Restoring Trust to Animation

There has been a great deal of trust lost between investors and conceptual artists.  This is because many conceptual artists live by the motto, "perception is reality," but it almost never is.  I joke about this quite a bit with engineers who tell me to "do the engineering" to make my concept reality.  While I can "do the engineering," I enjoy telling them, "Why?  I can make a 2 minute video and there you see it, so it must be reality."  I say it as a joke, because they are correct.  Any look at the internet will result in a myriad of images and animations that "look real," but not only are they fake, what they "show" is not physically possible.

"Perception is reality" is a very dangerous modus operandi in conceptual animation, for when reality falls short of perception, as it invariably will, trust is lost.  

Conceptual animation is like a time-traveler who goes into the future and returns with poorly exposed pictures of things happening there.  You see the possibility of something in the future, but it is an unclear image.  NEVER present conceptual animation as reality.

Never presume that conceptual visual arts can deliver substance when it comes to engineering or science.  Even when created by engineers, conceptual animation is always just an approximation of something that might be made real by an engineering team.  Rather than an accurate portrait, it is like an impressionist painting - blurred lines that serve the viewer an essence of what might be brought to life. 

Essence - "the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character," such as "spirit."

Abstract is the key word here.  This is one of the reasons engineers huff over animation being introduced in their project.  Their point is valid - what you have been called in to do is not concrete, but abstract.  Visual arts speak to the spirit, not the corporeal, whereas an engineering team is interested in the corporeal.

It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it may be a different thousand words to two different viewers.  An example of this is the UFO debate.  Even a well-documented image of an "unidentified flying object" is still left a mystery.  We may "see" a strange saucer-shaped object floating above the trees or a halo of lights doing acrobatics over the horizon, but the "how" is buried under a flood of disagreeing voices.  Engineers are absorbed with the substance of a technology.  They are concerned with the language and communication of substance in mathematics, code, and design, not the language of the abstract. 

However, innovative new concepts rarely have the engineering substance to back up a vision, and that is where animation finds its voice.  Just as an analyst is called in to look at a foreign nation's mystery technology, you have to work with what you have, and while you may suggest multiple explanations for what you see, at the end of the day, you may be surprised by what the reality turns out to be.  I am always a bit surprised by the differences in a final product from the conceptual design - the reason is obvious, though, as engineers work within the bounds of the possible to bring the abstract into the concrete.  But the point of utilizing animation is to share vision, not substance.  Sharing vision is where conceptual animation shines.  The very reason engineers sigh over it is the reason it is so important.  It MUST step beyond the limits of the concrete in order to share the vision, the spirit of the concept.  It must step into the future and return with the abstract in order to bring the concrete into reality.