You may not know the name Josh Waitzin, who he is and what he did, even if some of you have seen the movie made about his childhood. That movie was Searching for Bobby Fischer, and it outlines Josh's rise in the competitive chess world beginning at the age of nine. If you have not seen it, it doesn't matter - to make along story short, he ultimately becomes a jr. world champion, mastering the landscape of the sixty-four squares.
The interesting thing is that when chasing chess mastery became mentally overwhelming in his late teens and early twenties, Josh sought to free his mind through the study of Tai Chi. Initially, it was just a meditation exercise to help him concentrate, to make himself into an even better chess player - but it became much more. Tai Chi is practiced in public settings with people young and old gliding through various movements called Ch'uan in slow motion to help themselves understand their center of balance among other things. However, there is also a full contact, highly competitive world of Tai Chi, with its capital in Taiwan. This is the form of Tai Chi that Josh pursued and mastered and at a young age, rose to claim a world championship title.
Few of us will ever rise to such heights in any discipline - Josh can say he is World Champion in two distinct, and very different arenas. After reaching the top of the martial arts universe, Josh wrote a book entitled The Art of Learning - I think he has some very interesting things to say about reaching a state of Flow, where the mind is totally and completely absorbed in understanding and solving problems.
This quote comes from his book: "As adults, we have to take the responsibility for our own learning and nurture a healthy, liberated mind-set. We need to put ourselves out there, give it our all, and reap the lesson, win or lose. The fact of the matter is that there will be nothing learned from any challenge in which we don’t try our hardest. Growth comes at a point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities."
So, as we move forward in this course, this is what I want us to do - to push and find what really lies at the edge of our abilities. We can ever expect to boldly go where you have not gone before unless and until you push yourself.
With nine weeks left in the semester, this is what we are going to do:
We are going to take the next two week and continue to explore characters and their settings with silhouettes and line drawings - you really should have dozens and dozens of these as you visually search to build a character with real personality.
With dozens of drawings (maybe even dozens and dozens of pages of drawings) completed, each of you will take one of your characters and fully explore them. Thee can be drawings also, but should be much more - complete full turn arounds, add color, do a sculpture (I'm not kidding) or a collage or a series of sculptures and collages. You'll have four full weeks to really explore this character.
[It should go without saying that you shouldn't turn in four day's worth of work at the end and call it four week's worth - You know the difference.]
Finally, you will have three weeks to model your character. The challenge you will have is to build it with ewer than 10,000 polys so that you can then log onto the Mixamo web site, download a rig and an animation and make your character move.
Finally, each team - there are three of you, will make a presentation to the group demonstrating what you have come up with. This can be a Power Point or a Prezi, or mounted on foamcore and illustration board. It just has to be polished. Pretend you're after a venture capitalist's $10 million, and everything is riding on the presentation.
In class for the next seven weeks we'll discuss technique, the exploration of ideas, how to improve your drawing skills, etc.
Here are some silhouettes - yours should be comparable:
A couple of links that show a process:
Here are a handful of designs from Pixar films - color concepts from The Incredibles, very clean and graphic. Also some sketches and color studies from UP. These are here for inspiration.
As you prepare your presentation, I want you to design a poster - something that tells us about your project that could be used for its promotion. Here are more examples from several Pixar Films:
Here are a couple of backgrounds, early concept, from Disney's Sleeping Beauty - I thought these were nice, so I added them too:
