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Pahgawk
I'm a computer graphics programmer who occasionally still makes art.

Dave Pagurek @Pahgawk

Age 27, Male

UBC

Toronto, Canada

Joined on 2/8/09

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Moving on from a failure

Posted by Pahgawk - May 4th, 2012


Earlier this week, I participated in the provincial 2D Character Animation competition for Skills Ontario in Waterloo. We were given the prompt "it happened all at once" and we made this video:

My partner and I ended up getting seventh, and we will not be advancing to the next round.

This was pretty disappointing for me for a few reasons. Firstly, we came third at the national level the year before, and everyone expected us to come back even stronger this year. There was an enormous amount of pressure to succeed, and a corresponding amount of feelings of failure when we didn't. Secondly, animation is pretty much the only thing I'm any good at, and I'll admit that it really hurt when we didn't even place. I mean, it's not like we came second and narrowly missed advancing to the next round. We came in seventh, which was unexpected.

When I try to analyze it, I think that maybe it had something to do with the cartoon violence in our movie, which may not have been acceptable at this particular venue. It could have had to do with our dull colour scheme and our lazy backgrounds. I'll admit the limited palette worked much better with the vibrant reds we used in our last video at the Skills Ontario regional level than it did with the boring blues and purples in this one. It might have had to do with the fact that the frame-by-frame was a bit sloppy, but that was still better than the frame by frame in last year's, which fared significantly better. It also could have had to do with the bad sound editing, but we had little time and we only had a microphone and Audacity (plus we were in the middle of a very large and noisy room with hundreds of people.) Okay, so I got defensive and tried to explain why those last two points might not be valid, but I still know in the back of my mind that excused won't help. Frankly, I'm still a bit confused as to why it didn't do so well, but the past's the past, and I guess I have no choice but to simply move on to the next thing and make the most of this. If you want, you can offer constructive criticism of the movie so that I can make a better one next year, because then I can get something positive out of the situation.

So now my time is pretty much free since I won't be on any more trips for anything. I'm glad I finished my entry to the NATA open round (which can be seen here) early, though, because when I got back my motivation level was zero. This whole experience was sort of a turnoff from animation for a day or two. Now, however, I think I'm past that stage. I think I'm at the point where, instead of feeling like a victim of some sort, I feel like I want to pull back into the game and prove myself. I expect that when the next round of NATA starts, if I make it through to round 2, I'm going to put even more effort into it than before. That's one good result of this for sure. I just think that I probably won't be able to make something that's very funny for it because I guess I am no longer in a very funny mood, so expect something with a bit more meaning behind it next (like my video Masquerade did) if I do make it through and if the theme permits it.

So that's all I have to say for now. I guess you can't win at everything. Life will carry on as normal. Hopefully I'll learn from this experience.

Thanks for being here when I need you, Newgrounds!
-Dave


Comments

Oh, everyone has their failures and their mistakes. The important thing is to make sure you learn something from them. Your work is amazing dude XD Just because you didn't do well in one video doesn't mean you shouldn't get bummed XD In fact, I just recently had to cancel one of my works due to Legal Issues, but at least I learned a valuable lesson from it (Don't work with Copyright Material anymore XD).

Regardless, I look forward to more work from you dude :3 Your NATA cartoon was awesome.

Yeah... there's definitely some merit to the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I'll be moving on soon, and hopefully whatever comes next will be better.
Thanks!

I would kill to have the skills you do now when I was 15. Just keep at it, man. No matter what happens, you still have your Newgrounds fans.

Well, Newgrounds is probably what got me to this point at this age, and I think Newgrounds will continue to help me move forwards. I don't know what I'd do without you guys!

you have that motivation and that thinking that you want to be number one- that is how animators on new grounds are so popular. don't lose that train of thought. have the ambition.
but you know what.... you have really cared that you have not got seventh and want to push yourself and even did self-analizing. most animators will just give up and won't even go beyond the level.
new grounds here...... it will be a place for you.

I sometimes think that when I act like I need to "be number one", as you put it, seems a bit vain or narcissistic or something, but I guess it's that voice that forces me to try to get better. Hopefully I just won't get crushed and run over as that voice runs ahead of me.

What themysterymeatman said.

And honestly these things just happen. I fail pretty much all the time, but I have to keep moving on, and I'm glad you have that logic as well. You seem like you have a pretty decent fanbase now, lots of people love your work. You at least won one of the rounds in the competition, and out of all of the contestants, that alone is saying a lot.

Ira Glass said something pretty related to that: "It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone IâEUTMve ever met. ItâEUTMs gonna take awhile. ItâEUTMs normal to take awhile. YouâEUTMve just gotta fight your way through." I guess that's the attitude to have for this sort of situation.

I thought that was great!

Thanks :) Despite its shortcomings, I'm glad the video can still fulfill its essential purpose, which is to entertain.

Abraham Lincoln once said "If you've never actually failed, you'll never be successful."

Take your loss as a takeaway to what you could do to make yourself better. Instead of taking it negatively, make it into something positive and have it as a challenge to do better next time.

Sometimes you're up, and sometimes you're down. But that's life! Life wouldn't 'be' life if there was no failure in at all.

I used to be in the same boat as you; but I got out of the situation because instead of focusing on the negative, I looked at it from a different perspective.

Remember, even the best used to be the regular.

Yep, that's very true. I guess that's why I'm trying to see what I should work on for next time, although I find I still have to consciously stop myself from getting all defensive each time a criticism is made (even when I asked for them, which is kind of funny.) I'm working on this positive attitude thing, though.

You're still just a kid. You have a lot ahead of you, there will be many more chances.

Indeed. Life continues.

aaaaa gimme a break, you're 15! Most people literally never find a hobby, and just go to boring work n watch boring TV when they get home. Even discounting that, most people even START doing what they wanna do on some university course when they're like 18.

I submitted games to contests all the time when I was 15 (a couple of em are on here) and nobody even fuckin noticed! They were good, at the time, but now they clearly suck and are boring. I still resent those contests for not giving me awards, but if you win everything then you'll stop trying. And then you'd turn into some lazy cocky jerk who is bad.
Now you know what coming 7th feels like, you'll probably not fall into the trap of releasing stuff that's "good enough" like I'm doing right now.

Your character animation isn't that great, it's kinda just still images springin n bouncin n tweenin around. I mean the first kid's arms dont move and the second guy's thumb is on the wrong side for a start!
You're bound to end up completely fucking sick by the time you're 18, for two reasons:
A) You already started early
and B) You give a shit
so don't fuckin worry about how good you are, and don't go nuts tryina make some huge masterpiece to make up for it, cos you'll burn out before you get there.

For now just chill out, make a bunch o goofy nutty shorts, keep pickin up tricks, keep tryin new stuff, keep being interested in animating, and one day soon you'll play back something you made and be like "woah, fuck, I can't believe I made that!"

Makes sense. When there's still a goal to reach for, there's still motivation.
And yeah, I still have a very long way to go, for sure. I guess it was more the stress from all the expectations that was disappointing more than the actual video I ended up making.
To be fair, the thumb was on the correct side at first until I realized that I had animated that scene on the wrong hand, and rather than redoing it (didn't have enough time) I just flipped it. Oh well.
Anyway, thanks for the advice! Hopefully the direction I'll go is forwards and not just at the same "good enough" level.

*When I said completely fucking sick I meant it in the Beastie Boyz kind of good kind of way.

Haha, ok :)

Wow that audio was absolutely horrible. maybe it got 7th for the atrocious noise?

Well, according to their judging sheet, sound is only like 5% of the final mark in terms of judging, so it might have been a component, but it probably wasn't the main thing. Either way though, I now have a lot of respect for people who can make their own sound effects that are actually good. Normally at these things, they give us a sound library to use, but we didn't get that this time, and I have no idea how these things get made from scratch D:

It seemed better with audio, in my lowly opinion anyway. I can understand the kind of shame you felt when you knew 'everyone' (Who that entailed within the context of your written form above) expected a better result. I hate expectation. But I don't think you failed, that title exists for *ACHEW* Chris Pike and John Magnas *COUCH*. But I guess you expected more from yourself, and in a way, failed your expectation. Still, seventh in the province isn't half bad. you worked hard for where you are, from prerequisite experiences, too these competitions. But what really sucks about having a special skill, is knowing that out there, there's some asshole who's better. Usually Asian ( I jk of course :3). I don't think I even deserved to get to provincials, I want to become an accountant, not an animator, I was forced to lie at the interview lol. I only went along because a pretty girl asked me, as I knew more of the technical aspects of flash. Hell, when I found out my rank today, I was confused if anything. We did black and white, spiced up with filters and abstract music, perhaps it could be seen as symbolic; but that's up for debate. In any case, the cliched statement would be, "there's always next year", and I don't feel incredibly creative at this time of night; so I'll stick with that.

Oh, was yours the one about the other side, or something like that? (Sorry, can't remember exactly what it was called.) I thought the style and atmosphere of that was great, btw.

Well, I guess it's cliche, but there's definitely truth in it. Not much else to do but wait for the next opportunity, right?

Spazkid is right

Yeah. I guess next time I'll have to make a story that doesn't need me to create sound effects on the spot that I'm not capable of making.

the audio isnt the best thing ever...but i guess youre only testing it right?

Well, it was more like, we needed to have sound effects because they were judging sound, even if it is only a small percent of the mark, and all we had was a mic and Audacity, and this is what we came up with. Luckily, I won't be in that situation for any of my other videos. I just had to make do at the time, and it didn't turn out so well, unfortunately.

MAYBE YOU JUST SUCK DUDE

* SINGLE DRAMATIC TEAR ROLLS DOWN CHEEK *

The character animation is also complete balls though, I just-- really feel like nobody else is mentioning that.
I mean the guy walking right at the start is a static image moving up and down.

It's just-- I used to send animation showreels to all these companies when I was 18, and I'd have a TONNE o reasons why I never got what I was after, and I'd spend like 6 months tryina make better characters and make more likable shorts and do all this fake dumb stuff, until someone pointed out to me that it was actually just crummy animation. And I started judging myself objectively n I was like "Oh right yeah".

NOT that there's anythin WRONG WITH THAT- You're totally doin great for where you're at, it's just that you're starting out- and when the kid bumps into that waiter it's just half an animation, that is then reversed back to the position he was standing in. Be happy that you're on the right track and making great progress though.

IT WAS ANNOYING ME NOBODY EVEN MENTIONED THE ANIMATION!

That's understandable, yeah. I'd like to think that I was lazier here than I usually am, which definitely contributed to the result, but that doesn't change the validity of the point. It's definitely something I need to work on.

Alright well seeing there's a lot more comments now, let me tell you what I think of your animation, since, I don't think I've ever told you that before in my reviews? Or maybe I did, I dunno...

Well for the most part I like it, but I think your characters and most drawings in general are pretty blobby-looking, it seems when they move around they sort of lose their proportion, especially when you mix the use of frame-by-frame and motion tweening. You're a better animator than most people your age, and even some older than you (like Legendary Frog and Kirbopher a few years back), but I think it's very simplistic. They're not really bouncing around and breaking reality enough, even if it's not what you're going for, it's still something to be considered. No one really wants basic, limited, realistic-looking movement 100% of the time. If you do that, you get anime... and no one wants that... one thing I'll tell you is that your stuff is much more pleasing to look at than an anime.

I'm just really surprised you have so many fans and frontpages though. There's something about your stuff that Tom likes, apparently. I mostly like it too, but I feel your animations don't have too specific of a genre most of the time. When it has humorous moments, they're often very subtle, not really laugh-out-loud. Action parts are very tweeny and to be honest not really impressive-looking. BUT, I shouldn't really be the one to talk, since your fans and views speak for themselves, so maybe what I'm saying doesn't even matter.

It's just that contests like that in general are almost IMPOSSIBLE to win, you're lucky you won the first one out of so many contestants, there's a lot of people who would want to be where you're at, be happy with what you got. No reason to get so disappointed that you're not 1st all the time. Look at me, I spend months on animations now but no one really cares, I don't really get noticed unless I do some stupid parody or meme thing. Just be happy for where you are, but always try to improve.

Right. Consistency of drawings between frames (and also between entire scenes) is something I really need to work on, and same with motion. I guess I find that I can have a bit less "warping" of the drawings if I do the keyframes first and then fill in the in-betweens, but then the motion isn't as bouncy as doing all the frames in order. I guess it'll just take practice.

...and yeah, I saw your Skyrim cartoon on the front page a few months ago. It's too bad that it was only that video of yours that gained popularity. Looking at your other videos, you've got some great ones that are pretty well-animated, funny, and have original ideas (like the You're Firing Me one.) It's too bad that other videos don't get discovered as easily.

Weren't you allowed to search the internet for free use sound fx?

Nope. Everything had to be created at the contest site during the time we were given.

Well to put things into perspective, you're more successful as an animator than like 99% of the artistic population on newgrounds (including me). You're actually better than HappyHarry and Edd Gould (and me) when they were your age. You've got more fans than most people have friends on facebook, and you have mad programming skills to complement your still growing animation skills.

Did I mention I'm ridiculously jealous of you and am actually intimidated that you're entering NATA?

Not to be creepy or anything...

thats creepy Jerrod. Anyway yea i cant stress how irritating it is when animators dont publish with atleast DECENT sound quality. It also irritates me when animators say oh well dont pay attention the sound i just rushed it. no, its a complete experience