Honors Journal

This Journal is to help me document my process for doing both my Animation Honors thesis and film. This documentation once complete, will inform and contribute to another art piece that will be reflexive of the animation process.

My motivation for doing honors is to further my skills as an animator and hopefully develop a niche for myself that sets me above other animators and artists. I believe strongly that animation is a true art form and should be recognized as much as fine art/painting, sculpting, film and theatre. My thesis looks to discuss this notion of legitimacy amongst these other mediums but also show that animation has many unique features that puts it in a league of it's own.

My film will be a very personal film and I intend it to be very expressive and hopefully somewhat confronting. The film will take elements researched for the thesis, including styles, themes, techniques and conventions found in the other mediums and manipulate them in a way that makes animation more accessible to the audiences of those art forms. The film should also help promote animation as a it's own art form and establish myself as an auteur of this type of quality animation.

So here goes some of my very personal back story to the motivation of the film.

This film for me, is about expressing and relaying some of the certain difficulties I had during a relationship. I became involved with a girl during a hard time of my life. I had lots of worries and issues and being with her became really great for me. When I was with her I felt stronger and more confident, and being with her forced me to grow and mature while also helped her to do the same. It was symbiotic in a way.

She gave me hope for myself and inspired ambition within me, alot of good things came from being with her. I felt as though I came to rely on her for these strengths though and at time I surrendered opportunities and choices because of it. I became very attached to her, in both good and bad ways.

This relationship lasted a long time and many years later we had grown alot together and both become very strong individuals, but we both began to resent our dependence on the other. So I kept getting stronger on the outside, towards the rest of the world but felt like I was becoming weaker and more vulnerable on the inside, the side the was open to her.

Eventually I began doing something new with strength and confidence and it opened a world of independence to me. Opportunities that when acted upon caused ripples in my relationship.

I still needed her though.

The ripples caused a power struggle between us over who could be more independent and who could needed that other more and it ended with her breaking up with me and leaving. This left a huge hole in my life and was more painful than anything I've ever had to endure. Being so attached to her so much of my personality was invested in being with her and when she left it felt like a so much me had left too. My strength my confidence and maturity seemed to have been ripped out of me and I was left half a person.

Through the help of my very good friends and my family eventually the pain subsided and I could function at a base level again. It wasn't until I started to stand on my own and realise the freedom and strength I had in following my own path was I able to begin to move on.

This relationships taught me alot about my own dependencies and in post-examination revealed to me some of the workings of relationships in general. The symbiotic nature of relationships is something I want to explore in my art and it is a subject with great depth and history that can be related to a wide variety of audiences.