Work outside Work

For all you working artist’s out there with all these random ideas and influences (see Idea’s Book Blog entry) I’m sure you’ve thought about organising all those little thoughts to make a project! Maybe not for work but something you’d work on in your spare time. A walrus once said, “It’s one thing to have an idea its another to express it.” For me, I always try to occupy myself with things to do when there’s nothing to do, I have a few projects that I’ve done at home I’ll talk about in this blog, projects from way back to today, you’ll be going deeper into the corrupt little mind of the ninja!

Before there was animation, there were home videos….for me anyway. And the moment I set eyes on a camera, instantly (like those noodles) I made a movie, integrating all these random ideas from movies that inspired me when I was a boy. And as time went on our mates would gather around like family and make a random and un-meaningful movies. Sometimes we’d make them for the sake of satisfying our boredom, but other times it was a matter of all of us coming up with ideas and deciding to make a movie and see how it turned out. Wanna see a few of them? Check out my youtube account: “ghettogangsta”.

Here’s an interesting fact: another reason why I started animating was to make movies that aren’t limited by obstacles you’d face when filming live, things like locations, people, equipment, funds, etc. The freedom to do practically anything always encourages the mind.

So right now, I’ve got two main projects that are still in the making. One is a huge awards project dedicated to all my home video footages which I have failed to mention… I have about 25+ tapes of footage since 1995, 10 Vcds, hundreds recorded from my mobile and about 80 edited movies. So basically this project is like an Oscars ceremony but less serious and much more immature. The biggest and most time consuming task here is gathering all the footages related to a subject, capturing them then edit it in. I plan to have this go for at least an hour, I could do more but it’s just a matter of keeping it constant with its entertainment throughout the show.

The other project is an animation called Ninja vs. Samurai (surprise surprise) which isn’t far in terms of development, but its pretty much the type of movie I most enjoy doing, non-stop action, one-on-one fighting, crazy editing, over the top SFX and of course… a ninja! Unfortunately I can’t really do much to that as I’m in the process of upgrading my computer since my last one recently broke This project will also help me experiment techniques on these types of characters to help prepare me for Daughter of God.

I consider the projects I do at home, a learning process, for me and work, it constantly refines my knowledge in the software and helps develop better skills in certain areas not used as much at work. And above all I enjoy doing them