After experiencing everything we have been doing during the 4 weeks of collaboration with Fine art i would like to say how i found the experience mixed, there where plenty of good moments but there were also bad moments that left a bad taste in my mouth which i’d like to discuss about now.
Firstly, i feel that having the mix with Animation and Fine Art was a mistake. I feel that both even with the same common interest with art and creating fall short due to how different the both subjects deal with there way of presenting.
Fine Art are more about appearances, metaphors, idealistic views, trying to show off and create a meaning behind whatever it is they create, changing there initial ideas throughout till there final products. Now I’m not saying Animation doesn’t do that as well, but i feel animation care to focus more on how to tell a story, how will this gain emotion, how to pull people into the piece and keep there interest over a long period of time.
Reason why i call this out is because of how during the last weeks work it really showed to me how different each course really handles things.
With the fine artists changing the initial ideas we had come up with as a group to exclude our animations which took hours to create and felt like a slap in the face. I then realised that with fine art they’d rather change ideas throughout there processes and not have a “final” idea over what they’re doing, in a way, always changing the final outcome till its finished. While animation due to how much time it takes to create needs to be planned out and thought over before hand with notes and storyboards before anything animated could happen. In conclusion, Animation is more about planning and building the overall world needed to tell its story, while Fine art has an idea that changes throughout its journey before its completed.
I would like to talk about how collaboration didn’t really feel like we truly were able to “Collaborate”. Id like to bring up the scratch film week because i feel that even though i enjoyed it and would say it was my favourite week, it does come with many problems.
while the other weeks had at least some form of collaboration from working in teams and mixing both animation or fine art together while the scratch film did not achieve this. Because it was heavily animation focused it didn’t feel that as an animation student i was collaborating with the fine art students, it felt more like i was a teacher and they were a student. I had power over them because they didn’t know what they were doing and whenever they had a problem with the software they’d come to me, while if i had a problem they wouldn’t be able to help out due to there lack of knowledge with animation.
After all 4 weeks id say i did enjoy the topics we were looking into as well as trying to work as a team with fine art to create a final product. But due to how different each subject is i would say created tension between the groups. Not to mention how it felt like a second thought for hub D to be Animation and Fine art, having everything seemed rushed and created on the spot without real links between each week really just felt cluttered and uninteresting within the long run.
In conclusion id say that with all my mixed feelings towards collaboration I’d say this was beneficial to see other students point of view, seeing a different view point other than an animators viewpoint was interesting but in the long run hasn’t made me more likely to explore more fine artsy ways of creating artworks or stories. It was also beneficial to chat with people other than animators, seeing there interests and gaining new friends as well as finding ways to create or show stories within my own animations.
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