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"I've been ionized, but I'm OK now." -- Buckaroo Banzai
i'se feel ignored in real/life today. is it something i said or did, or is everbody just grumpy today
i went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.
Maybe we just need a "I think someone needs a nap!" button and when someone gets on our last never we can press that, or something that does this:
[sarcastic] Sure, you can sell PA models on other sites! Why it's totally legal! Daz will even send you a gift certificate for each model you post! [/sarcastic]
Wait, access to a sarcastic tag might actually get me on more ignore lists, wouldn't it?
"˝Gee, I'm sorry your mom blew up Ricky, but the doctors say she'll be fine, she just needs to lay off spicy food for a while." - Better off Dead
You haven't said or done anything.
Maybe everybody's in his/her own world today.
For what it's worth, I've noticed sometimes that someone asks a question that clearly has a simple answer, or something than could be cleared up with a couple questions. But then, somebody will chime in with an overcomplicated masters level reply that just confuses the poor soul. It's the "sledgehammer to drive a tack" paradigm.
New Ivy Proverb. "Far better to be "Ignored", than "Stalked."
Does that mean I should remove the cameras?
lol.
It's also part of the value of a place like this, because it takes some skill to both understand how a given area works, how to evaluate it, and how to express and give useful criticism.
Friends and family are unlikely to happen to have the same understanding of whatever you are doing. They may lack the skill to evaluate and express useful criticism, adding in the fact they have a relationship with you.
Folks here are more likely to understand CGI 'stuff,' and then you can find, of that group, folks who can evaluate and give useful criticism. I mean, a lot won't, but... odds are better.
This is why I don't like to have friends show me their art or writing looking for criticism. Because, frankly, many of them stink and I don't feel like dealing with the 'how do I put it delicately' stuff. Conversely, I often don't show my stuff to friends/family looking for any substantive criticism. I'm just hoping they go 'oh hey, that's cool!' and that's that. Because chances are high that any feedback they give is going to be useless.
As an aside, it reminds me of music. In every art there are elements that are really best appreciated by other artists. When I listened to a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing a Liszt piece, my jaw dropped. He was taking one of the most difficult pieces, and embellishing it and making it 10x as hard.
Nobody who wasn't a musician would get that. Heck, unless you've played the piano, you still might not get what he's doing.
Sometimes, art is really only understood by other artists.
You need at least one camera in the scene.
OMG. You got that right.
I have an extensive ignore list, but you are not on it Will.
that sounds awesome. I love Horowitz and Franz Liszt but I'm unfamiliar with that arrangement.
I don't really live on compliments. As a matter of fact, they have a way of distracting me - J. Hendrix
I put so and so on my ignore list but that was maybe around seven years ago. I cannot remember that person now.
Shhh, don't tell Ivy ...!
I don't know if this is the arrangement, but his effortless playing of a piece that looks like a note factory went on a bender is astonishing. (If you can find pictures of him performing, his hands are like dancing spiders)
I appreciate honest feedback. As long as its not hateful. Telling me it sucks isn't helpful. Telling me hey you could try this to improve that is useful. I might not like to hear that its not as good as I thought it was (who does?) but how else am I going to know how to change things? I certainly wouldn't ignore someone who was trying to be helpful even if I didn't agree with them.
Vladimir Horowitz's playing is of the school of "keep your hands on the keyboard, be stoic, and show no emotion" technique. Many modern pianists like Lang Lang are of the school believing in the "fling your hands around like Will Robinson's Robot, contort your face, and use maximum histrionics" technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYO9gTmCJTE
I was tought old school and I like the dicipline of the old school but I empathize with the new school and have more fun playing emotionally. Some pieces just beg to be played embedded in physical emotion but care must be taken to not let the histrionics interfere with the quality of the playing.
However, histrionics are not new. One hundred and fifty years ago Louis Moreau Gottschalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Moreau_Gottschalk was a flamboyant American showman of his day. Warner Brothers cartoonists used his reputation as the model for Bugs Bunny as a flamboyant pianist flinging the long coat tails over the bench when he sits at the piano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Nkj7kF-3U
Fifty years ago certainly Liberace (Lib-er-ah'-chee) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberace was the king of histrionics and flamboyancy. (Saw him in concert once. Much fun :-). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HauAf7JMVgQ
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Amazing piano playing...floored.
Yes, experts are theoretically more likely to offer useful feedback, but that doesn't mean the laymen can't also be dead right. There isnt always an expert around when you need one.
All feedback is useful to some degree, for me the test is how skillful the artist is at listening to and interpreting the feedback they receive into something that they can use. And that takes practice. I will explain
Not sure if anyone cares, but I like to site examples from my own life to describe things. This step may not be necessary and it might serve to push some people away, but it is intended to do the opposite. Anyhow...
When you are in the performing arts, such as dance, voice, acting, especially if you dedicate years of formal training to these disciplines; you learn right away that the effort is always collaborative. There is no vacuum where the artist plugs away in private and reveals a totally finished product to the masses. Nope. You can't be in the scene and sit in the audience watching it at the same time. A second set of eyes will always make it better, even if those eyes lack "qualifications."
Freshman year we Acting students were required to do an exercise called "Before the Door." Basically, the student is expected to choose a dramatic real life situation from their own pasts, and replay it on stage. Everything about Acting study borders on psychology, they are aspects of one another, so this exercise was quite therapeutic. For this exercise, there is nothing but a door on the stage, and the actor is supposed to find passing through said door to be extremely difficult for some tangible reason. Maybe there is a dying loved one on the other side, or maybe there's a zombie...the actor is not allowed to share any specific information about settings or character or anything else before the performance is played. The actor must answer all of those questions by playing out the scene, and the goal is to teach the actor to genuinely connect with the door and what's behind it. "Indicating" (a rather scary word for actors) is to be avoided. So if the setting is a hospital room we don't want the actor saying "Here I am at the hospital." No, instead the actor was supposed to walk in, see all the imaginary sick people, and feel empathy for them, helping the imaginary old lady to stand up or something like that. It's okay to let the audience do some work of their own, so long as its the work that the artist intended for the audience to do. More on that in a moment.
After each student's performance the instructor would open the class to discuss and provide feedback on what they'd perceived. There were about 30 students, so there were lots of opinions and plenty of feedback about everything we ever did. Looking back, it was there that I learned how to use feedback, seemingly useless feedback, to better my own art.
Outside of a classroom, honest feedback is very hard to find.
The instructor's first question was related to information: did the actor successfully convey the location, time, place, relationships and emotional stakes of the scene? Did we as viewers have the necessary questions answered to give the performance a context within which to be understood? This aspect alone was worth half the grade.
The other half of the grade was simple: Did you believe it? Were you as a viewer compelled to keep watching? Or did the piece play with a lack of genuine connection and generic choices from the actor? Did the content leave the viewers confused?
After my first attempt at the exercise the feedback was extremely mixed. Seemed that half the class thought the piece went by too slowly, didn't engage them, and they didn't see why it took so long. The other half of the class felt the complete opposite, that I had rushed it and not taken the time to truly explore the various moments. One thing was certain, no one thought it was very good! And I had put a lot of what I considered to be "work" into preparing for the scene. What had I done wrong? We students were all essentially laymen at the time, no formal vocabulary to discuss ideals. Yet they were expected to provide me with feedback, and insightful stuff, or they were invited to leave the school. You had to be serious, and exercise humility, and speak up.
So its too fast, or its too slow? How is this even possible? What am I supposed to do with such useless feedback from these unqualified laymen? Who cares how long it took at all, I at first thought.
Then, I dug a little deeper and realized that they were actually right; all of them, layman status aside. This "useless" and seemingly conflicted feedback was exactly what the doctor ordered. The scene really was indeed too slow, and it was also way too fast, depending on the viewer. Why was this so?
Answer: Because I wasn't making clear and specific choices early on in the performance to steer the viewer's attention toward the points I wanted them to be focused on, which allowed my viewers to decide for themselves what was important. That's a no-no. While there is always some degree of subjectivity in art, the range of reactions shouldn't vary beyond a certain threshold if the artist has done his/her job effectively. As Everyone is different, if left to their own devices, people will take away different things from the same stimulus. Choosing different ideals as important, meant they were watching completely different performances. People weren't sharing the same experience, even though they were all looking at the same content on stage. I wanted them all to share the same experiece. That was my fault as the Actor. Can't blame them for being dense viewers.
I re-evaluated what I was doing for the next round of performances. I took 10 okayish ideas and kept only the best 4 of them. I gave those 4 ideas my undivided attention and investment, which caused my audience to give those ideals the same degree of attention and investment when watching the piece. The second performance took the same amount of time on the clock...but at the end the feedback this time was completely different, as the tears were being wiped away from all of our eyes as a young boy named Rashad got separated from his mother behind a door. Suddenly, the feedback from everyone was the same...which was that they really liked the piece. It wasn't riddled with distractions anymore, everything and every moment was streamlined to lead the viewer and the performer myself to the same inevitable conclusion....the very conclusion I WANTED us all to arrive upon. My own emotional arc onstage was more pointed, I was more emotionally involved this time around than the previous, I felt safer to express more of myself, and I was confident these results were repeatable. Reaching people through art shouldn't be a random crap shoot, we as artists should KNOW what we are doing.
But you cannot KNOW what you're doing until you've received enough feedback to start predicting how certain viewers will interpret certain types of content. The more practice you get at receiving feedback, the more useful even the most random feedback can become. Expert or not, if it bores you, you're not going to watch it. This makes the layman as qualified as anyone else, even the experts, to give useful feedback to the hungry artist.
So my final grade on the project was an A, thanks to some useless feedback from laymen. And in all my artwork since then, regardless of the discipline; if someone is kind enough to share an opinion with me, I respect it and cherish it and try to find a way to make it useful to me, even if it would be useless to another artist.
There is siuch thing as bad advice, but like anything else, the palette has to develop enough to discern the difference between what's good and what's bad.
On Daz art; When I ask for feedback from everyday people about my work it is twofold. First, do you like it overall? And second, what things do you like most, and which things to you find distracting? I'm always amazed by what I hear. I've asked things like: do you think the skin is too shiny here? And every time I ask, they offer an opinion, even as laymen. Now after years of these pointed questions, many people around me have developed some vocabulary of their own. So often without solicitation they tell me, naw dude, that tree's branches are too loy poly...like they actually know what a polygon is....but they are right. Smoothing makes it better.
Growth is always at hand. That's why I call this Fun Fun, because not all fun is as fun as connecting with people in a geniune manner through art and collaboration.
Thanks for taking the time to read all this.
Cool story Rashad!
now op has derailed his own thread
i think its all about the situation people are in
sometimes ignorence can be much more rude than hate
it's an amazing piece but apparently missing the part where the mouse jumps out on the keys Bugs Bunny breaks into that boogie shuffle.
Rashad, thanks for a lucid, fascinating, and entertaining commentary!
Strat: Hah!
Thanks for reading it guys and gals. Feedback is something I truly believe in. Spreading the word. Now I'm off to study Iray skin for a few hours.
Hahahahahahahahaaaaa....
Same here.... Visa LOVES me... and so does Daz!!!