At the end of last year, I visited INNMOTION with one of my friends. Of course, that event would be a great place to network and socialise with Industry people and fellow animation enthusiasts. But the bad news is we were both too shy to talk to people there.
After the two days ended, I started regretting the missed opportunity of networking. One of the main regrets was we got Aaron Blaise and James Baxter standing near us and we just stood there in silence.
At the end of this year, the event will be back and we will go again! Hopefully by then we wont be as shy and can actually talk to people. wish us luck!
Earlier this year, I submitted my one-minute film, Friend Machine, to 15 festivals as an experiment. To be honest I think the film wasn’t concluded well as a story and I am not that hopeful about getting to any of them, so I am super chill about it. There were three deadlines that passed, and luckily the film was selected for one festival! Which is the Bali International Film Festival. I actually didn’t expect to get in because I thought that Film Festivals in Indonesia are more focused on live-action films. So this made me more hopeful about the future of Animation Industry in Indonesia! And I am grateful for it.
For my graduation film, intermezzo, I am also planning to submit it to as many festivals as I can (as long as it’s free or cheap lol) because I spent lots of time just to finish it so it better be out there 🙂
Let’s just say that I don’t like being online. I want to be as anonymous as I can live on earth, but of course, the world doesn’t work that way anymore. Especially I want to pursue a career in the animation and film industry. I can say that my digital presence is like a barren desert. But the annoying part is because I don’t voluntarily be present online, the things that showed up would be so random, like a silly tweet from 15 years ago from my abandoned Twitter account.
So I have a mission after I am done with everything. Which is to fill up my digital presence professionally through a portfolio website, Behance, Vimeo, etc.
I am currently still formulating how I want to present myself, should I be general with my skill and the portfolio or should I be focused? I have been looking through multiple animator’s websites and they are so varied in that aspect. I feel like being general and having a variety of portfolios could open up wider opportunities. But if I want the portfolio to be more focused, It would look more professional. the more I think of it the more I feel like I am worrying for nothing though, because I enjoyed surfing through different types of portfolio websites to get inspiration. We’ll see later on..
I have to say, deciding to learn animation is still the best decision that I have made, even if the animation career has not started yet. And if I am honest if I didn’t stumble upon MACA webpage and randomly started reading through the course details, maybe I would still be sceptical about pursuing animation.
When it comes to my career pathway after I graduate, I can think of three directions: first is as an animator, second is to be in the art department, and the third is in production design area. What I know is I want to be in this industry, and I can only hope that I will enjoy it, because sometimes professional life and the industry conditions could alter your view about something that you are initially passionate about, but I am optimistic!
One of the things that I will try to do after graduation is to do an internship. I feel like an intern role would suit me better at the beginning because I know nothing about the real working world of the animation industry. Also I feel like as an intern you will be more comfortable asking many questions and asking people to teach you anything. Or maybe the environment of the Industry is different than what I am familiar with? I guess I will have to find out.
As for now, I have only applied to one internship, which I did last week, so there won’t be any update until later on I assume. To be honest, there are many opportunities that I missed. My problem was the lack of decent quality portfolio for the showreel, because my exercises from the first year were super rough, so I had to wait until I was done with some cleaned-up scenes so I could have three different projects in my showreel.
Hopefully, I can add more after this!
(I actually have the showreel but I can’t seem to upload it so maybe next time!)
In our Storytelling workshop, there was one activity where we were asked to breakdowns the bones of the story/movie that is familiar to us. Instantly I thought of Annette (2021), a musical movie written by the Sparks Brothers and directed by Leos Carax. Personally, for me, Annette was the most appealing and eclectic (or maybe the weirdest?!) movie that I watched in 2021.
(Spoiler Alert!)
To summarise the story of Annette, the story began with Henry, a stand-up comedian and Ann, an opera singer that fell in love, got married and have a child together named Annette. While Henry’s career spiralled down, Ann’s took off, which resulted in an aggression on Henry’s end. Henry ended up accidentally killed Ann which left Annette with only her father. Later he discovered that Annette has a singing talent like her mother and thus began Annette’s singing career with Henry as her manager. Fast forward, Annette became a worldwide sensation and together with Henry and her mentor, The three of them went touring across the world. One night Henry killed Annette’s mentor because of his jealousy towards him. When the time of Annette’s final show came, Annette refused to sing, instead, she outed to the world that her father was a killer. The ending of the scene was Annette visiting Henry in the prison and how they have a conversation (in this case, a duet) with a brutal/sad/bittersweet open ending(depends of how optimistic you are).
So! What I love the most about this movie was the fact that Annette was a puppet the entirety of the movie except for the ending. I feel like as a movie, the director gave us, the audience, a chance to play along in this movie. When we saw a puppet Annette, it’s easy for us to not take her seriously, and I think that is probably what the director was aiming, for us to forget her as a human being, not unlike how the Adult in the movie sees her, as a means to an end. I feel like this movie is a great example of how the decision about how to tell a story is very important. In my opinion, one of the reason this works well because it is a live action movie, where they casted real people as the character. Maybe it is because we as a human could relate more to other human rather than to an object. When we sees a puppet Annette, which was also barely talk or do anything that hinted of humanity, It’s easy to ignore her existence, especially when there was a lot more real human drama surrounding her. Also, I feel like the writer and director of this movie did a great job in including the audience in the narrative without underestimating the capability of the audience to grasp everything at the end.
Finally, there are a lot of ways we could tell a story, we could spoon-feed the bones of the story to the audience, or we drizzled it in form of riddled words and visuals. As animators, with the capacity of creating and telling those stories, the choice could be in our hand. How the audience react and process what we delivered is another story. This is why I love visual storytelling!
In my learning of facial acting, I came across Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen. FACS itself is a system or a tool to measure or recognise facial expressions or movement based on the muscular activity. The breakdowns of these facial changes are called Action Units. I haven’t found access on the complete guidelines book of this system but based on the book “Emotion in The Human Face” edited by Paul Ekman, There are 33 Action Units listed and 11 more descripted as “simply defined Action Units”.
How to read these Action Units:
The scoring of AUs is based on the facial movement of the subject, not necessarily by emotion. In the book itself, the description of each AUs tried to minimize using more subjective terms, such as sad eyes or happy eyes. But using more technical term such as brow lowerer or upper lid raiser, so to learn about the AUs, we need to be familiar with the wording. Another thing is to understand facial muscles and how it works, because some AUs will trigger another AUs to happen at the same time because of the muscular factor. I am intended to find out more about FACS and to gain access to the complete guidelines in order to better my limited understanding about this.
To DO!
While learning about FACS, I have an idea to create an experimental and interactive way of learning these AU’s. My idea is to create set of controllers in 3D Software based on the AUs to help me learn how to differentiate each one. I haven’t got the chance to create this yet! But I will update my experiment when I finally do it. Maybe somewhere in the internet world, there is an access to this 3D approach of learning FACS, but still, I think it would be good for me to start from scratch so I could understand better.
Personally, I think that learning FACs would be beneficial for an animator, because it could specify the more subjective terms of human emotions and facial changes and then use it as a part of communication tool.
