Lavamation wrote:Have you ever had a moment where you don't want to continue animating even though you know you need to?
What did you do?
What kept you motivated?
And if you have never experienced this, what makes you motivated to continue animating?
Returning to the original point of the thread, because I feel like this is something we all deal with at one point or another...
Yes, although I wouldn't say I often feel like I need to animate. Animation is a thing I do because I enjoy doing it.
Out of all the things I've tried, I've not yet found a source of pure motivation. I find a profound lack of motivation to actually do anything I'm interested in. Sometimes you've just got to power through it. This is a quote I particularly like from this article:
On this particular day in the gym, there was a coach visiting who had worked with thousands of athletes over his long career, including some nationally-ranked athletes and Olympians.
I had just finished my workout when I asked him, “What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else. What do the really successful people do that most people don’t?”
He briefly mentioned the things that you might expect. Genetics. Luck. Talent.
But then he said something I wasn’t expecting.
“At some point,” he said, “it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day and doing the same lifts over and over and over again.”
To illustrate this as an animator, any big studio animator will likely tell you that they've probably done dozens of bouncy ball tests like this one, and they STILL do them! Just look at the animation on that cat . I'm sure many animators get bored of doing them after a while, but not doing them would be worse.
When I'm not motivated (so, very often), I go out and look for what other people have said on the topic. I've gotten a lot of great answers this way (Evernote is a great program for keeping track of all these quotes and articles, btw). All it ever comes down to, however, is if I'm willing to put forth the effort. From my experience, doing what you love doesn't mean you love it all the time. At times, you might even hate it. But it's totally worth it for the result.
So, where am I at with my motivation? Eh... it's a process. I'll have great bursts of it that last for maybe a day, then I'll go another week or month without doing a whole lot. Right now I'm cutting out all the things I do to avoid getting better things done (cutting out Reddit in favor of building a set in LDD), and things are still slow. I've tried other things that have worked for a while, then something happened and I stopped.
In summary, what I do is I find out why I'm not motivated, how I can fix the problem, and then make sure to apply what I've learned. The only thing that will fix the problem is doing.
"[It] was the theme song for the movie 2010 first contact." ~ A YouTuber on
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