Even though its common for me to let dust collect on this here blog, I didn't want that to happen this year but problems with my laptop and therefore my scanner have halted me from sharing it, which is a shame because I've been drawing a lot of stuff the past couple of months but I can't scan 'em. However, I will try to post the still lives I've been working on in my Drawing class.
Since I did say that I was going to be varying my posts, I did want to talk about something I want to do someday, maybe not in the immediate future but work my way up to is animate to a piece of classical music. I haven't thought far enough ahead to which piece (something maybe from Gustav Holst's "Symphony of the Planets") or what even the animation will look like but it is absolutely something I want to do.
To say "Fantasia" had a big impact on me growing up would be selling itself short. I remember I used to play conductor with a Popsicle stick or just sit, spell-bound by the moving shapes and swell of music.
Not just "Fantasia" (or "Fantasia 2000" but by then, I was too old for it to have the same impact) but really, any cartoon with classical music. I mean, I know in some cases, its just stock music but it really says something when I can hear Brahms "Hungarian Dances" or Strauss' "Blue Danube" and smile from the association with a funny piece of animation. ("Pigs in a Polka" and "A Corny Concerto")
If nothing else, it made me curious about the music used and seek it out, instilling in me a respect and appreciation in classical music. If not for "Fantasia", I wouldn't have been familiar with Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony" or something as discordant as Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" had it not been linked with something my brain could understand or process: animated images. Even if the images didn't tell a story like the opening "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" but where just visualizations of the music, it supplemented the music and freed your imagination to what was going on.
(Although the "Toccata" segment isn't my favorite part of "Fantasia", I understand what it was trying to do, in that it was putting the audience in the right mindset for the rest of the movie. Then again, it was pretty ambitious when it came out.)
A non-classical music example was when I saw "Yellow Submarine" for the first time. I'd heard of the Beatles vaguely and once I saw the animation, it reminded me of Peter Max's psychedelic artwork but it was completely unlike anything I'd ever seen or heard before.
It seems like a 'Well, duh' notion now but animation fundamentally is tied to music, whether its an actual piece like "Night on Bald Mountain" by Mussorgsky or even a simple beat to keep everything synchronized and timed properly. I say that because I know animation's tie to music and beats but maybe its just because its CLASSICAL, I feel like I want to do something profound or comical.
You are probably thinking "Well, you have these goals Why don't you try to animate something now?" and I have been thinking about but I've been putting it off because I'd prefer learning something like 2D animation hands-on with somebody who knows what they're doing instead of doing it all myself but that's just how I learn best.
Coming up next: actually art, hopefully >_>
