The FUN-ject

Most evenings when I take a minute or ten to myself, I will plug away at my main side project at the moment, Starfish Ninja.  If it's not that or a freelance thing or putting together lectures, I'm probably drawing or reading an article about the world of animation.

This week I decided to do something different, I would only make art...for fun!  I'll call them "funjects". Fun + Project = Funject (not sure I love the word, but I'm going with it).  It's not that the projects I'm working on are a chore, I rather enjoy all that I work on.  Every now and then I do need to make something that has no purpose, or doesn't contribute to any greater end.  It's not something for my reel, or something I labor over for days--on the contrary, if I spend too long on one of these side projects, I begin to get invested in them, which can make me too cautious to take necessary risks.

Some of my favorite pieces of art or animation of mine were some of the most simple to make, and I think that was a lot of the fun.  I let go and gave it a shot, totally willing to throw that thing away and never look at it again.  So funjects are somewhere between a warm up exercise and an actual test or project.

Part of the fun is that these mini-projects don't require the same mental intensity as longer projects.  Or maybe it's that the payoff of enjoying the final product is equal to the work put in.  I can spend a couple weeks of spare time animating a shot for my reel, or writing, or doing concept art.  And the end result may be that I save the file and keep working on the next stage, ad infinitum.

So without further ado, here was this week's funject, from an animation demo on the second day of a summer camp I taught at Ex'pression College.  To inspire the high school students who were working on a simple hop with this character, I whipped this out in an hour or so, between answering questions.  No this isn't going on my reel ;)  but the fun to time taken scale weighed well in my favor.