Loie Vaughn

This week I have continued to read essays in existentialism. The essay I am currently reading discusses the differences between psychology and phenomenology; psychology is the study of facts about emotions and the human psyche, whereas phenomenology is the study and reflection on consciousness and the phenomena within. Phenomenology simply does not place the earthbound restrictions on the knowledge surrounding the intangible and fathomless depths of our psyche as psychology does with it’s structured system of facts.

After many long hours of drawing, I have finished the first ten seconds of the opening scene in my animation.  This first scene will be the only completely hand-drawn scene in my piece. For 35 seconds I have estimated I will need at least five hundred pages. This week my drawing has been slower, because I am still learning how to draw motion using the millions of minute adjustments essential to animation. Wednesday, I had a test shoot in the 2D Animation lab. For this first shoot I used Istop Motion instead of Dragon, just to keep it simple. I shot the first three seconds of my piece, and I found I needed to add a few drawings here and there to smooth out the motion. Tomorrow, however, I plan on using Dragon, instead of Istop.

To start this third week of the quarter Laurie and I had a conference on Tuesday and decided on various changes to make to my proposal packet. That afternoon I made the changes, which involved adding detailed work hours every day to my schedule, upping some of the amounts on my budget, and expanding on the concepts section of my narrative proposal. 

This week I have been reading Essays in Existentialism by Jean-paul Sartre. In the introduction written by Jean Wahl I found this concept rather intriguing: “Hegel believed in a universal reason. He tells us that our thoughts and feelings have meaning solely because each thought, each feeling, is bound to our personality, which itself has meaning only because it takes place in a history and a state, at a specific epoch in the evolution of the Universal Idea (pg. 5).”  I call my thoughts and feelings my own because they are slightly different from others I hear or read or see, and therefore they are registered as part of my unique personality.  If we didn’t directly reference thoughts or feelings (like other animals) we wouldn’t be aware of our thoughts and feelings as entities separate from our existence. In the first essay, The Humanism of Existentialism, Sartre writes about existence preceding essence. “For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future (pg. 36).” Because man is conscious of his future and his existence, and because he makes conscious choices, he must take complete responsibility for his actions. I appreciate this concept. Instead of making excuses for choices you make, one should merely accept this choice and move on with whatever outcome you have in this moment. Acknowledging that you are not born with a set of specific talents and personality traits and duties and values means you are completely free to chose your own path. It means every single choice in your life counts.  

Thursday, Marit, the animation intern gave Rowan, Victor and I a run down on the basics of the animation program, Dragon Stop Motion. She showed us how to hook up a canon rebel to the animation stand, as well as the basic format for projects, and the steps involved in capturing frames and navigating through and setting up your images. Even though I have had only a quick tutorial to this highly complex program, I think I am going to jump in head first and just start using Dragon. It may be challenging, but I am wiling to put for the effort if it will enhance my animations and my resume. 

Friday evening, I attended a presentation by Anam Thubetan, a man who grew up and studied Prajnaparamita in Tibet. Very slowly and carefully, Anam spoke about the basic principles of Dharma, the true path to inner freedom. As I have been reading about basic principles of buddhism, the concepts he spoke of were not unfamiliar. Anam told us that Dharma is not the way of doing, it is the way of undoing- of letting go. When you let go of all of your preconceptions, knowledge, habits, history and future, your mind is free and clear to “drop your mind”. I particularly appreciated Anam’s instruction to question everything. When you question yourself, it helps to dissolve every notion of “I”. Near the end of his talk, Anam chuckled and said, “I do not actually teach anything. My job is simply to ask people to drop their minds… isn’t that funny?” After reading about buddhism and hearing Anam speak, I have decided to focus my animation on living in the moment, my struggle with time, and the perceived unbalance in the world around us, also linking in concepts of existentialism (such as existence before essence) which directly relate to these points. 

Wednesday afternoon and all day Saturday were devoted to finishing an old project with my partner Nathan Chinn. Wednesday we previewed and numbered the scenes of our 16mm visual essay. Saturday we cut out all the scenes, wrote a paper edit and spliced all the footage together, viewed the result, made a few edits, and screened the final piece. This piece will most likely be screened evaluation week when our spring projects are finished. 

Today I and tomorrow I am working on finishing the storyboard and script outline for my animation. I have collected many magazines and began cutting out fragments, and outlined three of the four scenes I plan on including in my piece. Later tonight I will screen Frank Film, a cut-out animation which Laurie recommended and that won an academy award. Earlier this week I watched several amateur animations on youtube to look for useful techniques, design concepts, mistakes, etc.

This week I was very distracted by the first real spring weather (as I’m sure everyone else was) but I did manage to accomplish a fair amount. Monday I finished the rough drafts for my proposal, schedule, budget and bibliography, and Tuesday I had a Skype conference with Laurie, Belinda, Ashe, Jeremy and Taylor (the last four are in Los Angeles). Laurie gave me some good feedback for my project, and we decided I need to focus on one specific animation piece, rather than just produce several small animation exercises. So, I decided to read about three different philosophies which have always interested me: Existentialism, Taoism and Zen Buddhism. To start, I gathered books to read: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Essays in Existentialism, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka (I cut this one, though as it was more about the lives of these authors, and though interested, I need to read more about the concepts of Existentialism, not the lives of those who wrote about it), Nothing and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre, The Secret of the Golden Flower (the story used as a guide to Taoism), and ThePsychology of the Imagination (also cut, due to a lack of reading time… I will pick it up later, however). 

I am now almost done reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Zen Buddhism is not a religion. I would call it more of a mindset. The ultimate goal of this practice is to be completely aware of the here and now. Suzuki (the author) often seems to contradict himself, but then works through this contradiction, and somehow the point makes sense. For example, “If you try to calm your mind you will be unable to sit, and if you try not to be disturbed, your effort will not be the right effort. The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. We say concentration, but to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense. Zen practice is to open up our small mind. So concentrating is just an aid to help you realize ‘big mind,’ or the mind that is everything (Suzuki, pg. 33).”

As far as my art goes, I have a small storyboard done for a potential scene in my project in which the world seems to fall away in a state of unbalance, and a mouth is saddened by this. The world is soon replaced by the beautiful black of space, which gives the mouth peace and acceptance. “Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony (Suzuki, pg. 32).” To practice some movement I made a couple tiny flip-books. One is a ball bouncing, and one is a black hole grabbing color. For inspiration, I have been watching animation shorts on the Experimental Animation Techniques website and on the Wooster Collective site.

And last, but not least, I finished my proposal packet for week three (which was severely revised this morning).

Shooting commercials for Televasion

This week I have started reading The Animation Book by Kit Laybourne to begin learning the very basics in 2D animation. To start, I am reading about production planning, necessary tools, storyboarding, basic exercises, and the history of animation. I am also beginning to lay out an intricate schedule for my spring studies, and brainstorming simple projects to start drawing. Today I am taking a proficiency in the 2D Animation Lab on TESC campus. As apparent, in class we learned how to design and manage our own blogs as well as how to draw up a detailed budget and production schedule.