me from my work even more.

Sure I planned my shots and had my usual trouble with keeping things simple, but I wasn't 100% completely THINKING about each and every drawing. As the result my work has been crappy. The sad thing is, I know what needs to go into each of my poses, but I've been so distracted and flustered by having to finish all of the animation this quarter that I haven't been able to sit down and think clearly about it. This weekend I pulled out my copy of the Animator's Survival Kit and was once again amazed by the amount of information that it contains.

I've read the book from cover to cover many times, but every time I open it I realize something new I believe this is because my level of animation understanding has improved and now I really get what Richard Williams is talking about. Pretty much everything that
I learned at AM is in that book, it's just that now I really and truly understand what's being said.

I've also been inspired to try to slow down and spend even more time planning. I was looking at the example drawings from Milt Khal's strut and was really inspired by how much information he included in each drawing. There's no way my drawings had that many levels of intricacy, and I resolved to sit and make extremely detailed plans about what each drawing will have. I figure the more time I spend on that, the less time I'll spend fixing things and my work is much more likely to come out the way I want it on the first try.