FALCON by my window

In my earlier professional life, I constantly looked for paths that would allow me to grow, and not afraid to leave the comfort of one to open another if I feel it’s the right growing path. One of these took me to an assignment to bringing life to a falcon character who had a very minor role in a feature production.

The film, unfortunately, was far from a memorable one; but then, to be able to reflect the natures of bird-in-flight, setting wings-to-air and especially creatively unrestricted (within context of the film) was just a very FORTUNATE experience I came across!

In retrospect, the most memorable memory during those production years was that- a pair of wild Peregrine falcons happened to reside on top of the high rise where we worked. They flew around catching pigeons and often came to the ledges where my window was!

For a lot of us, we spent much of our days working for a living. And in this regard, I think we all wished to be contributing members to something of an endearing nature! Unfortunately for good bits of our time, it’s just plain ‘WORK’- things we do that we feel of little consequences. It is a definite dilemma for the creative minds that concern with works in relation to the human spirit. Despite a well-earned paycheck, all can be very painful to the mind!

The interesting thing is- whether we like it or not, it is very much an experience in our life, long as we’re stuck doing it. While one might feel stuck to the circumstance, as often with those of us that have just graduated from school and taking first steps into our profession, we can always look to be very RESOURCEFUL! While the actual works belong to the employer or a production, the experiences belong to the workers! These experiences shaped our outlook one way or another.

And from these experiences of animating birds, I felt I’ve only scratched a tiny surface; I look forward to revisit this wonderful SENSATION of flight some day, with full freedom to expression, hopefully with a bit more wisdom so that my interpretations will be a bit less paled compare to Mother Nature!

My early suggestion of the character was a more human-like type (above right), something that might be more fun to animate and more suited to the nature of character animation, but the direction of the film called for a more realistic texture. Actually at these early stages, I didn’t have much insight into the falcon spirit yet and these character studies do reflect this deficiency; it appeared more hawk-like still. On the left are some sketches from life in search of that elusive spirit.

Our Falcon crew was small but we got along very well with each other! I thank you for the very warmth memory! (Here, a drawing with crew’s autograph.)