What am I doing here?

OK, so this is more about my state of mind right now.

I'm feeling a little lost regarding direction and purpose here at art school over the last few weeks, particularly after doing crit.  Which on a side note, wasn't helpful at all and if anything helped me to lose confidence in what I was exploring... but that's another issue.

So, I'm not saying that I'm questioning whether I should be here... it's clear this is where I want to be but I'm finding it difficult to be motivated right now.

With second year finishing in a little under 4 weeks time, I'm fully aware that this isn't the time to feel this way.

But what is the root of these feelings? I think it's because it feels like I'm just going through the motions, going from one assignment to the next, caught up in the regular domestics of daily life ouside of uni too, with no time to explore the various creative ideas I have... working for others only, not for myself.

In an effort to regain some control over an aspect of my art practice, I started a new photographic series involving the compost bins within Toad Hall, which I was finding quite fun.  I mistakenly mentioned it at crit and it was seen as stronger than the work I'd spent three weeks working on for uni.  The resounding suggestion was to explore the compost more... thus uni threatens to take that personal project from me too...  I guess I'm wondering where am I in all of this?

I could just need a break... which I'll get in 4 weeks... but that fact is still not motivating me.

What to do?

My gripe for the day: Animated PNG's (APNG's)

Ok, so I've been looking at how my rotating jars look if I convert them to GIF format since it gets round the issue of my desire for transparency and also the Quicktime symbol loading... all fine, except that it's exceptionally grainy on the bigger images.


This led me to start researching what other options I had in the area of animated images.  Turns out there is a file format called Animated PNG's... which overcomes the issue of the 256 colours limit on GIFs...  Definitely piqued my interest...

The downside, they don't animate in Internet Explorer or Safari.  I'm not too fussed about IE but I guess it is a major issue if even Safari doesn't recognise them as animations.

So, how do you make them I hear you ask...  Well, there are various plugins and a few windows tools... too difficult a proposition to enter into and not widely supported so why bother.

Here's an example of an apng:

How awesome does it look? How good is the transparency and colour depth? Why haven't the major browsers and image editors jumped onto this one?  So annoying!

Interested in looking into them anyway?  Check them out here: http://animatedpng.com/

[UPDATE: With a bit more tweaking I managed to make the animated GIFs look OK but they're between 1.4 and 6MB, compared to 168-868KB for the QT videos... Hmmm... Bloody Hell!]

"Quickies" Third Edition @ SwankFilms

Came across this guy's channel on Youtube... some funny stuff...