Farewell..?

Getting shingles is the most low-cost Ashitaka (from Princess Mononoke) cosplay, 100%. I wish that it didn't catch me during the finals week, but it's been a very... fascinating experience. Farewell to shingles though, and also farewell to the work I've done in this class!

First of all, I'd like to share a complete reel of all the practice projects I've completed this term:

*TW: violence (from :00 to :05)*

And, here's the actual project! I still have no sound, and there is just one more shot at the end, but first I want to make sure that things are good as they are. Sound and an additional shot are both rather complicated and I don't want to rush, but otherwise the animations are fully completed at this point. I might change up some details but my overall vision of the work has carried through to the end. 

There will be some necessary transitions and text to be added so it can be applicable to the scholarship I intent to get (Project Yellow Light), but my goal for this term was to simply make the animation itself. Though I'm landing just a bit short of that goal, I'm very happy with the quality of the work I've done so far. 

I wish that I had the time to make this appear more subversively real (as in, appearing to be a "real" simulation of a reality, as in, constructing a "realistic" depiction of traditional animation techniques in digital software), but things simply didn't work out, as you can read in my previous Blog Post. 

Here's just a small example of what I mean; all of this was made in Blender:

As is, however, my project is still an interesting simulation: I adopted a more abstract style rather than going for realism, and utilized techniques of parallax and Z-Axis placement (how far away the different objects, like clouds/mountains, are from the camera) in a way that made the motion make sense but feel a bit exaggerated. It doesn't feel "real" like the animation above, but neither is it "immersive" (a simulacra). 

I want to thank everyone in the class for expanding my horizons on what art can be and how you can present it- the variety in the project content and the way they were uploaded to the internet (if at all) was a bit overwhelming. At times I was like "whaaat, is this legal?", but I'm really glad I got to experience all these things, thanks to John Shimon's awesome curriculum and my peers' hard work :)

Finally, here's my favorite line from Boulliard: "real childishness is everywhere, particularly amongst those adults who go
[to Disneyland] to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness" (25-26). 

we're all children, period.