shameless self promotion...

 So im pretty bad at the self promotion thing. but here goes...

 3rd eye 

SeeMonster 

Later. 

Musings on being a creator

This is what I have been working on. A limited edition Peace / Necron 99 resin sculpture. The two gimps are production mistakes, but still cool I think. 

You can find more about this and possibly buy one here

 So I am teaching again. the break is over. This is what I am planning on saying to my class on friday. Its about being a creator and, well my opinions I guess.


It goes along with a Prezi that I am not finished with.

What is a Creator?

In my eyes a creator is someone who responds to their environment in terms of expression. It is possible to respond to the world without expression, but no one will ever see it because it is all in your head.

There are many ways to respond to the environment. The medium of expression is irrelevant. The expression could be sculpted in marble, spray painted on the side of a wall, performed live in front of an audience, or scrawled across a cave wall that no one will ever see.

Your relationship to your audience as a creator is precarious. In most situations you will not come into direct contact with your audience. Youtube would be a prime example of this. Lets say that you upload content onto youtube and at best deal with your audience through comments in a choppy back and forth way. If you are lucky you will have the opportunity explain your work directly to the audience, like at a premier or a special viewing, but this is rare and typically you want your work to stand up on its own. If no one understands your work but you, it still needs work. Now the flip side to the creator-viewer relationship. You are a creator of content, but you are also a viewer of content. At the same time that you are sending out information that is being absorbed, you too are absorbing information that someone else is sending out. And my point here is that you should be analyzing the content you are absorbing.

As a Creator you can respond to the world in anyway you please. There are obviously positive responses and negative responses to the world, But what ever the message it does have an impact. Think about that. You are responding to the world with new content that then changes the world you are responding to. My suggestion is to choose your message wisely. There is already enough negative out there, try something positive.  

If we are creators responding to the world, then the next question is what forces is the world enacting upon us that need to be responded to? The answer is that there are too many to count. A good place to start tho are the elemental physical forces that bind us to this planet. Forces that are universal regardless of race gender nationality. Forces like gravity. It seems silly to list because we take it for granted, but without gravity we would be an entirely different species.  Would you even need feet without gravity? beyond gravity… Time. Time is a huge influencer of human activity. You may not think it because you are still young, but every yesterday you have is a tomorrow gone. and when you are on the ass end of eighty time just might just be a big influence in your artwork.

As Animators what forces can you respond? All of them. In animation you are particularly free to explore. There are no circumstances that are beyond you, no locations out of reach. If you create an alien world your audience will believe that what they are watching is taking place on an alien world.

Is animation a powerful tool for communication? Yes! What animation does that no other medium can is immediately disarm your audience.

When you watch a movie you have to overcome a lot of mental hurdles in order to immerse yourself in that world. There are the obvious ones like the special effects. If it is a cold scene and you don’t see the actor’s breath - Boom - Fake... and you are of the groove.

take the actors. Have you ever watched an actor and not been able to take him/her serious because of previous rolls?  It is different for animation. When you create a hundred foot monster or a blue alien know one in the audience balks. It is accepted as truth and everyone rolls with it. Now this effect varies with execution. If you are attempting to create fantastic visions and render it crudely obviously your animation wont have the impact I'm talking about here. But if you hit all the right notes, you can make people cheer with animation. You can make people laugh, you can even make em cry...

few and far between

When it comes to self loathing i am a natural. Bred into me you can say, and believe me it is not a self esteem issue, because there are days when i cannot leave the house for the size of my head.

 Yes i do think im the shit...
But i am also realistic. I try very hard to not lie to myself, and keep my egomaniacal tendencies under control.
I am very aware of my short comings, mostly because i remind myself of them constantly.
I wont go through the trouble of listing them here but be sure there are more than a few.

I wonder however, do many other people do this same neurotic thing? On one hand believe in their greatness, and on the other stamp down any sense of accomplishment or self worth...

I only ask this because i walk through the world and see many people in it that seem completely secure in the knowledge that they are nothing shot of amazing , despite there obvious deficits.
I always thought in order to have a sense of accomplishment, you actually had to accomplish...

Back to me. I am endlessly self absorbed. Not to the lengths of drowning in my own reflection, but i do spend an obnoxiously large part of my day thinking about my place in the universe. So my dilemma is that I have always felt out of place, like i have been planted in the wrong time/Space
My priorities are out of wack with this current moment in history, and that is what causes me to obsess about my self. Now this is not a new realization for me, on the contrary i have been developing this theory for many years, it has only just recently cristalized to the point that i can verbalize it. This it comes out awkward and rough like stones.

 So this is the conclusion i am beginning to come to.
 
I am the accumulation of millions of years of DNA mixings. and for better or worse i am in this particular body, on this particular continent at this particular time. There were systems put in place before i arrived ( Political systems, monetary systems, religious systems, ect)  that i have been indoctrinated into. I am in the process of reversing my indoctrination to these systems in order to find a place of purity of existence, so that i may relate to the world with balance.

I have no findings yet, other than that we are a confused people with a short memory searching for meaning like everyone else.

Imagine FX #90

Thank you Imagine FX

Natural Order of the Universe

I am a firm believer in universal laws... I think that the universe, and therefore our world operates by certain principals. you can chooses to go against these universal principals and suffer the consequences (which i have many times) or you can choose to operate within the universal principals and enjoy a certain amount of control over the outcomes in your life.  

I only mention this because we are once again headed for another presidential election. We, collectively are operating under the incorrect premise that we have a say in those universal laws that play so heavily in our lives. We can choose a new national leader, but that does not change the universe any more than it changes us. Rather than trying to impose our will upon the universe, which akin to an ant imposing it's will upon a human toe, perhaps we should begin living inside those universal principals. 

Just a thought

Nectar of the Gods

 Back in the Swing of things here at NMSU. Teaching is weird. I am not a particularly outgoing person, and now I have a room full of people who have no choice but to listen to me. Wait till they find out I am just pretending to be an adult. Aside from that I am taking two classes this semester, gives me more time with the wife and kids. they are two classes i am interested in so that helps a lot. I am taking 2D animation with Eddie Bakshi, Ralph Bakshi's son.  For those of you still Pink
Ralph is the man. I hope I get to meet him.

First Post

Here it is, I have been putting this off for a while... For a variety of reasons, but mostly because i am a firm believer in the notion that just because you have something to say doesn't mean that it deserves to be heard.

There is a lot of talk in the world, the internet especially. so i needed to feel like what i was saying was not just more babble. Mental garbage for some poor bastard to read and take up valuable brain storage when i could just as easily not have put it out there in the first place.

The truth however is that I need an outlet as well as a way to make new connections and display my ideas.

off I go...

My Deviantart Account