Loie Vaughn

To start this third week of the quarter Laurie and I had a conference on Tuesday and decided on various changes to make to my proposal packet. That afternoon I made the changes, which involved adding detailed work hours every day to my schedule, upping some of the amounts on my budget, and expanding on the concepts section of my narrative proposal. 

This week I have been reading Essays in Existentialism by Jean-paul Sartre. In the introduction written by Jean Wahl I found this concept rather intriguing: “Hegel believed in a universal reason. He tells us that our thoughts and feelings have meaning solely because each thought, each feeling, is bound to our personality, which itself has meaning only because it takes place in a history and a state, at a specific epoch in the evolution of the Universal Idea (pg. 5).”  I call my thoughts and feelings my own because they are slightly different from others I hear or read or see, and therefore they are registered as part of my unique personality.  If we didn’t directly reference thoughts or feelings (like other animals) we wouldn’t be aware of our thoughts and feelings as entities separate from our existence. In the first essay, The Humanism of Existentialism, Sartre writes about existence preceding essence. “For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future (pg. 36).” Because man is conscious of his future and his existence, and because he makes conscious choices, he must take complete responsibility for his actions. I appreciate this concept. Instead of making excuses for choices you make, one should merely accept this choice and move on with whatever outcome you have in this moment. Acknowledging that you are not born with a set of specific talents and personality traits and duties and values means you are completely free to chose your own path. It means every single choice in your life counts.  

Thursday, Marit, the animation intern gave Rowan, Victor and I a run down on the basics of the animation program, Dragon Stop Motion. She showed us how to hook up a canon rebel to the animation stand, as well as the basic format for projects, and the steps involved in capturing frames and navigating through and setting up your images. Even though I have had only a quick tutorial to this highly complex program, I think I am going to jump in head first and just start using Dragon. It may be challenging, but I am wiling to put for the effort if it will enhance my animations and my resume. 

Friday evening, I attended a presentation by Anam Thubetan, a man who grew up and studied Prajnaparamita in Tibet. Very slowly and carefully, Anam spoke about the basic principles of Dharma, the true path to inner freedom. As I have been reading about basic principles of buddhism, the concepts he spoke of were not unfamiliar. Anam told us that Dharma is not the way of doing, it is the way of undoing- of letting go. When you let go of all of your preconceptions, knowledge, habits, history and future, your mind is free and clear to “drop your mind”. I particularly appreciated Anam’s instruction to question everything. When you question yourself, it helps to dissolve every notion of “I”. Near the end of his talk, Anam chuckled and said, “I do not actually teach anything. My job is simply to ask people to drop their minds… isn’t that funny?” After reading about buddhism and hearing Anam speak, I have decided to focus my animation on living in the moment, my struggle with time, and the perceived unbalance in the world around us, also linking in concepts of existentialism (such as existence before essence) which directly relate to these points. 

Wednesday afternoon and all day Saturday were devoted to finishing an old project with my partner Nathan Chinn. Wednesday we previewed and numbered the scenes of our 16mm visual essay. Saturday we cut out all the scenes, wrote a paper edit and spliced all the footage together, viewed the result, made a few edits, and screened the final piece. This piece will most likely be screened evaluation week when our spring projects are finished. 

Today I and tomorrow I am working on finishing the storyboard and script outline for my animation. I have collected many magazines and began cutting out fragments, and outlined three of the four scenes I plan on including in my piece. Later tonight I will screen Frank Film, a cut-out animation which Laurie recommended and that won an academy award. Earlier this week I watched several amateur animations on youtube to look for useful techniques, design concepts, mistakes, etc.