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...