Lately, I've been trying out a lot of new things - modeling in Blender, animating in Blender, animating in After Effects, subtitling in After Effects, recording in Soundbooth, installing and playing various games (installation being a grand task indeed, if the game is old enough) - and I've noticed something:
A good percentage of the time, if I'm having trouble with it, there will not be an explanation available.
The reason behind this is perfectly simple - the things I have trouble with are stupidly simple. These are things which are so intuitive that no tutorial or walkthrough will stop to elucidate the problem. Scrub the sliders on both ends to clip a layer's duration? But of course! Leave the house between flicks of the light switch to summon Uboa? Naturally! Make keyframes adjacent to make movements sudden and transitionless? Surely, that would occur to anyone with a brain!
I have to say, it dampens the self-esteem high of mastering something when my problems are so moronic not even guides avowedly catering to idiots and dummies will pander to them. The most debasing part is running over those tutorials detailing things I know painfully well in the process. "No, no, I KNOW what a timeline is . . . "
But hey, fuck it. I can make a sweet animation now, translate another animation from Japanese, and at the end of the day, get warped into an inescapable area by a giant melting face. TAKE THAT, HUMILIATING STUMBLING BLOCKS.
