Animation

I found an amazing website of animation sketches that I am going to share here out of guilt for not producing any writing lately.*

I wish I had the patience for my talents. I mean this in the least self-fellating way possible; everyone has talents.** I always felt like a fraud because I have all of this intelligent fire in me and this general skillset of things I'm decent at*** and you're supposed to have a "passion," something that you know, you can't not do.

Sometimes everything I do feels like a parlour trick, like I am very well-trained, enough to be very pleasing in certain ways but lacking something essential behind it all that would propel me to true success. I do not wish to simply ease through life with minimal discomfort (or I do) but no passion grips me, or many do, fleetingly, small sucker fish, silky tentacles.

The animation slides are fun, I do love me some animation. Seeing the intricate skill and work behind films I absorbed as a child is especially engaging. The character design process is, I think, informative on a different level; It's intriguing to see the movement of the character affecting the entire persona, and it makes me consider both my own body language and a larger literacy of "intent" being informed by each subtle movement. Aladdin wouldn't react to something frightening by leaning back and yelping with wide eyes, he would crouch quickly forward and assess the situation, because he is always in control. Ariel's movements are fluid, but her timing reflects her perky impatience and impulsiveness in every head-turn and fin-swish.

Keep a clear line of action. Consider your character.

*Most of my job is composing meticulous email communications and long legal brief letters about software engineers and by the end of the day I'm usually just honestly sick to death of word processing.

**I grew up constantly being told how smart I was and how I could do anything, but suffered the usual mental crisis of puberty and after that decided to firmly browbeat myself into believing I was extremely average in every way. It was how I came to see myself by high school: My hair was brown, my weight was not thin but not obese, I was from the very middle of the U.S.A., I drank a lot of mountain dew, average. I think this may be some kind of partial factor which mired me in an insecurity-fugue that is still ongoing. In retrospect I feel as though I was trying to wring myself of the waves of mental highs and lows that had begun to toss me, and to snuff the anxiety over the potential of catastrophic life-failure and general life-confusion. I mostly feel though that it was an attempt to control my personal image of my physical self, which was overtaken by the comments/leers/awkward makeouts of boys/men when I grew fantastic tits in 6th grade. Averageness was safety, and an excuse to recede into self-comfort instead of striving. Or whatever.
The point is I regret not being ballsier about my ambition. I don't know if it's how I was trained to be or if it's in my nature or if I fucked it up by the above paragraph or what.

***I take great comfort in being decent at things.