I've been finding lately that sometimes, without trying to, school takes all the fun out of learning.

Working on the computer is alright, but I really miss the tactile element that comes with MOST artistic pursuits. My favorite classes so far have been Life Drawing, Scriptwriting, and History of Animation. I just straight LOVED the drawing class and I wish I had one every term. Scriptwriting took my love of writing and taught me a stucture for pursuing my story ideas and taking steps to turn them into an entire script. It was incredible to have a completed script for animation at the end of term, and the fact that instructors and classmates found my story to be so original that I recieved an award for it was very validating. History class was great because I enjoy history to begin with, and to look at animation with a broader perspective of critique, was fascinating. Granted, sometimes it's hard to just enjoy certain things anymore because I know that they're bad, but I try to separate myself from my newly acquired critical eye when I can. We also had the chance to create some simple stop motion animation in this class, and I enjoyed it so much that I'm even more sorry that we don't do more with this in later terms.

Learning so much about a single application has me somewhat bored this term. 3dsMax is alright, but I knew even before I started at Bradley that while I wanted to learn animation, 3D is not really a huge interest of mine and probably not the direction that I'll go in as an artist. I am really wishing I had more free time outside of projects to persue my own interests. I want to do more drawing, and always like doing my concepts and storyboards the most when it comes to my schoolwork. I REALLY want to learn more stop motion on my own. Yes, animation is incredibly tedious in some ways and very time consuming, but the tactile element of stop motion makes it so much more bearable. That simple 100 frame stop motion I did in History class was so envigorating and delightful. I wish that I would have had more time to fully flesh out my ideas, set up my shots, gather my materials.... everything. I did so much collage work as a teenager just for fun, that when I took simple magazine cutouts and brought physical motion to it... it was if I had somehow come full circle. I could spend so much time perfecting it just for my own enjoyment, the ideas flowed so freely and quick and that is always an exhilirating feeling when you're creating something, as any artist knows. Out of everything I've done so far, I feel as if that project, and my script, had more of ME in them than anything else I've done thus far in school.

I want to do more projects outside of school, just for myself, because I have been feeling creatively drained lately and it causes me to become disinterested in my school projects. I hate feeling that way, especially when it comes to projects with a deadline, because I have to force myself to create and I don't think that's how it should be. To find some balance of doing things that really energize me and capture my creative interest would really help to offset the boredom I am experiencing with 3dsMax. Maybe it's not the application... maybe it's the instructor.. but then again, maybe it's something else. I want to learn to do things with the application, and have plenty of vision, but it's as if I don't have any time to actually just fuck around with the application and discover things... that wonderful "Eureka!" feeling that I love... that is REAL learning in my opinion. The constant barrage of projects nagging... it's like an overdose of structure and there is no "Play" to this learning experience. It's tiresome. I love the excitement of learning, the fun of it. And it seems to go both ways... if it's not fun for me, then it's more difficult for me to learn. Joyless learning is Not learning. I suppose I'm just going to have to force myself to find the time for outside pursuits. My social life is practically nil, and this doesn't seem to be something that will change any time soon, so I might as well do something constructive with the small amount of time I do have.

Ahhhh.... It's always nice to empty your head. Back to work now.