More from those amazing French students
This was on Cartoon Brew a few days back so I'm sorry to those of you for whom it is old news, but my PC died last night and I ended up having to reformat my hard drive. I was up till 3:30 last night and have spent most of today re-installing and re-backing up files, so I haven’t had much time for researching blog stuff.
New SBIT friend Aaron put up a post about some French animation on the Students and Friends page the other day, and here is some more great animation from that part of the world. This time it’s from a different school called Supinfocoms. It’s amazing what they do over there. I hope you find it inspirational.
In my opinion the biggest reason for why there is such a difference between what we and they achieve is the amount of creative freedom given to the students, for some reason Australian students arrive from school expecting that they are going to be able to spend vast amounts of time coming up with what they are going to animate instead of animating what they are told. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say there are students among us now who spend around 80% of their time at Tafe thinking about what they are going to do instead of doing something.... anything! In a discipline as time consuming and intricate as animation, and within the context of a two year course that is madness, you will just never produce enough work to reach this kind of standard (or even an employable standard in many cases). I wouldn't mind if there was a stream of amazing original ideas but sadly they tend to fall into the same old categories (tortured soul, ninjas, care bearish, robots, southparkish, cartoon networkish, gratuitous violence etc), its obvious that this kind of crud just isn't tolerated at these schools. I would guess that the story is decided upon collectively (in a relatively short period of time) and then everyone is told what and how to do things in order to execute that idea. They would learn so much more!
Jane, Terry and I have the information between us to achieve work of a similar standard to this and we have equipment and software that can produce work of this quality (just). We just don't get the opportunity to get in that deep with most students, many are just too busy grinding away at their own agenda, often even avoiding us in class to sidestep conversations about how they are doing their work instead of what you are animating (is that you?). One thing I've learnt is that you can't turn the Tafe culture on a dime, you nudge it this way or that and it can take two years before the results become apparent. But I think we are definitely heading in this direction. For now the system is as it is, and I think if we just put our foot down overnight there would be a revolution. If this is getting through to you then you need to be the one who pushes in this direction, seeking feedback at every possible moment, and making sure you understanding how things are done and why (there are reasons, non of us just like pushing students around (accept maybe Terry)). I have my share of the blame to bare here (if there is any blame, I think it’s a great course generally I just want it to be better), I don't like confronting students who I see straying from the course, I’m a big softy. But hopefully we can work on it together.
Note that I didn't say at any stage they are more talented than us, there is tones of talent among our students. I think the main problem at the moment it its just shooting off all over the place instead of focusing on what has to count most of all. A growing improving local industry and jobs in that industry for our students.
Oops, spot the guy who is over tired and went off on a bit of a rant….. Hope you liked the animation :P
New SBIT friend Aaron put up a post about some French animation on the Students and Friends page the other day, and here is some more great animation from that part of the world. This time it’s from a different school called Supinfocoms. It’s amazing what they do over there. I hope you find it inspirational.
In my opinion the biggest reason for why there is such a difference between what we and they achieve is the amount of creative freedom given to the students, for some reason Australian students arrive from school expecting that they are going to be able to spend vast amounts of time coming up with what they are going to animate instead of animating what they are told. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say there are students among us now who spend around 80% of their time at Tafe thinking about what they are going to do instead of doing something.... anything! In a discipline as time consuming and intricate as animation, and within the context of a two year course that is madness, you will just never produce enough work to reach this kind of standard (or even an employable standard in many cases). I wouldn't mind if there was a stream of amazing original ideas but sadly they tend to fall into the same old categories (tortured soul, ninjas, care bearish, robots, southparkish, cartoon networkish, gratuitous violence etc), its obvious that this kind of crud just isn't tolerated at these schools. I would guess that the story is decided upon collectively (in a relatively short period of time) and then everyone is told what and how to do things in order to execute that idea. They would learn so much more!
Jane, Terry and I have the information between us to achieve work of a similar standard to this and we have equipment and software that can produce work of this quality (just). We just don't get the opportunity to get in that deep with most students, many are just too busy grinding away at their own agenda, often even avoiding us in class to sidestep conversations about how they are doing their work instead of what you are animating (is that you?). One thing I've learnt is that you can't turn the Tafe culture on a dime, you nudge it this way or that and it can take two years before the results become apparent. But I think we are definitely heading in this direction. For now the system is as it is, and I think if we just put our foot down overnight there would be a revolution. If this is getting through to you then you need to be the one who pushes in this direction, seeking feedback at every possible moment, and making sure you understanding how things are done and why (there are reasons, non of us just like pushing students around (accept maybe Terry)). I have my share of the blame to bare here (if there is any blame, I think it’s a great course generally I just want it to be better), I don't like confronting students who I see straying from the course, I’m a big softy. But hopefully we can work on it together.
Note that I didn't say at any stage they are more talented than us, there is tones of talent among our students. I think the main problem at the moment it its just shooting off all over the place instead of focusing on what has to count most of all. A growing improving local industry and jobs in that industry for our students.
Oops, spot the guy who is over tired and went off on a bit of a rant….. Hope you liked the animation :P
6 comments:
Hey Ian, your lovely laptop didn't die did it? I HATE it so much when computers do something like this, as it takes so much time to get it back to where you want it. I agree about how lovely the French school animation is. yum yum!
Naaa, it was my desktop. Its up amd running again now. Lucky for me I had all of Mertle backed up on an external hard drive.
The school of 'Supinfocom' is apparently on the border near Belgium...this is where 'Ah' was made. The other school is Gobelins. (Where 'Burning Safari' was made) These two art schools are the biggest two in France for animation.
The reason why australian students come up with the same stale ideas is that we have been conditioned to the same cultural tripe for the last 20-50 years... whereas over in france, "mainstream" stuff is a little harder to pinpoint.. they are more open to a variety of ideas, and mainstream doesn't stick out like a sorethumb so much like it does here. because we've all grown up on disney, cartoon network - and have been denied the "unknown and possibly (shock horror!) unprofitable" foreign/european animation (where i think the most innovative ideas come from personally)... of course we are only going to have a narrow mind about these things. and it sucks!
what i admire most is these european countries don't restrict their thinking because really they have nothing that restricted them in the first place! here we are only fed superficial cartoon crap and are too afriad to branch out to other forms of animated entertainment. western world sucks like that. so narrow minded!
Maybe we have too much freedom, and nothing to fight for.
The ideas may stem from the cultural environment, but this stuff is executed better than most of our stuff (Australian Students in general) as well. That’s gota be because they are following or being forced to follow their teachers directions closer than here. I mean its not like you could consistently count on students who have a higher intuitive understanding of how animation works. It may happen from time to time, but you can see from the Gobelins site that Aaron put a link to on the Students and Friends page that these guys do it year after year.
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