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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

It’s pretty common. Our faces and mannerisms are the thing we’re most familiar with.

When I worked in animation, I could tell who on the team modelled a character based on the subtle details that were reminiscent of that person. You could tell who animated a shot by the subtle details of how a character moved and acted.

Art is a reflection of self. Even art for hire or objective reproductions. Even photographs. There’s a bit of us in everything we do, whether that’s personality, mannerisms, world views or personal history.

For the coders here, you must have hit code bases where you see a function and know who on your team wrote it. It’s the same thing.

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> For the coders here, you must have hit code bases where you see a function and know who on your team wrote it

Thank you for the analogy, I was thinking precisely that.

Something that would sometimes grate me is working on a project where you could "feel" that several people had contributed to it over time and had not understood the "spirit" of what previous authors were trying to achieve. Have you experienced something like that in your own work? Having the sense that what you are working on is a pastiche aggregated over time by an unwitting committee of tired workers?

Isolated temporally aggregated pastiche is a medium some artists revel to work with, unfortunately the first adjective is often missing from the metaphor, and the blind keep pushing the clay further from the points of realization upon the artists fingers.

When I worked on some of the bigger projects, I’d written some tooling that let multiple artists work together on a single shot.

It’s actually very interesting how the leads for the shot would have their style picked up by the other artists so it felt more cohesive. I assume because they communicated regularly and could see communal progression of the work.

But if a shot was originally done by one animator and then picked up by another (due to vacations, priorities etc) you could often see how the style would drift because they didn’t have the shared mindspace.

Big studios have “fix animators” who basically come in to shots after the main animator is done and do any touch up notes. But “touch up” can be quite extensive and if you know the people involved, you can see how the content drifts between two minds.

I feel pretty unfamiliar with my face even though I have tons of photos of it and see it in the mirror a lot. I just don't process it the way I do a face I need to recognize or read emotions on. Of the faces I'm familiar with, I'd say it's the one I'm least familiar with.

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