Work Flow

Some days at school I feel that the only way to gain knowledge from particular classes is to analyze what is wrong with them and from that gain a better understanding of the situation.

The problem class recently has been Technical Aspect of Animated Film Making. As it sounds, it is a class where we learn about the tools and methods that are used to put an animated movie together. For most arts there are technical aspects, but I think animated film making nears the highest level of technical complexity in art, with video games being the only art form that is more complicated.

The advent of computers only made things worse for film makers. There are hundreds of new steps with thousands of new options, all of which will result in some wildly different, or absolutely similar results. In addition to that the information about everything is either spread out, not existent or wrong. Thus there is a lot to teach.

But now we come to the problem I see in the class. The objective of our class is to teach us how to work through the animation work flow of our specific school. You use such and such a camera, the film goes then through this process, use this audio program, edit your video here, use these things for that, and so on.

What really needs to be taught is how to make your own work flow for a specific project. To learn that you need to know what tools you have at your disposal, what they are good for, how to use them and how to decided between different options and most importantly, how your decisions will impact your final film. Our class gets about half way to such an experience because we do learn about some underlying principals that could help make a work flow, but simply following a work flow is dramatically different than creating and following your own.

In any case, at least I know what the problem is and can get my own better experience out of the class by thinking about the fundamentals.

Kyler