Saturday 9 April 2016

A Quick Post on Failure - (An old post I wrote but never published)

Last week all the animation students at University had to hand in their latest showreels for a pre-christmas assesment. We then gathered as a year and watched them on the big screen for everyone to watch...

I'll admit, when I watched my showreel I felt like it wasn't up to the standard I usually aim towards. The title cards were outdated, the pacing was bad, none of the shots were rendered, none of the shots were finished to a stage I was happy with and it was generally boring to watch. 

That being said, I feel like it's okay to have a major kick in the teeth like this one. 

As 'artists' we're constantly asking ourselves to create. Create drawings, sculpts, matte paintings, animation, whatever it is, our job is to create. And in order to create great work, we must fail, and fail often. By failing fast and often we are constantly faced with opportunities to assess the quality of our work and then ask ourselves and others how to improve.

Failure teaches the shape of our intuition. After you keep making a mistake/failing, you'll begin to see it coming from farther away than before.

All in all there is therefore no straightforward path, so keep failing and fail often.


Work Dump 2016

Been ages since I last posted on here. Testament to how busy things have been and how rubbish i am at keeping a diary.

Thought i'd dump a whole bunch of separate animations i've been working on for my final year films: Far-Fetched (apologies for the lack of blog updates on here too...) and Bertie the Elephant

All of these are still in the WIP stage:


Bertie the Elephant


Bertie the Elephant - Shot_009 WIP from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Bertie Shot_013 - Sad Walk from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Far-Fetched



Shot_123_FarFetched from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Shot_017 from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Shot_033 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

More updates to come....i promise :)