Discussions/Essays – Page 80

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Two of the greatest animators of all time, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, peruse through their infamous animation book, The Illusion of Life. Few people ever seemed to enjoy their daily jobs and their careers as much as Frank and Ollie did.

“True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If the philosophers are right, happiness is a state of mind. You can’t plan for it and you can’t fully bring it back, even in positive memory. It has to be savored during its occurrence, during its moment in the sun. And there’s few joys as momentous and enjoyable as the act of creating something. Getting lost in the making of art is bliss.

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The character team of Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas and John Lounsbery created real magic with King Louie, the self-proclaimed king of the jungle. Great art like this only happens when its creators are lost in the magic. From Walt Disney’s Jungle Book.

It’s far too easy to be pulled into the lure of fame or fortune, into that dreaded desire of feeling to be needed and respected – what philosopher Alan Watts calls “unsubstantial promises.” It’s dangerous to be caught up in a world of external rewards.

“The real secret to life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” — Alan Watts

One must move beyond the external circumstances that are beyond one’s control. Happiness, ultimately has to come from within and from the process of doing the work. Nothing’s as secure as that. Nothing’s as comforting.

Marcel Proust, writer of one of the most revered books of our time, In Search for Lost Time, discovered that art may be the single greatest thing that gives meaning to our lives. (Video courtesy of The school of Life)

I remember reading somewhere that the biggest separator from the immensely successful versus the not so successful, is the consistency of putting in the work and time to those parts of the craft or job that are typically the most “boring” — the stuff that nobody wants to do. This is so completely true, both in animation and nearly every other vocation.

It’s what’s often referred to as ‘the grind‘ — that which you have to do, not which you want to do. There aren’t many animators who look forward to spending days and nights re-doing work, cleaning curves, or fixing penetrations. Neither are there many chefs that enjoy meticulously prepping 50lbs of vegetables or athletes that dig riding miles on the stationary bike after the game. But it’s this part of the process — this seemingly endless labor that’s often viewed as both joyless and unproductive — that make a professional a professional. Pros do what needs to be done. It’s the kind of consistency of action that builds knowledge AND fortitude. It’s the ability to bear thru the uncomfortable that sets the top people apart from the rest.

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Bruce Lee doing his famous ‘dragon flag’ sit ups. Lee was only 5′ 8″ and 140 lbs, but hit like a 200lb heavyweight and throw punches as fast as 2/100th’s of a second (standard film shot at 24fps failed to capture his movement). He trained harder and more consistently than any martial artist in his time, throwing an average of 4000 punches and 1000 kicks each and every day. Not bad for a guy considered too small, too skinny and the wrong color.

Because this really hard and boring stuff, this thing that seems to bear no immediate fruit, and is so tedious and not so sexy, is what makes the work good, and in turn, makes you good. Making art is never boring because it’s never easy. Work that’s easy and without challenge isn’t worth doing.

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It’s true – it IS the hard that makes it great. Tom Hanks and Geena Davis star in A League of Their Own, Penny Marshall’s 1992 film about life in America’s first All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

And sometimes in order to have happiness, one must have unhappiness. People get the wrong idea that the “answer” is constant bliss or, at least, constant positivity. But that’s not sustainable nor ideal. Struggle is required for growth, as much as perseverance, as much as getting sufficient rest.

Diego Rivera Mural

I’ve always been blown away by the vast amount of work it takes to produce murals and the power that one feels looking at them. This huge mural, by Diego Rivera, depicts the history of his home country and sits at the Palacio Nacional de Mexico. Making significant art requires significant work.

This explains why so many of the most naturally talented individuals at the start, whether from the arts, music or sports, tend to create nothing and become much less than they could’ve. Most talent is unfortunately wasted. Giving up is always easiest thing to do. If you’re too used to early approval and easy success, subsequent set backs become too unbearable. The real challenge is always from within oneself. And, in the words of martial arts legend and Aikido founder, Morihei Ueshiba, we need to be reminded of that:

“Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something.”

External failure forces one to reflect, inspect, inquire and ultimately, start over again. Settling into continued comfort is a dangerous thing. This is the most difficult challenge for the artist. It’s not the external stuff, not even your self-perceived notion that you might not have enough talent. I’ve seen professionals with both limited natural ability and education reach great heights. They made it by overcoming their fears and doubts, and just kept soldiering on. We have to keep challenging ourselves, and as artists, we must keep creating.

SteveBuscemi

Steve Buscemi plays Norther Winslow, a poet who lost both his drive and ability to write because life was just too darn comfortable in the town of Spectre. From Tim Burton’s 2003 magical fairy tale, Big Fish.

Of course, having balance is best. It’s required in our art and in our lives. Formulating a great mixture of trying new things — testing different styles, visiting strange places, and meeting new people — with the well-earned joys of leisure, full play and rest, is what makes an artist’s life spectacular. It’s why the creative and productive artist is disciplined, so as to ensure that balance exits. Although, it’s much easier to say than do, professionals don’t get too high with success or too low with failure. They just show up, and show up regularly.

“Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.” — Woody Allen

In other words, it’s okay not to enjoy the process all the time because you are, after all, human — our strengths and flaws make us who we are and allow us to grow. Sometimes those challenges (and how we respond to them) define us. Artists, like Chuck Close for instance, keep working no matter what.

American artist Chuck Close seen here painting in his wheelchair with paint brush taped to his hands. Despite becoming a quadriplegic as a result of sudden catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988, Close fought back to regain partial usage of his limbs and continues to be one of the most productive and successful artists living today.

So what keeps you creating? What stops you? Whatever you choose to do with your time, know that it all matters. You are the aggregate of all your choices. Personally, I don’t know what boring is because I always have the option to create something. And knowing that, makes me happy.

“I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life’s mean pettinesses” — Søren Kierkegaard

The poignant and elegant artistry of Jillian Tamaki does justice to life’s realities without looking exactly like it. From her lovely multi-award winning book, Just One Summer. To see more of the artist’s work, go here.

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” — Susan Sontag

It’s common for the modern day artists to use photography (or moving photography such as video) to capture reference for use in their own non-photographic art. But photography is an incredibly powerful medium, a beautiful art in it’s own right, with the ability to record, ignite and reinterpret the world around us in a way that we’re often unaware of.

Susan Sontag’s profound and insightful book On Photography (published in 1977) remains an outstanding discussion on the power and influence of the photographic image that feels particularly profound and prescient today.

Take the words of Maria Popova (author of the insightful and extraordinary blog Brain Pickings) on her reflection of Susan Sontag’s excellent book On Photography:

“Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera … this aggression precipitates a kind of social media violence of self-assertion — a forcible framing of our identity for presentation, for idealization, for currency in an economy of envy.” — Maria Popova

Maria Popova’s blog post goes into wonderful analysis and explanation of the concepts and implications of the camera discussed in Sontag’s book that doesn’t need to be repeated here. But what we, as artists, must be aware of is that this overwhelming phenomena — the domination of photographic images which has heavily affected how we live and how we see ourselves and each other in society — has also altered who we are at the core as painters, animators and filmmakers, and in turn how we’re interpreting or reinterpreting nature in our own separate creations.

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch in a motion-capture suit during his performance for Smaug in the Peter Jackson’s Hobbit series. Is this the future of animation? Will animators become merely technicians to clean up actors’ performances rather than create them? Although this is now common-place in game and VFX applications, I have personally seen motion-capture data successfully applied to cartoon designs.

There are some artists out there that really stand by the total devotion and usage of photography and video to copy or create their art. Others are less excited about giving up their visual artistry to the whims of the camera, and prefer, almost 100% of the time, to take their inspiration from the source directly — i.e. from nature and from their own minds. There are others still, like myself, who believe that photographic reference has its usefulness, when used for the appropriate material, to aid in the research needed for full out exploration, and ultimately, inspiration. At the very least it gets the animator off and out of his seat and into feeling the action. What it shouldn’t be is something that acts solely as ‘THE’ source to be thoughtlessly duplicated. My own biased opinion is that such approach is not only unauthentic, but lazy and ultimately, pointless.

Live reference photostats for Walt Disney’s 1961 animated classic, 101 Dalmations. Disney animators always had the reference they needed for their characters. Here, you can see how legendary animator Marc Davis reinterprets the action depicted by live actors, Mary Wickes and Betty Lou Gerson.

Why not duplicate if you can achieve acceptable or even moderately successful results? Firstly, because of the concept of dilution — much like photocopying a photocopy — it degrades the image and thus degrades the experience, and thereby culminating into an inferior result. Secondly, it aids in shutting off our creative instincts, to expound, distort and reinterpret data in a new and more creative fashion. There is much more to art than what is merely and objectively seen and dutifully duplicated.

The rather dated effects of rotoscope, as seen here in Fleischer studios 1939 animated show, Gulliver’s Travels. Although the technology is much improved now, both rotoscope and pure motion-capture has its limitations — namely the lack of graphic artistry and interest. Even the best motion-captured data needs to be heavily tweaked and polished by hand, in order for it to look half respectable.

Furthermore, there’s distortion of the experience by any optical device — what you captured isn’t reality — because all fully realized experience is beyond mere sight and sound. You can easily test this yourself. For example, take the activity of looking at the changing of colors of leaves on a cool autumn day – the tremendous beauty of the sunlight piercing thru the half-worn leaves, into near translucent wonder, flickering in the wind, complemented by its siblings still dancing in the air. I did this just this past fall — seeing how amazing it looked and felt — I took out the smartphone and tried, mightily I add, to capture the experience. I couldn’t. In fact, I failed miserably despite numerous attempts, changing camera settings and angles of view.

The majestic photography of Ansel Adams is known to capture nature’s magnanimous beauty, but it’s still a creative choice, one carefully selected and uniquely interpreted by the artist.

It’s common for captured images to feel dull, diluted, flat, and practically lifeless in comparison to real live experience. It’s not surprising that photography itself is an art and craft, one requiring great skill and experience to master, in order to capture just a sliver of that beauty in celluloid or digital form. But even in the hands of a master photographer, the photograph will never be more than an interpretation, for reality could never be captured — its experience, unique to a specific time and place, has passed. Beyond the limited field of vision, life and nature can rarely come close to being duplicated in art, either on film or in paint.

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” — Andrew Wyeth

In order for artists to get as close as possible to the source in their work, we must keep this dilution of the direct experience to a minimum. So, for painters and animators alike, copying too closely from photographed sources is much like making a poor copy of a poor copy. The age old advice of ‘drawing from life’ is not just an issue of artistic snobbery.

Lucian Freud’s paintings carry an intensity and authenticity that is completely unique to both his experience and his interpretation of his models. He was also known to come physically and uncomfortably close, sometimes within inches, to his subjects, peering intensely to gauge what was in front of him, as he pondered how to best capture what he saw and felt.

As to our second point, we must also remember that art was always meant to be an interpretation of life, ideas, and visions. To merely copy exactly the colors, light or movement as objectively and coldly as possible is NOT art, and it’s not surprising that those who try to approach art this way, produce not things of beauty but stale, lifeless widgets of hurried, impersonal and thoughtless reproduction. Art is a very personal thing, an introspective interpretation of our universe, shared with the rest of the world. There is no such thing as objectivity in art.

My old friend and colleague Graham Annable (Oscar-nominated co-director of Box Trolls) made a huge name for himself with his outstandingly funny animated comic strip, Grickle. Graham’s work stretches the limits of space and time to play on the psyche of his characters and his audience. He is, in my opinion, one of the funniest guys on the internet. To witness more of Graham’s genius, visit here.

So, in summary, use caution when using photographic reference, and try to keep in mind that it’s just that, reference. Copying is great for learning, but to blindly copy, is not creation, and thus, not art.