This week’s session allowed for the animation students to pitch their projects to us to see if we are interested in the first pathway, and disappointingly the session kind of moved me away from that direction more than I had hoped. There were a couple projects that I thought were nice but mostly nothing I thought I could add to or live up to the expectations of, there were 2 projects that were asking for particularly harsher sounds – one being a fun horror comedy short with a kind of Newgrounds-era Internet art style and aesthetic which I quite enjoyed, but the issue was that their pitch had very little creative room, which hinders my wanting to work with them. Still, the idea of doing some horror sound is quite appealing, and the possibility of reaching out is in the back of my head, but the implicit lack of freedom is a bit of a hindrance, I feel. The other project that asked for hard sound for their work was a kind of coming-of-age queer work about drag queens, and they wanted the sound to be stressful to get across the feeling of not belonging. While it is certainly something I could do, I am not interested in the premise really, I am more of a fan of queer arts when there is an emphasis on transgression, it feels more representative of my own interests rather than pandering to anyone else’s, I wouldn’t want to be a part of someone else’s very clearly personal work without being fully invested.

The other projects were nice, it wasn’t as if I hated any of the work or anything but I didn’t feel very enthusiastic about working on any of it, it feels as if there was a difference in approaches between the departments, the animation students were asking for more of a commission than a collaboration and personally that is not something I’m interested in doing, and none of the work was very experimental either dissapointingly.

I guess this session put me firmly on the 3rd pathway for my project, which I’m not sure what that would be still, but at least I know what I won’t be doing. It is a bit tricky with my situation being halfway between Liverpool and London at all times due to work, and collaboration online often tends to a lot of nothing happening, so the choice of collaborator is important in us being able to both work in person and online. I could ask some of my friends to work with me on this, but a lot of my friends are not the most time-efficient people, to put it lightly. It is kind of a tough situation right now, to be fair not being able to spent so much time in either place, but i’ll see if the VR students’ pitch fares better with me.