I write this because this time, this year, writing my resolutions means something different to me.
Because I think this will be good for me.
To be a better person.
Be happier with my life.
Be closer to my friends and family.
Be calm.
Be hopeful.
Be inspired.
Be assertive.
Be compassionate.
Be employed.
Be rich.
Be satisfied.
Be realistic.
Be rational.
Be energetic.
Be new…
Actually scratch all that,
and just,
Be.
Ré
It’s the first thing you ask another artist and perhaps the very same question you ask yourself in an attempt to define your aesthetic: “what are your influences?” I don’t know why that question is given to artists so much, and somehow escapes people in other occupations (or perhaps it doesn’t and maybe my artist bias prevents me from seeing otherwise,) but when was the last time you heard someone ask a mathematician or a physicist ‘what are your influences?’ rather than ‘what got you interested in science or math?’ Somehow artists are “influenced” as if by a divine intervention, much like the concept of talent. But alas, I’m not here to discuss semantics, so influences it will be.
So I said I was going to talk about my influences in the last post’s “PS,” but I’m still not quite organized with those ideas. So, think of this as an intermission. I decided to take a sketch of one of the characters from “Hockey, Love, & Guts” and see how I could make a painting exercise out of it. Maybe it feels a little too overworked and too clean, but alas, I had better get it out there and move on. I’ve done some painting before, and I especially learned a lot doing character design paintings for “9,” of which unfortunately I can’t post yet (and IMDB is listing the release for that film for September of next year!) But, I think of it as an intermission, a relaxing break from the struggles of story structure, character, and the still frightening idea of page layouts and a clean look for my comics… Well, it’s my birthday, I think I deserve a break. 😉
“Dandelions” is an idea based on “Her Lion’s Jump” that I decided to develop since my friend and music composer Richie Kohan asked me whether I would continue to do more fantasy based stories. My first response was actually “no” since I’m not really interested in having more talking animals in my stories, but the characters in “Her Lion’s Jump” seem to really resonate with people, and all the works that influenced me during the pre-production of the film gave me a wealth of ideas and feelings about childhood feelings and dreams that I decided were worthy of development to say the least.
Now the approach I am taking to “Hockey, Love, & Guts” is very much character and script based, letting the art and the story and the script work simultaneously during development. So, for “Dandelions” I decided to take a purely visual development approach to the idea (even though I already wrote an extensive outline for turning it into a feature film or short series) and to explore it with watercolors. For one, I really miss the medium without ever fully delving myself into it, but having had some experience with acrylic paints and digital media I really wanted to learn more about watercolors because of all the paint media out there, it somehow resonates incredibly deeply with me. Either way, I’m also trying to take a more environment design approach before developing more characters for it, though my natural inclination is to really compose characters, and I already have a few more than the ones featured on the short.
So this is a story that I’ve been working on since the latter days of pre-production as a storyboard artist on “9.” It started as they usually start, a sketch, a character, a feeling, which then develops into a character’s life, the other character’s in that character’s life, a story, a purpose, and so on. I’ve been very hesitant to just let the ideas out like this, but alas it seems that I have to let them go a little bit to be able to share them and hence develop them further. For now I’ll say that girls field hockey isn’t what I even expected to be interested in, but as I learned from a film professor dear to me: “write what you know? NO!” What he was saying was that the mantra of “write what you know” is far too limiting, and that rather we should be thinking about writing what we feel.
