Evaluation.

During this module there was a lot that I had learned and a lot of new terminology.
My favourite task of all was the question we had to come up with using word association because it helped me shed some light onto my topic, which was the reason why style changes with history, before this module I'd never have pointed out that rotoscoping would change with history.

This module has helped me with so much practical work being set, it's gotten me into the habit of documenting class notes the second that I get into class, even if it means that I was late, in some of my notes I was late, but because I was writing down what people were discussing I was able to look back and pick up on what people were talking about.

I am thankful that I had been taught some new terminology like "Fantastical, Context, Form and Content".
When I analysed pieces of work before the module, I would still discuss the form of which the animation took, the context and meaning and the content with great description, but I'd never separate them into the titled categories, my analysis would be messy and disorganised.
This module has helped me discipline myself into putting things into grouped paragraphs.

I also learned about Harvard bibliography, but unfortunately I never really demonstrated it and I still find that to be a huge weakness of mine, but I find that if I'm recognizing this as a disadvantage, it will become an advantage by remembering it more often as a mistake I learned from. I believe if I train myself to use the library more often, I will be more obligated to look for the information that I am looking for rather than just searching on the internet.

The other things that I need to improve on is giving myself enough time to complete tasks in an organised manner, in future modules I will be doing this by documenting time plans and including these plans into my Blog notes. I already pointed out that I really need to improve on the Harvard referencing system. Another improvement that I was asked to do by my lecturer is to include more imagery in my essays as visual content is very good for demonstration and presenting and using as examples.

Over-all I believe that this module has helped me to notice my own strengths and weaknesses among all of my written work, but has also helped me to categorise everything into terminology that I now also know because of lesson tutorials. Though I didn't demonstrate much of my newly learned skills throughout the module as much as I should, I've made myself a promise to practice these new skills throughout the rest of my work, because I believe that I can really benefit from them.

Class notes.

Contexts: History, Influences, Culture, Topics, Styles, Mediums, Forms of Animations, Technologies, Field of work.

*Division of labour.

• How has tech changed Animation?
• What field in Animation do I want to practice? 

Develop questions about Animation.

Favourite styles; Frame-by-frame, Hand drawn, Stop motion, Ryan Woodward, Rotoscoping, Ub Iwerk.

Who watches Animation?
2-8 Children's TV, 7-14 Cartoons, 14-27 Comedic Animations, Game cinematic, Artistic Animations, Animation is not about cartoons, it's a creation of illusions created by the artist, giving them unlimited access to create whatever their imagination is capable of.


Why do Marketing Artists use Animation + Fictional characters?

Touching to their Childhood/ memories.

Intertextuality- 

What car film + Animation have in common?

Frame rate

Emotion

Story

Immersive environment that portrays emotion -----> Reflecting emotion.

Special effects

Diagetic and Non-Diagetic sound.

Colour scheme

Mood

Facial expressions + Acting

Multi- Media


Animation has forward looking and backward looking aspects.

Graphic Art-

"Caricature Honore Daumier 1880-1879"

Satirical prints in the  18th century was popular because people wanted to see what was being said about our king. ( It was illegal to make a mockery of the king through art )

Collage: Emerged with 20th century art as a way of capturing a fractured experience.

[Stan Bandarbeek - Google] - Tony Gillian

Dance is key for animators; It's expressive.
Sculpture, CGI, 2D, 3D

Animated projections

Politics: Animation depends on stereotyping, Racism in the 40's.  Gerder.

1938 A woman tried to apply as an animator but was not allowed because of gender inferiority.

(  Missed session- Feminism )

Hitchcock's Psycho:
|- Black and white
|- Scary music
|-Very minimal

Vertigo
|-Colour
|-Scary music
|- Hypnotic shapes.

Private SNAFU -Spies (1943) 
Repetitive
Looks very Warner Bros, style.

Private SNAFU- A few quick facts: Fear (1945).

Very whimsical - Floating eyes, talking horses.
Simplified.

Limited Animation.

"Limited animation is a process of making animated cartoons that does not redraw the entire frames, but variable reuses common parts between frames." - wiki
Saul Bass Animation history of;
Why Man creates.  Isaac Davies.

Rear window 1954: 
Mise én scene:

-Colour - His house is gray and dark on the inside but outside is colourful, social and bright.

-Diagetic sound- People talking, his magazine/ news paper = Paper turning.

-props- Main prop is the chair and the stool, he just sits there with his foot propped up.

-Gender roles. Women are known as naggers, he's not very nice to his lover.

Women aren't really listened to based on "Ethics"..

He seemed envious of her talents that he started to dismiss her, but now he sees her as weak and does not want her to get hurt.

There is a lot of low key lighting, it's the end of the day, or night.

Isn't really day time through the duration of the movie.. Mainly night time.

He started to admire his girlfriend when she was in the face of danger.



Disney, Childhood, Ideology. 

TOY STORY -
How is childhood depicted?
The child (Andy) is very easily excitable and perky.  He has a very ripe imagination and has no problem imagining scenarios with his toys. He has plenty of toys and has a certain sentimental attachment to his two main toys, Woody and Buzz. All kids in children's animations, tend to have a favourite toy.
He is jumping on the bed quite erratically. He has a lot of drawings with crayons.

HOWLS MOVING CASTLE-
How is childhood depicted?
Young girls are working from a young age and have perfect etiquette.
They are very hard working and have the wit of an older person.
Younger children also seem to be well behaved and everyone tries to act older than they are, and all the older people try to act younger than they are, buy socializing and going out partying.

TOY STORY-
Are there any jokes or references that are not aimed at children?
Mr potato head makes a joke about being Picasso by jumbling up his face.
Woody and little Bo peep make jokes about what they get up to in the evening.
Mr. potato head makes a wish to have a Mrs. Potato head.
Buzz jokes about fossil fuels.
Buzz says that he doesn't think Sid ever been to a veterinarian school before..
Mr. potato head calls piggy an uncultured swine.

HOWLS MOVING CASTLE-
The girl doesn't really make any jokes till she is turned into an old woman and she continues to make snide remarks about her age and how it wasn't what she expected.

Word association.
20 words that come into my head about Rotoscoping.
Tracing
Manipulate
Frame by Frame
Fluid
Realistic
Layers
Colour change
Bold
Lineage
History
Rhythm
Rotoscoping
Cartoonising
Movement
Reality
Fantacy
Frame Rate.

After this word association I cam up with a question to do with Animation, The question I came up with is "How does history effect the style of animation?"
I go on to explain about how I think rotoscoping plays a huge part in the style as it is a tracing of a physical image, I also believe that the new technology used in animation also plays a huge part in the style of animation.

This blog post will be found here:  How does history effect the style of Animation?

I arrived late but when I arrived, the class was watching an animation about a mosquito and a man and they were discussing the "Gags" in this animation. I.e the movement.

They said the movements were erratic and exaggerated.
I noticed that the animation was very repetitive and that was rather amusing, it was also quite funny that the mosquito was causing grievance to the man but would fly away before the man could hit it. The mosquito would fill up with the mans blood which was quite weird to see.


Secondly we watched Felix the cat in fairy land 1923-

Felix the cat seems to be a bit of a hero, saving the fairy, miss Muffet and the Old lady in the Shoe, but he seems to just fall into these scenarios which may just mean that he is just reluctant about actually saving these people.
There are moments that are Whimsical, moments being the spider; Makes a web that goes straight up in the air ( like a ladder)  and felix the cat physically climbs it like kids are expected to climb rope in a gym.
Felix's tail has the ability to detach itself from his body and form shapes like question marks.

Silly Symphony (sound cartoon)
How have the animators altered the humour?

Rhyth, ... Without dialogue we rely highly on facial expression and the rhythm of the music.
This animation features a lot of conflict and some fear and people are antagonizing each other.


Humour in Animation is based and reliant on conflict and often mild violence, there is something funny about it not happening to the audience.

Slapstick humour is highly recognised even today where characters are often subjected to to self harm to appease a younger character.. Often a baby that is very hard to control or stop crying.

Yankee Doodle Daffy 1943

Daffy forces Porky pig into his office despite him just about to leave for a holiday.. Daffy calls porky a "fatso" which is considered humorous but also, Dark.
Daffy is quite pushy to sell his client.

I think that the movements are very exaggerated.


A SCANNER DARKLY
I don't particularly remember what it is exactly that I had to write about this, so I'm just going to analyse it the only way I know how.


This film is a Rotoscoped film, something about drugs, while I enjoy the style and the skills of it, the story itself was actually quite hard to follow, I understood the most of it, I just couldn't really understand some of the scenes where the characters were either high or hallucinating.. And the film seems to be set in the future since there are people walking around in weird holographic suits that generate a continuous pixelated and jumbled identity, the idea behind it is so the people wearing them will never have their identity compromised.

I liked the style of this animation because it's very jumpy but smooth at the same time.

Writing task one.

The animation that I am writing a review on is "thought of you" by Ryan Woodward.
This artist is a family man who has some pretty cool commission and partnership work under his belt including doing a Google doodle for a Dancer called Martha Graham who is very famous, he explains his processes of getting the final animation and talks about how he learns her movements with proper research.

He has a wide range of skills that he has picked up with different jobs and explains that this is because of the change within the industry and because he likes to learn new things, these job roles include, Traditional EFX animator, Digital EFX animator, Traditional character animation, Animatic artist, Compositor, Concept Designer, Character Designer, Concept animator, Storyboard Artist.

He's partnered with Walt Disney picture, Marvel, Universal studios, Dreamworks, Sony pictures, Cartoon network and more.

These are some of his story board work from his website at: http://ryanwoodwardart.com/studiowork/storyboards/

 
 

The animation I'm choosing to review is "Thought of you", because it is a very interesting and simplistic piece. It is a piece about two people and they are dancing.

It's very simplistic, the video has no real backdrop, just a colour, it's quite an interesting brown, it sort of looks like tea stained envelopes and the animation itself of the two people are very simple with a sketched style of animation with no real details, even the drawings of the people are quite hollow.
I like this because it's mystic in some aspects and fits with the animation itself being quite whimsical.

How does history effect the style of animation?

There are many ways that animation has changed in time in techniques and technology.
I wrote this question mainly because I very much like the method of Rotoscoping in animation, rotoscoping is taking an existing image or video and tracing frames to create an animation, often times its used to change reality or mix animation with reality.

One of the ways in which history can be a huge factor in rotoscoping is the obvious one, the time era in which the original video or photographs came from, since many rotoscoping animators stay faithful to the animation and keep to the mise en scene of the video but a lot of animators like to modernise things or change them try create a surreal world. 

I, myself personally see rotoscoping to be a form of surrealism as it's taking something that exists and making something new out of it... A somewhat animated "deconstruction,  reconstruction".

The definition of surrealism in the eyes of Wikipedia is to create a semi existing piece that is not possible in the eyes of reality.

Surrealism is a movement that manifested in the 1920's and was made big by people like Andre Breton, Salvador Dali and Man Ray, some artists moved their skill to photography and developed their surrealist skills further. 

Man Ray was a huge role in the movements Surrealism and Dada, He was also moved around a lot because of the war and that is probably the key reason he became a good part of the movement Dadaism as it's said that it was born out of a reaction to The first world war. Dadaism would also play a role in the inspirations to other art categories. 

The information I supplied above is from reading the website: http://www.manraytrust.com/ where is includes a short biography of the artist. 

The sources I used to know such information about surrealism are mainly online based. 

I find that the similarity in surrealism and rotoscoping is the reason I favour the two when it comes to art forms and because I like the concept of editing reality. 

In some sense I believe that it could also relate a lot on futurism, futurism is an art movement that focuses a lot on technology and movement, paintings in this style often have depictions of humanity moving forward and I believe this is also a part of how history effects the style of art.

I think that animation is usually determined by the time era that it is set in and the mise en scene is an obvious part to play in that. .. I know in a lot of animations people change the colour scheme of animations intentionally to make it seem old or new.

The film and animation I know of to be inspired heavily on history and surrealism is Alice in wonderland, the story itself is historic and surreal and holds many adaptations of it in different forms.

As well as my theory that physical history will inevitably change the style of rotoscoping due to it just being a tracing of an actual event, but I do also believe that the evolution of technology is also a huge key role on the style of animation, as things like CGI is a newer technology and in time has made traditional frame by frame, drawn animation become obsolete.

Animation styles like flip books, frame by frame, stop motion and rotoscoping have become less known to the newer generation of the animation audience because they are too used to the style of their "time", because they aren't tracing physical events in this form of animation, they are down to the artists doing their research on a certain time period.

I notice for older animations they have been more into the futuristic side of things and imagining things that will happen in the future, but as the things that are already in said animations become real due to humanity advancing in their tech, animations have become more about the past, I believe it's because to appeal to the audience, Animators give them what they cannot have, like an ideal planet with amazing gadgets, or a historic event with pretty colonial dresses.. Either way, it will appeal to some body.    

Group research.

In the first group session work we were asked to think of some things that we like in animation and create some work association about them

Analysing an animation.

The animation that my presentation was about is linked in the window below.




 The animation that I was comparing "Super" too is linked in the window below.

I chose these pieces because I like the films very much and felt like they would be a perfect match of comparison because they are very similar and feature a lot of the same actors, the styles are very similar and very fluid and use a lot of the same natural/faded colours, a lot of animations in this style often feature pastel and washed out colours because they are not generally seen as the norm and are often under the category "indie" and are normally described as quirky.
 

Animation presentation from Charlie Hewins