FMP and Thesis proposal! The monster I was so afraid of turned out to be fun! I admit I was struggling to find a theme and something I really wanted to do also important and meaningfull for my showreel, something new. In my head nothing was new, so I booked a session with Luke and he helped me look in to some areas that were newer and no one talked about it much, like AR, VR, deep fakes, etc…
I did my research and all those things looked pretty cool but I could not relate to any of them, nor wanted to really do that. For me, animation is the real thing, of course I am open to new things and techniques but always around animation and ways to do it better.
So, I decided to make a creature animation shot for my FMP, where I want to have a human interact with a non-humanoid character either a lion or a monster. I’ve always been a fan of monsters since I was young that was what I loved to draw the most, I was free to create anything without it needing to look like something, monsters are freedom to an artist in my opinion.
FMP was decided, the hard part was really to decide what to talk about in my thesis, I don’t want to talk about monsters because that is something that has been around for too long, no one wants to hear more about it, I wouldn’t know what to say honestly. So I did research for a long time without any luck, I wanted to talk about lighting and rendering as it is so important the way an animation looks, if something is not very well animated but has an amazing light and render some people won’t even notice the bad animation.
But… I was getting bored with that subject, until I thought about the female characters and looked it up and found an article about the head of animation of Frozen (2013) who had the unfortunate idea of saying “female characters are so hard to animate because they need to look pretty” and also talked about the limited range of facial expressions for women just because they need to look good. WHAT? WHY? That was it for me… Really needed to talk about this. Even because I’ve never related to any female character in my life, but Mulan, and Mulan was also a princess…
I always liked to dess as a boy, when I was young people would mistake me for a boy and I loved it! I see myself as a woman now though… Anyway, I believe things need to change, the world is changing why would we (artists and animators) not evolve with it. If we think about it animation movies sort of teach something to the kids, it taught me back then, not so well if you ask me, as a girl I always felt the need to fit in where I didn’t, as I’m not so girly. Kids don’t understand that you can be yourself, kids learn from what they think is correct.
What kind of message are we sending them…?
What are we teaching them? What are we teaching ourselves…?
So, here it is, my FMP and Thesis proposal: