I'm a little short on money with this year's beginning taxes, so instead of buying a course, I wondered if I could head over to Learnsquared, observe and copy what others were doing and then make the same kind of assignment.
I often wondered when my streak of bad luck with work was going to end as I don't seem to land on anything particularly exciting to me, I always think there's a rainbow after a storm but this storm had been going for a long time now... and boy, did the rainbow deliver. It came in the format of a book called 'Ego is Enemy' and what stood to me was something along the lines of:
(not verbatim, I'm trying to recall it from my head) "Don't work with passion, passion is for amateurs, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then passion is some sort of mental retardation."
Funny right? But does make sense, continuing:
"When asked a football star about his coach, (whose name I can't remember, but I'm positive it was a well known one), he said he'd describe him as de-passionate, as in, not passionate, the coach would not give motivational speeches, he'd not try to nudge his players for honorable thoughts and sugar coating everything with passion, (here's the gold, it's in the why:), he'd find that those emotions would just get in the way and are a burden, instead of working with passion, be realistic, work with a purpose, amateurs are passionate, professionals work with purpose and are objective, not lost under the glossy eyes of making art."
It's exactly what I needed to hear, because years ago, I had this same mentality when working, my work was not as professional on the execution level, but I feel I never was as creative as I was back in college, where I had this mentality and approach to design, I'd be disconnected from my work even though I liked it and I could tell if it was a good piece or a bad piece, even if it had no traction on social media, I would be confident it was a bad or good one, because I delivered it objectively, I was sure on certain points of it, once I started to dwelve in the big bad world of concept art was when things got messy, I got passionate and emotional, I wanted to do this job no matter what, it was a dream, but in reality, I took myself way too seriously, and Im still recovering from that, sure, my fundamental skill improved, but I feel my creativity took a big hit, I know it'll come back eventually though, now that I can put my finger on what was right back then and wrong now, I can do something about it.
Key takeaways from making this:
- Go the extra mile (no really!) Dan Hardy went the extra mile by purposing his wife's father in his native tongue, now that's an extra mile. I'll try to make a reverence to that next time.
- If an idea doesnt start with wow, its not worth pursuing. I shouldn't had chased this one.
- Even the slighest shape can make an impact in the composition, I thought the square horizontals didnt matter much in the case study still frame but after adding set of shapes reverent to them, it helped push everything back to the focal point, this wasnt an issue, it was already framed by several different shapes, but this one just gave it one extra, which is always welcome to know how to add more without making it too much.
- Introducing variety of shapes to frame the focal point once is good, but a secondary, smaller set of shapes like the destroyed door frame (rusty one) to the right, is enough variety to help frame both characters too!
- Bringing the main protagonist to the 3D frame as PNG will help sort out if set design needs changes, something I overlooked and thus the whole composition suffered when I bruteforced him or her in
- Halfway through, I realized something funny,I was using the a different breakdown for the thumbnail I had drawn, so I was applying theories that wouldn't mesh well for the planning I had done, once I got the right study to complement my still frame, everything got so much simpler but it was interesting to try to make a still work with a different storyboard. I realized this late, because the movie has such a consistent visual language on continuity from frame to frame. For this reason, it is important not to rush to a final while making things.
- Detail asymmetry is good, form asymmetries are great. I re-found this when sculpting the monster models.
- Big nose but smaller nostrils make the character appear gentle-r
- Focus on form changes rather than detail changes/contrast
- When trying to find the correct height and scale for the characters and their environment, I had to get a few references, I know this is one of my weakest points, a uniform scale throughout the environment so I needed all help I could get before I could even let this slide, as I had many times, without me realizing it.
- What went wrong here was that I ditched my bible of ideas I want to execute for a long time and went with an inferior pre-conceived one on the spot.
- I was lost in the glossy eyes of passion and emotion and forgot to be objective, this is a problem on all my work, and I now see the best work I have done were the ones I didnt let emotion get in the way, which is the core reason, I believe that us designers and artists do good work for clients consistently, but not personal work. I need to design with reason and purpose for now on instead of letting passion and emotions being a burden.
- Was not smart to wash out my initial monster design by covering it, overthinking your design is never the way to go, it's the best to just go with the flow. It's good to think but not overthink as it kills expressiveness of an image.
