[flow_default] Transcription: 02_Anatomy101_Part1_WhyStudyAnatomy.json

transcriptions/02_Anatomy101_Part1_WhyStudyAnatomy.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "02_Anatomy101_Part1_WhyStudyAnatomy.wav",
+  "text": "Normally when I'm teaching anatomy to students for the first time or if I'm going into a studio to teach a workshop the first question that I'll ask people is Why study anatomy? Why are you here? Why bother? And that question seems like there's a really obvious answer but when you start to dig down you try and nail what is that reason. It's actually often a little bit difficult. So I'm gonna ask you and I'll give you a couple of seconds to think about it. Why study anatomy? Still going? Got it? Good. So it's surprisingly difficult, maybe. Or maybe it's obvious, I don't know. It's different for different people. I always get different answers. And a good one, one student once said, well, I've got a human body, like I own a human body. So I may as well know about it. That's one of the best reasons I've heard, I think, because that sort of applies to everyone. And a lot of the time, the reasons are a little bit more cloudy, like, well, I want to work in games or I want to work in film. And so then I need to be able to work with the body better. And I'll often counter that with examples of artists who worked with the body really well but didn't know anatomy very well, which is nearly every artist in history, right? If you go before the 19th century, it's very difficult to get the kind of resources that we can get very easily, the kind of books that we can buy that knowledge just didn't exist. But the artists were able to work with the human body very, very well, even though their understanding of exactly what the muscles were underneath were slightly limited. So when I'm thinking about why am I studying anatomy, it's that I see anatomy as the study of nature. And when you kind of frame it in this way, you realize that that then plugs into a thousand other things you can learn from it, not just the origin assertion point of the Terry's major. It becomes very powerful, very useful. And my transition from modeler to concept artist to creature supervisor took me many years to make that transition, but it wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be because as I moved into concept, I realized that I already knew a lot about design from studying the human body. So I'm going to show you what I'm thinking about literally every day if I'm working with anatomy, with every decision that I'm making. And if it's useful to you, if it aligns to your way of thinking or it opens up a different way of thinking, then great. And if not, go screw yourself. No, if not, it's fine. Just take what's useful to you and discard the rest? But when I'm thinking about anatomy, I'm thinking, like I say, about the study of nature. And the fact is that we are conditioned and we condition ourselves to move away from nature, to build houses, to build secure things where we're not going to get our face ripped off by a lion, right? And naturally, when we create shapes, we then tend towards the safer shapes for most of us. Some people don't, but most of us will tend towards, for example, vertical lines or horizontal lines. And then when we add in more, we tend towards parallels ten, if there's a problem, it's going to be this. It's going to be that they've naturally been pulled in too much by the tendency towards order and they haven't introduced the necessary chaos. When we move away from straight lines and into curves, we have the same thing. This curve that's symmetrical on both sides that can be mirrored is not a natural construction because it's perfectly symmetrical and you don't see that level of symmetry in nature. And sometimes people go, well, what about a snowflake or some other clear pattern in nature? And I think it's a valuable question and we should look at those things. And I would say every time that we do, we find a pattern, but we also find where the pattern breaks. We find the order and we also find the chaos and understanding nature is understanding these two forces in constant conflict or constant harmony depending on how you want to look at it But if in your work you're tending more towards one way than the other Well, that's going to affect your ability to describe the form in the way that you want it Like I say most of us will naturally tend towards these ideas Now and again, some people will naturally tend towards chaos. And that's great. Those people make great artists, but they need taming. They need to be able to control their forms and find the order. And we can find a thousand different ways that this could manifest itself in our work. I mean, even if we avoid making this curve too much like a C curve, we have some variety to it, it will then be the temptation to mirror the curve on the other side. And this construction I see in arms and legs all the time. And you can take a look at an arm or leg that you've sculpted recently and see, are you falling into that pattern? Does it feel symmetrical? Is there a centerline that you can draw that it feels symmetrical now? And every bone in the body, every muscle in the body will have some pattern, will have some element of order to it, and that's very useful. But it will also have some element of order to it and that's very useful. But it will also have some way that the pattern breaks. So whatever it is that we're studying in the body, that's the question that we ask. Where is the pattern? Where does the pattern break? Let me give you a direct example of this and we'll consider the calf muscle, right? The muscle on the back of your lower legs, which most people will depict like this, right? This is then going into the foot through there. So you have two muscle masses, two parts of this muscle that are split across the center. So the pattern is very, very clear, very obvious. And nine times out of 10, when I see people sculpting this, they will get as far as this and they will then get locked in by that pattern because they're not asking, where does that pattern break? But as soon as you ask it, the answer reveals itself. And it reveals itself in a thousand ways, right? On the inside, this part of the muscle runs lower than on the outside. As soon as you find that, that pattern is broken. On the inside, this breaks more quickly and this is a longer gentle movement. So just with these two ideas we now don't have anything that resembles symmetry but we still have the order there. If we start to lose the order and we just allow this to get all kind of wobbly or whatever it is then that's too much chaos. We want to be finding that balance and we could go through the the entirety of the human body and do this for literally every muscle and every bone in the body but that would take a long time and I don't think that we need to I think you can train yourself to be asking this question every time you go to your studies and the answers will reveal by when I don't fall into this trap. When I'm sculpting wrinkles, whether that's a body and a tension or a face or whatever it is, very often I will do this, accidentally. I'm just not naturally doing it. I'm just not naturally good enough to not do that. But I'm trained, I condition myself to look for it. So I'll sculpt it like this, I'll see that I've screwed it up and then I'll do it again. So in the final result, that thing hopefully won't exist, but I'm still falling into the trap every day. I'm still conditioning myself more every day to find this balance between order and chaos that allows our work to feel descriptive and naturalistic.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 534.88
+}