I started this project, because I thought it would be both interesting and a challenge. Asking artists to create a ‘cast’ for an animation without any specific rules would lead to unpredictable outcomes.
I listened to the track ‘triangle’ and thought how lovely it would be if there were characters doing some sort of relay through an ever-changing environment. Could I relate this to the Olympics? What if the characters carried an olympic torch and passed it onto each other. What if the characters were designed differently? what if they were all designed by different designers in some super awesome collaboration? How lovely would that be?!
This project idea was made for sharing. So I set aside a couple of weeks to animate something potentially unpredictable but exciting at the same time.
I invite artists to design a character. Just a line drawing. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Just something pure; a gut reaction to the track ‘triangle’. That’s all i wanted. I’ll take care of the rest. I didn’t want to tell anyone my intentions of what to do with the characters, I thought it would be a nice, unexpected surprise. I also didn’t want it to influence artists character designs either. There could potentially be 50 different characters coming together in one piece of animation sharing the idea of teamwork and collaboration. :)
Despite people saying what a lovely collaboration idea it was, artists weren’t so keen to enter. Only 7 designs from 5 artists. At time of writing this blog, I have 673 followers on twitter. Really? I’m incredibly disappointed. As a result, I won’t be doing an open call for collaborations again. I’ll just keep the good ideas for myself from now on perhaps?
The following paragraphs discuss possible reasons as to why this project failed.
NOT ENOUGH TIME
I gave artists a week to produce a character. How long would it seriously take for an artist to scribble something. I did not want artists to produce something that was overworked, as that would be missing the point of this experiment.
“Oh, I’m too busy.” Too busy to draw a character doodle in 3 minutes? In the time you could have listened tot he track, you could have jotted down something. A class of five year olds could come up with something I could possibly work with.
I’M BUSY (CAN’T BE ARSED)
If you don’t want to work with me, just say. I will never ask you again for anything.
YOUR ONLY ASKING FOR A DOODLE. THE PROJECT CAN’T BE THAT AWESOME.
This is my first big collaboration. I would feel like I was asking too much of creatives to create fully rigged character puppets ready to be animated. How can I plan ambitious collaboration projects if creatives can’t even handle the simplest of requests? As it turns out, a doodle was still too much to ask from people.
YOU’RE A NOBODY.
I get it. I’m not a high profile artist that people would want to collaborate with. I’m sure that if it was Ben the illustrator who had proposed this idea, he would have been inundated with submissions. Hey, maybe computer arts magazine might have even done a feature on it if it had been Ben’s idea.
I’m more than capable of awesomeness. I just wish people had more faith in an underdog.
Thanks for reading. Please leave comments/excuses below.
