Personal Information

Jermaine van der Kolk

4th year Animation student on the Willem de Kooning Academy, Currently following the Digital Craft minor.

Email: 0869226@hr.nl / jermaine.vdkolk@gmail.com

Portofolio: VIMEO

Assignments

Wiki Late Night Questions

-What is your craft? (define your discipline, method or approach)
-What are the tools and media of your craft?
-What are the borders of this practice? (what new media technologies have arisen / what is its future of the field))
-Connect to a historical discourse and give concrete examples (images too please) of inspiring historical and contemporary practitioners

~~TMy craft is Animation, I tend to work to the core of what I want to tell first. Once I tracked down my core of its story I start adding in my ideas, build concepts and develop its design.~~

~~My tools and media are often digital, animation and in 3D and 2D blended space. I use Digital tools like Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, TVpaint.~~

The borders are in my opinion still not seen in the animation industry. Our craft is young and is still developing. There is a mix of 2D and 3D work blending and VR is becoming a rising trend in the industry. I think animation will be able to help this new technology.

1. What is your craft? (define your discipline, method or approach) My craft is animation, This means creating moving imagery. Animation is a versatile way of making since you are busy with storytelling, design, creating it and editing it. I tend to create story-driven animations. I start with finding the core of my story first. Once I figured out the foundation of the narrative I can build on I start thinking about its design and medium. This means the animations are diverse, since the eventual medium and way of making are based on the story it needs to tell.

2. What are the tools and media of your craft? There are various methods of animation, whether is analog or digital, 2D or 3D. Animation is a young profession, but its tools are diverse. We can use our pen and paper, clay, stop-motion, pixelation, 3D animation, 2D digital animation. We can use digital tools like Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, TVpaint. There are various variations of these tools and everyone prefers another, but the basic interaction with it is the same. There are also other uses for animation, think of things like games or interactive media. We can use Unreal 4 engine to create our games and to animate in.

3. What are the borders of this practice? (what new media technologies have arisen / what is its future of the field) I believe the borders are far from reached for the craft Animation. Animation is a young profession and the methods of thinking about animation and ways of creating it still changes. We're blending 2D and 3D work together or adding a new way of thinking about our films with VR technology. Games makes us think about all the angles and views we have to see our animation work. Our future changes based on the technology we can use to create with.

4. Connect to a historical discourse and give concrete examples (images too please) of inspiring historical and contemporary practitioners. The first animations were created with devices as the zoetrope in 1834 but when the invention of the camera came, we could start to moving towards 2D animation. This opened different possibilities. No longer we were stuck with building devices that we had to showcase but could give film with our animation. (such as Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton in 1906.) The animation industry is quite young, Companies as Disney or Studio Ghibli exists in the 1900's. 3D animation only started its big development around the 1990s. In present day, there is a current trend coming up of combining 2D and 3D work together. The fluid feeling of 2D drawn animation in the more technical 3D setting. I think short films like 'feast' or 'paperman' from Pixar show successful blending between these two methods.

Statement

[user:JMvdKOLK/totstatement] The craft I'm going to work with is Animation.
Animation is about bringing non-moving imagery to life. To accomplish this, Animation uses a variety of methods and tools. It uses for example storytelling, producing of work (digital, analog, 3D or 2D) and editing. Digital tools could make it easier to craft animation. When computers weren't that advanced yet, people had to draw their cells on paper and use a layer machine to combine them. Now we can create layers easily in any drawing software.
The cons of my profession are not being able to see the final result immediately, you have to use a method to render it out or flip through it. (devices/digitally etc) Another struggle is coming up with an idea. As an animator it is easy to get stuck in a personal bubble. A good way for inspiration or motivation is by watching what others did, going outside and view your surroundings, talking to others or just simply doing something else. Another thing I'm worrying about is how much motion capture and scanning is happening in animation. A lot of AAA animation is not made by hand anymore but with motion capture. models can now be scanned and animations are trying to achieve realism.

I believe it would be fun to figure out something to distract yourself from your work and which give you new ideas. I am thinking of a device that