Think With Your Eyes

Everyone has a story to tell: a childhood memory, an inside joke, a dream, a big mistake, a life well-lived. Everyone has a slightly different way of telling these stories. These differences can be as simple as word choice or as broad as their medium; and among all of the media I have learned about, animation intrigues me the most.

You have to love animation to pursue it; even its most successful scholars describe it as a labor-intensive, painstaking process. Animating a scene entails set construction, dramatic lighting, point-of-view, the subtleties of acting, and the drive to create a memorable piece of art that will, ultimately, represent only a twenty-fourth part of a second, and then repeat the process until emotion is conveyed, conflict is resolved, and the story is told. For feature-length animated films especially, the procedure can be excruciating.

One aspect of a good, marketable animator is traditional figure-drawing training. Even though character animations—especially 2-D animations—look simple, the artist behind them should be “performing” with a fleshed-out, competent knowledge of the human figure. At BYU, you cannot apply for a major in animation until after you have completed at least one full semester of figure drawing.

My figure-drawing teacher is strong-minded and candid. His ideas about the mindset of a good artist are measurable and reliable, with results to reinforce them. There may not be a definitive way to judge art, but there are certainly ways to measure its accuracy.

In my other animation pre-requisite class, I was shocked to find that I could point out inaccuracies in the gesture drawings presented in an instructive video—inaccuracies that would draw negative attention and feedback from my figure-drawing professor. To be fair, “gesture” drawings of the human figure are not meant to capture accuracy as much as they are meant to capture motion; but my professor would have some choice words to say if I presented those drawings—done by a seasoned professional—in his class.

I think my eyes are being taught more than my brain; I see the world so differently after my classes.

--Posted by S. Benjamin Puente