Initially I considered an inanimate object as a character (i.e Pixar's Lamp in "Luxo Jr."), which allows for serious focus on movement of the character to convey emotion in the form of body language. Much like mime, the gestures have to be overexaggerated to be understood by viewers to compensate for the loss of sound effects and dialogue. Another plus for using an inanimate object is that viewers are far more critical of both the movement and construction of animals and especially people, so there is far less room for error in both modeling and animating when using a human character.
Using Luxo, Jr. as an example, Pixar used only the already present attributes of the lamp as potential for animation, maintaining a realism and simplicity that stands as a good tenet for character development (ignoring of course the manipulation used in their latest film).
The theme of duality, which I will discuss further below, has been a consistent theme in my work, so I began by using the idea of a Yin-Yang as two halves of a whole, one of which being my protagonist. Unfortunately, half a Yin-Yang, even if extruded into the third dimension becomes little more than a distorted sphere, or teardrop with very little potential for dialogue much less animation. Potentially this symbol could be cross-pollinated with a machine, perhaps like the organic machines in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ.
After putting a lot of thought into inventing a non-human character with very little progress or inspiration I put the idea aside and decided to focus on the construction of the world surrounding the protagonist.
INITIAL THEMATIC DEVELOPMENT
As mentioned above, duality has been a focus of my work, so in an attempt to infuse my thesis with my own artistic senisibilities, I began ways integrating this theme. Duality became a part of much of my animated work in my first class on computer animation. A term paper was required on how each of us interacted with space in an attempt to translate our intimate interactions in the world into virtual space. I decided to focus on being left-handed, which, while not actually a disability does greatly impact on how I interact with the strongly right-hand biased world around me. My right-handed friends have dismissed my claims of left-hand deficiency in the world around us I believe as a defense mechanism to avoid feeling guilty for being supremacists. But seriously, it is easy to overlook all of the ways our world is righty-biased--from door handles to the direction screws are threaded to scissors--most things are easier to use in one's right hand. And for good reason; only about 11% of the world's population is left-handed. So don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for the world to change for me. I'm merely making a comment about how it changes the way a left-handed person sees the world, slightly.
There are a couple of different ways a "virtual world" can be constructed to respond to my left-handed complex. Left can be seen as a mistake or as the minority--the "ugly step child" of the right hand. In this world the system/builder/God errs and the left is the unintended result. This is the way left-handedness is interpreted in my undergraduate thesis, "At The Eleventh Hour" (viewable below within my previous blog).
On the other hand (no pun intended), and in a more positive way, the left can be the mirror of the right hand. This is how the world is constructed in two pieces I created it my first animation course, "Sinistral" and "The Mirror Conspiracy." This world has much more potential because the concept of duality can be exploded to opposites (or if one prefers, complementary pairs). Male/Female, Black/White, Night/Day being some pairs that come to mind.
I also have a preoccupation with crosswords, sudoku, and games and riddles of all sorts. In addition, I juggle and play Ultimate frisbee. So the idea of play is inherent in the way I view my spatial interaction with the world around me. I create ambigrams (words that when rotated 180 degrees reveal the same word--they have rotational symmetry). Some examples of my work are below.
My first name, one of the easier ambigrams to create
Ambigram of Animattic, the name of my future production company
And here are some professional examples:
The cover design for Paul McCartney's newest album
The world-famous ambigram designed by John Langdon for Dan Brown's novel
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