Keeping Motivated and Finishing Things

I've always struggled with motivation and in all honesty I hardly ever finish anything I start. So many times I've written something or started an animation project that just will never see the light of day after about a days work. Why I'm like this, I honestly have no idea. A lot of the time I have this amazing image in my head and when I try to recreate that, it just doesn't work out the way I wanted and I just stop half way.

So! I am attempting to commit myself to two thing from now on. One of which is this blog, I don't imagine a lot of people read this but to be honest it's more for me than anyone else. Days like today where I'm not feeling to great it's nice to just write and hey if I help someone by doing so, super.

My other commitment is something I call the '30 Days of Motion Design' and it's quite literally what it says on the tin. I've decided that I will be making an animation at least everyday until I have 30 really really nice bits of motion graphics work. I am so committed to this because I honestly think it's about time I found a job and made a move with my career. I didn't get the Cartoon Network job and that's okay, I learnt a lot from it. They were even nice enough to give me a few pointers for next time, claiming my work was more geared to VFX and film rather than motion graphics. Which makes sense! I mean I come from a VFX background and the interview was so unexpected. I honestly don't think I was ready for it but I needed it. So yes, I am now trying to make a giant pile of work for my next Motion Graphics reel.

I think it's actually going pretty well, I'm on day 10 now and I don't feel like I've learnt much in terms of technical stuff but on a more creative
basis. Something I've always struggled with was the actual design of a graphic, I mean my technical knowledge is pretty good and sometimes I get lucky with the design work. When I decided todo the 30 days, I knew I had to step away from constantly learning technical aspects but instead, using the technical to make something effective for design. So it's definitely time to teach myself the design part of it all. 

My tip to you guys is to stop settling. It's one of the hardest things for me... the will to move forward and not stay in one place. It's definitely not easy but I personally feel like we should always look to move forward and not stop or settle, even after you've reached your goal... move forward.

"poor man thinks for the weekend rich man thinks for the years ahead" and that's not even talking about money, because money has never bugged me... like my favourite poet Taylor Mali says

"If you have this (head), you follow this (heart) and if someone tries to judge you based on this (money) you give them this (the finger)." - Taylor Mali (What Teachers Make)

Straight up. When I quote "rich man" no I don't mean money, I mean the one that has truly lived life to their complete fullest, one that never stopped experiencing. The way I see it is; in order to create success from nothing you must be willing to move forward and work when everyone else wouldn't. 


"I'm on a blood buzz, yes I am, I'm on a blood...buzz" - The National


Stay Caffeinated Guys,
Adeel.

Why I wrote RED?

Not too long ago I released a short animated film called 'RED'. The film follows a toy robot and his journey to the tree of life. RED falls in love with this idea of the tree as he sits directly opposite a painting of it. He is captivated by this painting and seeks to find it.

You may ask, since he's moving around and has feelings for this tree... clearly he must have some life in him, so why? why search for the tree? Well, I can't really give you a straight forward answer to this unfortunately. What I can say is that the film is in many ways a fairy tale, a fairy tale within the mind of a toy robot. Whether RED went on this journey or not even I cannot say, I'd personally like to think he didn't and it was all set in his mind, in the mind of a lifeless object.

So why? I guess I didn't realise it until recently but in many ways RED is based on every bit of wanderlust I have in my self. I sit at my desk all day creating fictional realities because I feel somewhat limited within mine.

For those of you who have seen the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott

"I have… seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like [small cough] tears… in... rain. Time… to die…" The film was quite heavily inspired by this one line, this idea of being more human than human in a sense. Being able to look beyond from where you are. All those memories that will eventually get lost or never heard by anyone. 

Whether the tree actually exists doesn't matter, RED is about our ability to escape from the world into something truly beautiful. We live routine lives and not often are we given this chance to "see things people wouldn't believe", we live robot lives almost everyday and we rely on escape, we rely on our minds a lot of the time. In many ways RED being a robot is a metaphor for routine, being trapped in a plastic body and not completely feeling human a lot of the time.

"don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!" -Charlie Chaplin 

The tree represents our ability to dream, our goal. The journey is all the beauty our minds allow us to envision, it represents the amazing moments we do have while travelling to our goals, those brief moments of happiness. 

Essentially RED "dies" at the end of the film, he finds what he believes to be the tree of life. In all honesty I intentionally made the tree look incredibly different from the painting, my reasons being is that it was never the tree RED was searching for. Instead, it is the reality that we settle with until it's "time... to die...". Things will never be the way you imagine it in your head but sometimes the moments we settle for in our lives always feel like more.

If you haven't seen the film or just wanna rewatch it, here's the link; 
https://vimeo.com/94875483

Stay Caffeinated Guys,

Adeel