Aesthetics: 1: The study of beauty (historic definition) 2: Philisophical study of art ||"Reflect on [art]! Don't just consume it like candies!" ~Brigitte Hosea|| Hello and welcome! My name is Teddy, this blog was created in the summer of 2017 as a study blog, and now im repurposing it for... well still studey stjff kinda
Hey y’all. alots changed since I last used this tumblr. (for instance the fucking purge happened...) so I’m here for now mostly for convenience sake. making any lengthly writing on twitter is a pain, and I would like to easily share this with people. so without further ado, lets get into it!
Tommorow is the mid-term review for my progress on my thesis project. and I have 45 minutes. Ill have only ten to introduce my project.
heres some notes from my mentor on how to approach it.
so Ill start with the blurb to intoduce my project.
Hey y’all, My name is Teddy, Im from the animated arts program, and for my thesis project I am making a video essay on structures of oppression in mainstream kids cartoons. I expect that the final product is going to be about 20 minutes long, as I have already recorded half of the script, and the rough edit comes up to 11 minutes.
The clips I am about to show you is footage of me speaking on my research opinions an anecdotes. This footage will serve to ground the diverse visuals Ill be including that reference contemporary animation, animators, and the business and culture around them, as well as my own animations (of which there is currently only one of) so! here is some of my footage.
draft one: essentials before timing...
1. content
This is a video essay intended for youtube, and other internet streaming sites for a public audience. My intention is to offer my queer experience and point of view to critique the animation industry as it exist today, and invite my viewers to think about it an draw their own conclusions.
Yes, I am not focusing my thesis project on making an animated work, rather I am centering my ideas, thouroughly articulating them, and using the visuals to draw the viewer into engaging with the work. This larger story board is the bulk of the video, and it shows both moments when it is only me on the screen, Ttle cards for each segment of my essay, and moments where I am including visual references of cartoons, artists, toys, etcetera.
Here I have some story boards laid out representing diferent visual aspects of the video. You can see I have a couple different title cards in the board, these mark seperate sections in the essay. since I am using the conceit of the animation pipeline, I am breaking up the raising an animator to prepare them for the industry into segments. These segments adress things like, getting you hooked on animation, developing the ability to mimic art styles, getting technical education, and distill them into the bits with the most impact on myself and other marginalized folk.
here, is the second animated intervention I have planned. Wheras the first intervention was meant to draw the viewer into the intimacy of a flip book, and emulate the childish style indicative of my early animations, the second intervention is kind of in the style of a “draw your life” style video.
(at this point pull up a gif exerpt from your thesis proposal, the one where you are standing in a field and the wind is blowing)
here is a style example from the animation I i did for my proposal. this is a popular format in which you tubers talk about stories from their past and illustrate it as they voice it over. since I am using personal narrative in the video, I wanted to include this as a visual aid to get my memory across with the emotionality that I remember it with, and really putting people in my shoes.
here is the final storyboard, for a prospective third animated intervention. For the ending of my essay, I am not entirely happy with the tone it takes, but I can not find a way to word it any differently. in my conclusion, I am reflecting on the state of marginalized exclusion from the industry, and how I have personally decided to not seek a career through those avenues, and want to strike out as an independent.
here is an excerpt from my conclusion:
“For me, the path lies wherever I can express myself freely, and for the forseeable future, that doesn’t exist in mainstream cartoons. It is not a comfortable path, there is certainly more money in the industry, but it is comfort with the status quo that perpetuates it. Maybe I will toil just as much as an independent, going just as unnoticed as I would in an office, but I will be able to make the work i feel truly matters. I want to make something that speaks to people like me who are pushed to the margins. Something that makes our lives better, my life better, if only by a little bit. I hope that I can make that happen.”
My intention is to share a message of adaptation, I don’t want my conclusion to sound as hopeless as I think it does, because I’m actually quite excited for my career, and the final animated segment attempts to aid my words in getting this across.
on this final animate intervention especially, I am open to cuts and ideas from you all, as I am not entirely sure I will include it.
2. research
So since this is an essay, I am not just going to spend 20 minutes ranting about my uneducated opinion. I speak from what I know, and what I know is my personal experience. Not only do I experience many of the things I speak on first hand, I use those experiences to guide my research.
The first thing I think I should note about my research is that it is almost entirely done on the internet, and to further clarify, I usually dont bother looking for scholarly sources. so before you make assumptions about the rigor of my research, know that I am fully aware that it is all to easy to lie on the internet. Even videos are not safe from being tampered with in this I have grown up with this reality, and cross referencing the information I pull from any of my sources is second nature. For instance, when I searched for “famous queer animators” I saw that there was a wikipedia list of them. While wikipedia is convinient for looking at details about someone, I am aware that the people editing it are not always genuine. I follow the sources cited on the page for the person, and I also plugged the names back into a search engine to see if there were any details about the person having a same sex partner, or openly saying they are gay, elsewhere on the internet. So while using the internet as a main source presents some difficulties, the diversity of voices is really important to me, not everyone is coming from the same background, so I don’t get trapped in a echo chamber.
So why not use academic sources also? First off, I am not making some thesis on the aesthetics of contemporary kids cartoons, so I don’t need such heady sources full of artistic critique jargon Second, the meaningful information I am looking for is the structures of this industry and how it explicitly effects marginalized folks. Academia is among the most exclusionary institutions out there, as there is a stark class divide between who can afford higher education, and who cant. I could make a completely separate thesis on this, and seeking these sources would just muddy my research and make this whole essay less direct.
This essay is based not only off of my personal history, but the parallel an intertwined history of the animation industry itself. I use my personal experience as a jumping off point to dig into what forces have shaped them.
3. sucess rubric
SO! You know my goals and my process an why Im doing all this now. so lets talk quality. Ill be aiming for success based on the following goals.
Good, non jarring cuts, both in editing out um’s and pauses, throwing in segments from cartoons, and other images, the transitions between each segment of my essay, and the incorporation of my animations.
I want to create a cohesive aesthetic that ties all of these aspects together, through my personal stylings in the trappings of the video (such as my outfit, the backdrop, text overlays, and other visual flairs,
and Finally, I want my animated interventions to really pop out, and highlight key moments in my video and serve as something that will stick in the viewers mind, reminding them of the ideas expressed, and keeping them coming back to watch.
okay, Im going to time myself talking through this, I’m shooting for 5 minutes.
I got 5 mins 46 seconds. Im pretty happy with that. further edits coming soon!
I adressed the mentor notes.
a note from my mentor:
This all looks really good. The only things I would note are:
1) to include more technical details about the video essay-estimated length, sections, etc
2)you mention that you cross-reference your internet sources, but how do you do this? Perhaps provide an example.
Learning how to make motion graphics (lol just say animation) in one of my classes.
IDK what to do but I had this Idea where the program is like a comet, where there is a core that sheds particles. so like I gotta make particles and tell them how to act (-w-)
anyway, I’m working in processing, and on the website, there is an example code of a particle system, and I’m currently trying to decipher it.
Here is the code:
ParticleSystem ps; void setup() { size(640, 360); ps = new ParticleSystem(new PVector(width/2, 50)); } void draw() { background(0); ps.addParticle(); ps.run(); } // A class to describe a group of Particles // An ArrayList is used to manage the list of Particles class ParticleSystem { ArrayList<Particle> particles; PVector origin; ParticleSystem(PVector position) { origin = position.copy(); particles = new ArrayList<Particle>(); } void addParticle() { particles.add(new Particle(origin)); } void run() { for (int i = particles.size()-1; i >= 0; i--) { Particle p = particles.get(i); p.run(); if (p.isDead()) { particles.remove(i); } } } } // A simple Particle class class Particle { PVector position; PVector velocity; PVector acceleration; float lifespan; Particle(PVector l) { acceleration = new PVector(0, 0.05); velocity = new PVector(random(-1, 1), random(-2, 0)); position = l.copy(); lifespan = 255.0; } void run() { update(); display(); } // Method to update position void update() { velocity.add(acceleration); position.add(velocity); lifespan -= 1.0; } // Method to display void display() { stroke(255, lifespan); fill(255, lifespan); ellipse(position.x, position.y, 8, 8); } // Is the particle still useful? boolean isDead() { if (lifespan < 0.0) { return true; } else { return false; } } }
Also, I’m picking up HTML but thats kind of more of a back ground thing at the moment. I just would like to have my own website and not have to pay a web designer or web design service.
I’m also trying to decipher a sample code for HTML too. Also HTML seems way easier than Processing? even though processing is just a simplified java platform, it still requires a lot of math to figure out what to tell the computer to do. anyway, heres the sample code I’m picking apart for HTML
This code has 2 tabs!!!
Tab 1: index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Brown Bears</title>
</head>
<body>
<nav>
<a href="index.html">Brown Bear</a>
<a href="aboutme.html">About Me</a>
</nav>
<h1>The Brown Bear</h1>
<nav>
<ul>
<li><a href="#introduction">Introduction</a></li>
<li><a href="#habitat">Habitat</a></li>
<li><a href="#media">Media</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>
<div id="introduction">
<h2>About Brown Bears</h2>
<p>The brown bear (<em>Ursus arctos</em>) is native to parts of northern Eurasia and North America. Its conservation status is currently <strong>Least Concern</strong>.<br /><br /> There are many subspecies within the brown bear species, including the Atlas bear and the Himalayan brown bear.</p>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_bear" target="_blank">Learn More</a>
<h3>Species</h3>
<ol>
<li>Arctos</li>
<li>Collarus</li>
<li>Horribilis</li>
<li>Nelsoni (extinct)</li>
</ol>
<h3>Features</h3>
<p>Brown bears are not always completely brown. Some can be reddish or yellowish. They have very large, curved claws and huge paws. Male brown bears are often 30% larger than female brown bears. They can range from 5 feet to 9 feet from head to toe.</p>
</div>
<div id="habitat">
<h2>Habitat</h2>
<h3>Countries with Large Brown Bear Populations</h3>
<ol>
<li>Russia</li>
<li>United States</li>
<li>Canada</li>
</ol>
<h3>Countries with Small Brown Bear Populations</h3>
<p>Some countries with smaller brown bear populations include Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, China, Finland, France, Greece, India, Japan, Nepal, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.</p>
</div>
<div id="media">
<h2>Media</h2>
<img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/codecademy-content/courses/web-101/web101-image_brownbear.jpg" />
<p>The image above shows a bear in its natural habitat.</p>
<video src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/codecademy-content/courses/freelance-1/unit-1/lesson-2/htmlcss1-vid_brown-bear.mp4" height="240" width="320" controls>Video not supported</video>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Tab2: aboutme.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>About Me</title>
</head>
<body>
<nav>
<a href="/">Brown Bear</a>
<!-- web browsers respond to index.html and / the same way -->
<a href="aboutme.html">About Me</a>
</nav>
<!-- A section that describes the brown bear -->
<p>Hey, my name is Michael, and there's little I find more exciting than bears! I've spent most of my young life traveling to the edges of Earth to take videos of these wonderful creatures. <br /> <br />
Family, Country, Bears, <br /> <br />
Michael D.
</p>
</body>
</html>
this code makes a very simple little website, with no special themes or anything, but I figure its a great way to start.
Visit Our Store: http://bit.ly/MPGiSStore The Most Popular Girls in School | Episode 2 (HD) Subscribe to Our Channel: http://bit.ly/MPGiSSubscribe Check Us O...
Hey, this is another thing for Narrative Strat, in response to being assigned to Paul Wells’s Understanding Animation where he talks about fabricaion, I wrote this:
Delta, this one's for you, my dude.
I lost my little post it and forgot what it was... I'm guessing I got this? okay here it goes.
Fabrication is about the process of choosing objects, and using them in stop motion (or as Paul Wells refers to it, 3D animation) more specifically, objects carry meaning, and through pixelation or stop motion, bringing life to the objects informs the meaning further or putting a new layer of meaning on it.
I picked an animation that I think puts a new layer of meaning to Paul Wells ideas...
"The meaning of the object etc. is determined by the understanding of how it has absorbed its historic form and function and created the associational climate for the viewer. ... A child's doll, therefore, would stimulate comforting memories of childhood, ... [the doll] seems threatening by still seeming to possess the life it was invested with by the child..."
In The Most Popular Girls in School, we see Barbie and Ken dolls used to comedic effect, in a doll house like high school setting. Since we all know Barbie as a little girls toy, (something we use to indoctrinate children into female gender roles) the juxtaposition of these figures in a raunchy high school with sex and drama captures the absurdity of what Barbie stands for. These animated shorts take on a setting familiar to television, which would be all those shows and movies romanticizing life in high-school. while a great deal of these shows have a certain amount of critique on themselves, The Most Popular Girls in School filters these tropes down to their most essential and sensational parts. The ideas presented, with Barbie dolls as the main actors gives an atmosphere of parody, not only of the high school narrative, but of the indoctrination into gender roles, their predestination, and the absurd narratives that spring from media in our capitalist society.
for an animation course called narrative strategies, I was assigned a bit of the hero’s journey to talk about. here is the post I made on homeroom about it:
While Kirby games always have an exceedingly simple narrative, there is always one there. (surprise, it's always the hero's journey.)
This segment (starting at 43 seconds into the vid,) shows the call to action in the story, where Kirby must help this fairy character collect pieces of a magical crystal to save her home world! Exclamation points!
(uh, it may be important to note that Kirby skips the refusal to call completely... like in every game.)
So we are also supposed to be able to talk about the rest of the game in class and I got a couple hours... so I’ll practice here!
All of the stages of the hero’s journey are kind of mashed together (save for the refusal to call, that part is more up to the player) because of the interactive nature of it being a video game. Things have to be able to happen any time the player wants them to, so it kind of happens all at once! of course, the game is played in levels, and follows a linear chronological order, so the larger shapes of the hero’s journey fall into place.
1:the ordinary world
The game intro shows this pretty fairy home-world at peace.
2. Call to adventure
The Fairy tries to save her home-world’s precious artifact, a massive crystal, but Dark Matter breaks it into pieces. She needs help getting them back together, and Kirby apparently has nothing better to do!
3. Refusal to call
4. Meeting with the mentor
The Fairy is simultaneously the mentor, supposedly she tells Kirby about the horrific Dark Matter, and that’s all Kirbs needs to know honestly. (I mean when your side job is saving planets, galaxies, and sometimes entire alternate dimensions from eldritch abominations, one more unspeakable terror doesn’t seem all that bad!)
5.Crossing the threshold
Kirby games don’t dwell on anything for long, so it seems natural that the threshold takes no more than a couple seconds. sure Kirby has seen numerous enemies by this stage, but this is the first time he is encountered by a thrall of Dark Matter. At first, Kirby thinks that there is a friend up ahead who looks a little troubled, then it ends up he is possessed by Dark Matter!!! The player, and Kirby must face whatever fears they have in mere moments before they are attacked by this buddy with one big bulging eye.
6. Tests, allies, and enemies
well this is the better part of the game... one by one, Kirby saves people possessed by dark matter, and makes some new friends who help him on his journey.
7. Approach
This is built into the gameplay. any of these obstacles could be the “Approach” section for the hero, but most likely, it is a boss that requires a player to come up with some strategy to defeat it. otherwise, when the going gets rough, Kirby’s pals pitch in!
8. The Ordeal
Finally Kirby and the gang have everything they need to purge Dark Matter from the Fairy Home-world. in the Ordeal stage, they go to the home-world and fight to return everything to normal!
9. Reward
&
10. The Road back
Horay! they saved everyone from dark matter! Kirby’s reward is the Fairies gratitude, and the road back is their homeworld back to normal.
11. The resurrection!
The Final boss (which comes in a couple stages actually) is the resurrection stage.. Dark Matter threatens to totally consume the home-world after Kirby and friends thought they had defeated it, they go to fight it with the power of the crystal artifact.
12. The Elixer
Kirby, with the help of his fairy friend, use the power of the crystal to finish off Zero 2, the source of all dark matter, and finally everyone is safe! (now the reward section is repeated :P)
stuff from "The Toolbox of Technology and Technique"
Paul wells wrote a little thing about techniques animators use, all the little different angles you can take on animation, or atleast a lot of em.
so he kinda runs through a history of animation, starting with theatre optique, and then moving through various artist and methods of animation, subjects and mediums. things like matches, paper, puppet, chalkboard, and things like lighting sketch (which i understand to be a kinda vaudvilly type performance???)
honestly I think this reading is just to get us back in the swing of things. we have covered all the teqniques presented here in previous classes. It is also usefull to have them all displayed like this for us to start thinking about what our short film is gonna be like.
OH
BTW
I forgot to mention my class for animation aesthetics is over. technically I don’t need to keep this blog for a grade anymore… but I like this blog, so I’m gonna hold onto it for my studies. hopefully it remains a usefull place for my reflections on animation throughout my career! now I’m taking a class where we make a short film, so it seems natural qe should start by adressing possibilities of what techniques and mediums we could use!
anyway, if your reading, Birgitta, don’t be a stranger! drop an ask every now and then
(•ㅈ-)~☆
Oh, lol, I never made a post about the eclipse. Our instructor, Birgitta, was kind enough to call eclipse day a field trip day. so heres what I did!!! I went to a highway over pass near my appartment, it was a great Idea! apparently more than a few people had it! I had some nice people lend me a pair of viewing glasses, and they also fed me! They are also responsible for the pictures of the eclipse, my phone could'nt get a decent focus for some reason. anyway I wasn't in the path of the totality, but at 99.8% so it got stuck in that "diamond ring" phase. holy fuck though it was amazing. I saw these crazy dancing shadows before during that phase, apparently they are called shadow bands, and they are a rare occurrence even during solar eclipses!!! everything was covered by these wavy shadows, honestly that was my favorite part. (i mean, night skt during day time was cool and all, but literally everything under the sun was covered in these crazy shadows, and I felt like I was in another dimension.)
Wow so I made a weird descision for a topic for my final paper.
during this class we have touched on pretty much every one of the broader topics in animation, and I felt very set on doing something about digital animation.
well I had to narrow it down from all of digital animation so… I guess I chose
machinima? specifically machinima made in the smash bros series…
IDEK
my reseaarch for this has been leading me all over the place for this, I got a couple cute little scholarly articles about the begining of machinima. these writers hold machinima in high regard, as an emerging artform that turns a player into a performer, and questions ownership of the creators of the games.
then I have a plethora of smash machinima which could give no less shits about these papers, and are just totally awful.
so heres the deal:
people making smash machinima are fan-laborers. they love the game, and they are a part of the culture around the fans of the game; as such, they share similar humor. Most of the creators are 30 > years old, came from a family who would buy them any game they want, white boys.
this is such a special niche, because they cater to the interest and humor of specifically the crowd they come from.
the papers I read praise machinima as something very populist, evoking the demo scene, and talking about politically inspired machinima
these smash machinima honestly couldn’t give a shit less about that. Humor is a way for a group of people to socially police eqch other, it tells us whats okay, and whats not okay (or who in many cases.) and the white boys who brought you these 1&½ - 3 min segments of gaming fun, they go out of their way to show how lame, uncool, or dumb anyone who isn’t specifically like themselves is.
well its not like I don’t enjoy watching them thouh. It is entertaining to me in a way, and with my deep knowledge of the game, and game feanchises involved, most of the not bigoted jokes make me giggle. but I mean still, I came from a family that bought me every game I wanted. so even though I’m queer and an ally to anyone society shuns, I’m still a privileged white boy, and I’m in enough on the joke to get it.
Kay soooooo I took some notes about this in class, and now im gonna semi regurgitate them.
So we talked about a number of forms of abstraction, including:
♡Exploration of visual form in time
♡ Visual music
♡Spiritualism & expanded consciousness
♡Data as material.
☆☆☆ So a lot of artist in statements talk about how they were “exploring” a medium, and loads of abstract animation does explicitly that and not much else. it can be fun to watch, and it often has some kind of concept driving its creation other than the making of animation itself☆☆☆
♡here is a link to an example of something more for exploration of animation as a medium than anything else-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga48XKYjFLM
☆☆☆Visual music started as a movement in animation, one prominent animator was Hans Richter, the goal of these animations was to try and evoke a similar feeling to listening to music through abstract visuals.☆☆☆
♡Hans Richter’s film “rhythmus 21″ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nRviu2clUs
♡yes click uh huh is good promise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-3z3DNUGiE&index=17&list=RDQMymmTxf1C7os if only hanz could have seen this
☆☆☆Spiritualism / Expanded consciousness stuff... well people make weird stuff with these ideas. you’ll find a lot of really psychedelic stuff. I feel like this has a lot of bleed over into visual music, since both are trying to evoke feeling from abstracted visual forms.☆☆☆
♡ huhhh its long and exauhsting. but this gives the whole ark of a typical psychedelic film, it sets expectations and the takes you to crazy places in a way that feels alot like a drug trip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWa5rzEOumQ
☆☆☆Data as material. for real I find this super fascinating, it may be my favorite approach to purely abstract animation... This approach uses data and/or code to make abstractions of said data, or create some animation through procedures written in code that make it a little different every time the code is run.☆☆☆
♡ code is beautiful and reveals the secrets of the universe watch this and tell me otherwise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjTb3B4d3y4
sooo yes. abstraction...
each of these different forms aim for different basic ideas, even though they share the strange visual objectivity abstract work seems to convey (to me), they have goals like, evoking feelings similar to listening to music like rhythm, or aim to convey spiritual ideas, or are the excriment of computers with creative directions to interperet data or excecute codes.
(not sure if the vid works, uploading from my phone, i'll change it later if it doesn't) Hey y'all, so I just finished Boundary Crossings, (a biannual summer event that visiting artist and upper classmen are allowed to attend) where everyone takes two weeks to make an animated installation on a theme. first off, I'm technically a sophmore, but I'm going to graduate before the next boundary crossings, so I had to work a little magic to get into the class in the first place. I remember the head of my deparment telling me that I couldn't get into the class, but I have a penchant for proving people wrong! So I got into the class, and this years Boundary Crossings was about performing identity. I had a few ideas before the class started, but I was not super in love with any of them. Anyway when the class started, there were a number of post graduate students, which at first I thought was cool, it made me feel that much more accomplished by making it into the class. Of course, we are doing introductions, and part of the intro as we go around is to statw your pronouns. I introduce myself, say where I'm from, what I like, and my prounouns, the next person (A non-binary trans person) introduces themselves with they them pronouns. its all honkey dory but then the very next person is finishing their intro and gets to pronouns and just says "wow, pronouns, whatever I guess" and the majority of the cis gendered people in the class follow suit. I was so taken aback, The first time I was asked about my pronouns, it certainly seemed unnatural to my good ol' country boy upbringing, but when I thought about it, there are many trans people who havent had horomone treatment or surgery, and maybe never will, but who present as a gender that society doesn't associate with their bodies. So yeah, let's talk about pronouns, cuz I want to respect you for who you are! When my class mates failed to reach this conclusion, it angered me for so many reasons. Of course a few of them are ignorant, but I'm sure some of them are outright transphobic, this open denouncement of the importance of pronounce reduces the dialogue of trans identity to sillyness, and not only makes the trans people present feel unwelcome, the atittude spreads to blot out important information for young queer people unsure about who and what they are, and for everyone else who fears queernes and believes these things are unnatural. I was thinking about the rejection in an action as simple as denouncing the importance of pronouns, I thought about the elitism inherint to the culture that begot this behavior. I thought then that I wanted to make a piece that would invalidate anyones identity, so that people would understand what it feels like to be on the outside of a power structure, and maybe empathyse with people who are "different" or "strange" before shutting them out. My partners both really helped me flesh this idea out, one partner, Alonso, told me I should intentionally misgender people in the class to show them how uncomfortable it feels. my other partner Zach and I got into a fight when I was telling him I didn't want to make work that was negative. (I like making work that makes people feel good.) but he convinced me that night that negativity is a good tool to get people to think about your meaning. So I ended up making a piece where there is a very, very exclusive performance being advertised, and I am the bouncer, asking people wht they feel like they are worthy of seeing the performance, and when they make a plea to gain access, I tell them they must be judged by the arbitraitor. so outfront I have a couple computers, and I'm controlling the Arbitraitor wizard of oz style. So the Arbitraitor and makes you uncomfortable for a bit untill he openly insults you and laughs in your face, and I tell you he has deemed you unworthy and you have to leave. It is kind of an abbriviated verion of a more complicated piece that I originally thought of, but I made a number of people very upset, so I'm feeling very accomplished! I feel like, while it had it's issues, my piece stood out, even among graduates and upperclassmen, and my teachers seemed very impressed too! (it's notably difficult to impreas the head of my department[who was teaching].) overall, I'm very happy with Boundary Crossings. It was challenging, and frustrating, and I didn't exactly finish my vision, but I made something effective, and pretty fucking cool!
so all of the reading we did this week had something to do with out a screen. since you cant replace a sculpture 30 times a second by hand to make incremental movements into a whole, there has got to be some kind of mechanism that switches out the images with consistent placement, and since these are usually circular mechanisms, you need some kind of flicker to maintain a frame in the mind of the viewer so the images don’t pass by in a blur.
I was thinking about the essay where we are told that the persistence of vision was debunked, and how silly it was to believe that. If I could see the last thing I just saw for a moment all the time, all movement would wipe over itself in a wash of recent movement, and animation would appear like a set of overlaid frames.
Thinking about how the mind computes fluid motion from animation seems like a simple answer to me still. It is the illusion of movement, but if you look closely you can see the “privileged instances” as they pass by. When I wiggle my finger in front of my face, I can see no such “privileged instance” as it just appears to be a blur plus two fingers where it lingers at the top and bottom.
it is interesting that when wiggling my finger in front of a CRT display (which flickers A LOT) I can only see what seems to be single frames of movement as my finger passes over it. My best guess is that the on flicker casting the shadow is when I see the “frame” and the off flicker is gives my over exposed retina a hard time distinguishing between the finger and the screen, so I simply can’t see it.
Oh hey, How’s about a about me post.
I’m [REDACTED], I’m a student in the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Animated Arts program. I’ve been directed by my teacher to start a blog that is focused on critically analysing animation. I’ll be a Junior this coming fall semester, and I am for sure, 100% a credible academic, definetly know precisely what I’m talking about all the time, kapeesh?
With that being said, Please feel free to contest the facts and opinions represented in this blog. I may be totally off the mark on my facts, and my opinions may be heavily biased; offering your dissent or disagreement will help me consider my studies more deeply!
I intend to use this blog as directed by my teacher, and also as a bit of a journal / sketchbook. I’ll do my best to stay on topic and post material that reflects on the study and appreciation of animation.
Yeah, I also feel a little bit off about the rap part. But I guess it just something Quinn choose to fit the character's performance and explain her motive. Like you mentioned, rap was quite popular during the 90s. :P
yeah, I mean rap has remained popular, more precisely I was pointing out how it was particularly popular for white people to use it to be "cool" during that time. (this attitude lingers today but not so much in popular media.)BTW If you want to see a wonderful example of a white person trying to be cool by rapping, go to youtube and search "a rap band called the rapsters." It is T E R R I B L E !
First, I should note I’ve watched this a few times now, and I cant understand most of the dialogue. There are a couple very clear lines but everything else is too garbled for me to parse.
Basically, some of this animated short is lost on me.
Now that that's outta the way…
Today, an animation like Body Beautiful might come across as hokey, or sappy. This is not to say that challenging standards of beauty and loving your body are irrelevant or out dates topics, but because of our current media atmosphere, this Animation would blend in to the plethora of art telling the same exact story.
This changes when you put this into its correct context of 1990.
While Womens rights had come a long way by the 90’s, Patriarichal attitudes have lingered to this day, and were still especially strong during this time period. The character, Vince, resembles this attitude, and moreover, the womens’ insistance that Beryl diet and loose weight illustrates the expectation that 90’s era society held for women.
When you think about this time when beautiful women could only be young, white, and nearly anorexic, Beryls confidence and flaunting of her body would seem nothing short of scandalous. This might be heightened by the kind of News paper Cartoon visual style of the animation. News paper cartoons are usually trying to be abrasive or obnoxiously Ironic in a way that nowadays seems condescending, and I think this animation is taking a similar intentionally abrasive approach.
While I appreciate The body positive messaging, and the time it was created, I still find it hard to truly love this animation. I am really put off by the “rap” at the end. It is a product of it’s time, as there was plenty of appropriation of rap in the 80’s and 90’s, but it doesn’t change the ugliness that is cultural appropriation. There are POC as background characters in this short, but they are just background characters. (not to mention the Japanese american coded stereo types, with kemonos and unsavory impressions for voices to boot.)
