The tools
Blender
A mixture of animation techniques and software will ultimately be involved in the animations, the primary medium however will be 3D graphics, created in Blender 3D.
I discovered Blender in October of 2008, when I was searching for a means to create and render 3D graphics for a possible interactive virtual environment.
I had previously, in fall of 2007, been introduced to and using 3DS Max, a commercial product for generating 3D graphics, which was made available to me while I was taking courses at Prague College. While learning 3Ds Max, I became acquainted with the fact of virtual objects' capacity to disobey physics in various ways, such as being able to pass through one another. This discovery, coupled with my directed search to find out the means to make surfaces in 3Ds Max reflective, allowed me to produce a short animation called "Flight of the Inner Mask," in which a winged mask rises from a substance which resembles both a mirror and water in its reflecting what passes through it.
The ability to produce moving images which present the illusion of real objects yet which needn't be affected by gravity, mass or surface tension, allows for vivid allegories to be assembled, and for transformations to be part of their language. Other media of animation may combine with 3D to affect seeming shifts between mental states or realities, and may add languages of expectations and establish systems of belief of their own during their stay on the screen.
The medium of animation overall as a system of communication has the ability to allow for the realization and articulation of a distinct system of the possible within which the impossible perform as the believable, and familiar objects can be made to express stories.
Blender is the only freely available software of its kind which can be downloaded in full for unlimited use by the private creator to make films, games, and digital sculptures. Blender has become not only the vehicle for realization of teh project, but a major source of inspiration for many of the scenes and events in the film, as Blender's ability to simulate certain aspects of reality, and to deviate from other aspects, have fueled my technical experiments as well as much of my generative process of storyboarding and story development.
I have learned the majority of my abiiltis in 3D animation from and within Blender, and Blender has become my "native language" in 3D, although I have used 3DsMax and Soft Image previously. These software all have in comon the same basic workflow and structure, and include the same basic toolset and simulation abilities. They differ slightly in interface, layout, naming conventions, and keyboard shortcuts.
For the ethereal aesthetic I imagine for the project, Blender's toolset and capacities have proven ideal. I have been satisfied with both Blender's capacity to enable me to articulate my particular visions and intentions, and also with the degree to which BLender as a medium contributes particular qualities to the project, which come about as effect of the medium's particular advantages and properties.
What I ask of a medium, is that its particular properties allow me to employ certain of my particular skills, and that I am able to make objects which are faithful to my original, essential communicative intention, but which in addition contain details that came about as beneficial accidents; the result of my ambition coming into contact with the medium. A medium is useful to my purposes if it contributes to my subject matter or story, as a matter of its influence in the process of making it real. I feel the work can really be understood through a given medium, if I can recognize that I have come to better understand the idea through the process of working it into a particular medium.
When my abilities and restrictions come into contact with those of a medium's, my hope is that the communicative outcome retains my original intent but also extends that idea, by way of having allowed other of my talents besides my formational imagination, to be employed during the process of production. I do not mind if the product of my artistic work deviates to some degree from my original intent, so long as the essential drive to portray a unique entity or mental and emotional state are clear and present, and the audience is able to make associations between my creation and other experiences or ideas which I would agree have certain things in common. I do not in fact imagine, pre-storyboard, graphics to a level of detail beyond a series of events- the exact textures, hues, and illusions of weight and depth, become the domain of the medium to propose and for me to approve or work to alter. Blender creates images which are "brigher" than I imagine, however pen and ink sometimes create images which are more "cartoony" or "organic" than I imagine.
