Updates!

Well, it has been a while since my last post, but today is a designated "do stuff on the website" day. There are some cool projects I've been working on recently, a couple of which are online, a couple are still pending release.

I've been trying to get a bit of variety in my work - a lot has been influenced by my self promo animation, which has had a great reception and has found me a bit of work, which is good. I'm quite aware that it is playing on the current shape layer/ vector style that is getting a lot of love in the motion graphics community, and while this isn't a bad thing at all and it still looks fresh to me, I've been trying at every opportunity to diverge from this and get out of my comfort zone a bit more. 

The way that I'm going about this is to approach projects from a different viewpoint (whether it is 3D, film, stop motion) and to get more into illustration. This has always been a weak point for me - and by that I mean the act of actually sitting down with a pen/pencil/paintbrush and drawing something that looks good before I touch it up in the computer.

I think that doing personal projects that involve this will help significantly. This is mainly because when faced with a commercial animation project, I think "how can I make something that looks good, but can be easily animated and turned around on time and to budget by one person?" When illustrating a single frame, these restrictions disappear and I can play around with styles without worrying about how layers and textures will animate. This in turn will hopefully spawn some techniques that can carry through into my animation.

Anyway, more on that in a different post. And more on what I've been up to in a professional capacity in a third post. Today might be a bumper-triple-post kind of day, which I'm not sure is the right way to do things when maintaining a blog (in fact, I'm positive it's not what you're meant to do) but what if It's another 2 months before I find the time to post something? Just pretend that they are all spaced out at regular intervals and we'll be fine...

My (continuing) Motion Graphics Adventure

So, a few weeks since I set up on my own and I've been enjoying it so far. Work has been quite sparse, but thankfully not non-existent and there have been encouraging signs following the various people I have spoken to about my work. It's quite frightening that I don't have a regular income any more, but I've been quite good at limiting my spending and am way under budget, which is nice.  ​

The other thing that's been nice is to just have the time to work on my own projects and development. A few days ago I posted a work-in-progress of my self promo, and it's coming along nicely. I've been able to interact with the design community much more now that I have a freedom to set my own schedule, and although I've got a long, long, long list of skills to learn and tutorials I to do, I've enjoyed being able to get through a good chunk of learning without stressing myself out by allocating the 3 hours between finishing work and going to bed to doing extra work in the hope of getting to the level that I want to be at.

That's the tricky balance for me as a motion designer, I'm constantly feeling as though I must do better, I'm very aware of the fact that there are many, many people out there better than me so I'm always pushing myself - I know I'm not bad but sometimes I can feel quite inadequate as a designer. I think that the most important thing is that I continue to do this for the right reasons, the reason I started in the first place - because I love doing it, and one day I might be as good as the designers I look up to (although I am fully aware of the fact that once I get to the level I think I want to be, I'll no doubt want to be even better). But that's part of the fun of of it

​I'm relieved that I'm not quite as lazy that I used to be, I used to be very aware of the fact that I had to work very hard to fight my laziness, but I think that part of me has been beaten into submission - mostly due to the fact that when I get stuck into a good project I just can't stop, and those times keep me going when I'm lacking motivation. I think I'll be OK.