Hello, to be clear I'm not aspiring to be an animator as a job, I would like to share my thoughts I have been having on the desire to want to desire animating. In the past and present I have always been inspired to animate by anime's or by spirte animation here on newgrounds, or stick fights, and many other different works and compositions.
Since atleast 2010 animation is one of those things in life that I wanted to do and spend my time on. So I found out the more time I spend animating the better I will get in a short amount of time and the more animation I will be able to make in a short amount of time.
Although the thing I noticed 10 years ago and I still notice now, is that after 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 minutes of animating something within me feels really uneasy or restless, I can't really describe it, it's that feeling that your body/mind/soul says, I don't want to do this anymore.
When I encountered this feeling 10 years ago I was always like asking myself "Why do I feel this? What can I do or think to not feel this feeling so quickly, so I can animate as long as I want." So what I used to do is force myself to animate, even though that feeling came up.
The thing is, everytime, every single time as far as I can rememeber when I start to force myself to animate, when that feeling comes up, I start feeling bad, I feel like someone is holding my throat, not exaggerating, just stating exactly what I feel. And yeah I will have made more animation after this forcing, which I only last maybe 10-20 minutes longer than usual, because this bad feeling I cannot bear for long.
This bad feeling also makes me animate worse, makes me hasty in every stroke, and also completely makes me unable to think, it's strange, as if I just cannot think a thought, because of this bad feeling everytime I force.
It seems as if my mind has one desire which is, to be able to animate all day to get the results I want, but my body and conditioned mind has other desires that, and everytime I go againts my body and conditioned mind when it comes to animating, by forcing myself to animate, I get this bad feeling, even though my rational mind doesn't want to have this bad feeling, the feeling just happens, there is as far as I know, nothing I have found that can just change that feeling, I have tried.
I wonder if anyone here that has experienced the same has managed to change their brain wiring/nervous system to not have this reaction.
I guess the theme of these thoughts here, is that for a long time since 2010 atleast, I had the desire to change my desires, so that I would feel normal or even good to animate hours upon hours, so I could get the results I wanted.
But I have found that it is not worth feeling bad while animating, to make animations, and ofcourse it may seem obvious, but you don't even make good animations if you do it while feeling bad. Sometimes the juice ain't worth the squeeze.
It may seem obvious, that animating long hours is just 'not for me' from an outsiders perspective, but for a long time I assumed or wanted to believe that I could change that, change that feeling.
As an experiment I animated something, by forcing myself like I used to do. I kind of got mad because I got that feeling again. https://gifyu.com/image/VU2U
So I'm just sharing my thoughts, curious if y'all can relate. Thanks for reading
Hey, (this might get a little personal I guess but here it goes)
So I just want to start with a quick question: What is it that drived you to start animating in the first place? Specifically looking at the hobby past the inspirations - what made you take the very first jump and draw out that very first frame? Maybe by honing in on the thing that drew you to animating (pun intended) might be the first step to figuring out if its really worth continuing. Life is a really weird for all of us, and sometimes the hobbies and feelings we fall into initially aren't quite what the seem. But breaking it down into pieces might help you narrow the feelings down.
Personally, I have struggled with a somewhat similar feeling. I just started animating last April after exam season and now I am utterly hooked. Like you, I don't really intend to make animation my main career and am really just doing it for the passion and fun. I draw alot all over my school notes and stuff, and have always loved the idea that in an animation, I can bring my pictures to life as there are no restriction (besides the time and effort you're wiling to put into it) compared to traditional filmaking. I only just started because I never thought I had the patience or skill for it.
Anyways, I took the leap and started on a stupid idea me and a friend were joking about for a while. The first animation I did was a really stupid short that made no sense, and was really just a story made up as I went to test what I could do as a starter. Kindof a proof of "can I actualy do this or am I in over my head?". Now, I ended up using almost all of my free time from the time I woke up till the time I went to bed to crunch out the animation. But about 3/4 of the way through I woke up one day and found it so hard to focus on it - despite being close to finishing. It ended up taking just about a month to get through my first 3/4, and then another not so fun month to get that final bit done. By the end of my animation I always get somewhat exhausted of seeing them, yet can't stop thinking about them until its finished. But that final 1/4 is something else, its always a huge push to get through.
Recently, I've been back in school for the semester and its really stressing me out because I can never seem to squeeze in the time to even get the final push done which is so weirdly stressful. I definitely still find myself running back to animation over time, so my case is a little different than yours. It is starting to become a little bit of an escape for me considering whats been going on recently - a place where I can immortalize the dreams and ideas I have in my head.
That being said, do you take breaks sometimes? Maybe you need some more time to develop your ideas to get a final goal that you want to reach, something in your mind that when you see it in real life you'll be able to say "thats what I wanted it to look like/close enough anyways". I personally find for every hobby I've had, if I don't take breaks, my interest in them gets to a saturation point. Maybe the way you're approaching it might have something to do with it to? It might also be the medium too: there are tons of animation methods, like tradtional, abstract, even stop motion, and trying out a new style might allow to focus more on it.
Either way you look at it, animation is incredibly tedious and will take a very long time regardless of the style. So it is probably common for a lot of people to lose interest at least for a little bit given how incredibly long it takes to reap the rewards of a finished product. And on top of that, most people probably wont understand the time that went into it when they see it.
At the end of the day, you know yourself better than most, but might be ignoring the elephant in the room. And maybe, animation might just not be your thing, and thats alright too. I'd say its better to know now than get frustrated by it everytime you do it.
If you're interested in sharing some of your other stuff you've made I'd be glad to see it! I liked the gif, has some cool motions to it.
Let me know what you think, hopefully this helps, - maybe it did nothing I dont know aha
-JUZ
Thanks for responding. So I have been looking at things that I like in animation and why I wanted to do it in the first place. The idea that I could make very fluid but weighty animations appealed to me. I also like animations that were fluid but had weight at the same time, I wanted to emulate and have the same ability as those animators. I found people on Stick animation forum Fluidanims in the past, which had a style that had the qualities I just mentioned.
I also wanted to be able to animate stickfights without using special effects, special powers, or weapons, since it's easier to hide lack of fluidity or sense of weight by makeing the sticks have all kinds of flashy movements. I wanted to be able to make basic stick fights look fluid and weighty. So I practiced animating alot of basic combos, or even just punch combos, since when you use alot of kicks in your sticks movements its easier to make it seem fluid because kicks have more circular motions in them, punches less so, so I practiced alot of punches.
Looking back at my old practices from 10 years ago they sometimes do approximate that fluidity. Here are some of those animations
https://easyupload.io/m/i33sl0
This one of the animators from fluidanims that had the style I mentioned
https://ufile.io/kcve1387
I also made a practice of punches today, https://gifyu.com/image/Vat7
I found out alot of the fluidity comes from referencing real life movements and poses, so in the my latest practice you can see that. I have traced more and rotoscoped more than I did in the past, so that was one of the missing links I think why I felt lost, because I was trying to figure out human movement by just thinking about it on my own, instead of learning and tracing from references for years and then making it my own, which is the way to do it.
The thing is it is not that satisfying to me to animate. I guess my post was a little lament about how I wish I did like to animate so that I wouldn't feel any problem doing, so I could get to a high level of animating and animate any I wanted in with this fluidity. But to get there you have to like animating. I also found that alot of the animations I like is ofcourse because of the story and build-up.
Well that is good, your stick animations definitely seem to be more fluid thn most I've seen! I personally don't really follow stick animation very much - although I used to way back growing up and kids at school would share youtube videos of some pretty wild ones.
Maybe at the end of the day, that push you give yourself is what you might have to do to get to the next level of animation, per se. Also maybe try something dramatically different too, try fitting in some really cool tropes or ideas that maybe you've never seen before in stick animation - it might help you see it ina different light and spark up the interest again. I'd also recommend watching lots of other animations for inspiration. Something like World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt uses stick figures and has a much more surreal and artistic tone to it, maybe it will interest you.
If it ultimately boils down to the animation process, I'm not sure what advice to give. frame by frame animation is inherently incredibly time consuming, so I can't give much help for that aside from keep pushing. For me, the first 30ish minutes, I kind of don't want to work much on animating, and then after that something usually just clicks and my body just locks in for a couple hours at a time.
Rotoscoping can be really important I find to really understand how the movements of soemthing new and/or complicated work and replicate the motion rather than the picture istelf. Sometimes though, if something is too heavily rotoscoped it can often lose the artistic touch and lose a little of its lifeas well. Maybe you could even try a somewhat isometric view with a little bit of a 3D aspect to the drawing - I think that might be cool. Also you could try adding some colour and detail to the backgrounds even and really spruce things up!
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