Category: Design for Animation

https://vimeo.com/784674622

Linked above is my submission for the video aspect of my paper. Try as I might I couldn’t get it to embed.

Alternatively my paper for the course was submitted online. I used the spare time over the holidays to re-read and further refine it and deal with any unclear sentences or structures.

After having completed my initial draft last week for my paper this week was spent editing it. Currently my paper is missing its literature review however my plan is to write that after I actually have finished editing the main body of my paper. By doing that I will be able to have an accurate gauge of how many words I will have to write my literature review without compromising my main body arguments. I often shave off whole sentences on my second draft as with all my ideas now written down I can see how more efficiently to convey the ideas they present. The thing I looked at to the most in my rewrite was my citations, I paid careful attention to make sure I’d gotten the right structure for my citations.

Above is one of my books that I hade to make sure to properly cite. Luckily JSTOR provides citations for it’s books automatically

In class we mostly discussed the structure of the paper again. This time though we focused on all the things surrounding the paper such as the titles, chaptering and writing abstracts. For me structure is always the most difficult part of an assignment as I’m constantly worried about having missed a component. It might be I’ve missed numbering a page or my font size is off and that ends up stressing me out more than writing the actual paper.

Following on from the plan I created the previous week I wrote my paper over the course of this one. The first draft has now been completed and is currently in need of a heavy set of revising as it is over the word count before I have even implemented a literary review of my sources. Pictured above is a scene that I analyzed for my paper on crowd shots and individualism.

The biggest challenge in this paper for me is proper citation and intext citing using the Harvard system. Since I’m very used to MLA I need to be careful that I haven’t actually cited in MLA format and have to make sure I use the proper Harvard style. For this I will likely go through my final or semi-final draft with my professor to make sure that I haven’t cited anything incorrectly.

This week in class we had group discussion about our topics and helping each other with any issues or difficulties people were facing in research or topic development. For me the thesis I have settled on is: “How Blood Blockade Battlefront uses crowds as symbols of the city’s liberating potential”. This would function through the lens of the ludic nucleus as defined by Manuel Castels alongside with an analysis of the series through the genre lens of the city symphony. I have a plan already written up along with quotes from my secondary sources that I will use to back up my argument. I am quite on track when it comes to my paper.

This week we focused on the formal elements of preparing for our paper, mostly on quoting, paraphrasing and argument construction. For me what was most useful from this class was learning about the Harvard Citation format as I have not used that citation format before and need to learn it. The other aspects are mostly a good refresher as I have come off a BA in Film Studies so I am very used to writing papers of this nature. We were given a task to paraphrase a quote provided.

The original quote: The authenticity of a documentary is ‘deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images are linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality’

Horness Roe. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

My paraphrase: Honess Roe writes (2013, Animated Documentary) that the authenticity of documentary relies on the perceived notion that it’s images are authentic and represent evidence of an event that has occurred. 

I have also begun rewatching Blood Blockade Battlefront and taking specific notes for the show based on my thesis which I have refined a bit more. I mention how BBB uses crowds to convey Manuel Castel’s ludic nucleus but specifically I want to explore and show how BBB uses crowds as a symbol of the city and the city’s liberating (IE transformative) nature that the Ludic Nucleus idea explores. The definition I use for Ludic Nucleus is the one provided by Lawrence Webb in The Cinema of Urban Crisis : Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City “the city as playground, and ultimately, for all its contradictions, a place imbued with liberating potential.”

We went over this week on animated documentaries going over a massive list of them and viewing them. This led ultimately to the question of “Can animation be a documentary”. While some people believe it to be a grey question of half yes half no, I unequivocally state the answer is a Yes. While some people raise an issue that animated documentaries shouldn’t count as documentaries because of the nature of using drawings and not ‘recorded reality’ via a camera this to me is a strange argument to make. Traditional documentaries that make use of ‘reality’ via camera recordings are as prone to creating falsities for the sake of drama or education. Documentaries have been know to reconstruct footage in the editing room to make separate events appear connected cutting between a predator and its prey that in reality were filmed neither at the same time nor in the same location. Documentaries frequently make use of reenactment to convey long since gone events using actors, props and sets and while it is filmed and we see real people one screen it is no more ‘real’ than an animated piece. Even more fundamentally than that is that one cannot ever truly capture reality. When a camera is pointed one way it will miss out on everything else. Things such as distance to subjects, timing, movement of a camera all inform the audience of something and can create relationships that objectively do not exist like a close up of a tiger’s face causing the audience to connect with the creature because of how cute it is.

However Honess Roe points out that Documentary is linked to the notions of realism, not realism itself. That to be a documentary one must merely convince their audiences that was is being seen is ‘real’. Animation can provide that just as well as recorded footage. Using Maitland’s ‘Tower’ as an example it recreates the events of the University of Texas shootings using animation. It recreates the scenarios through the various reports and testimonies of the events. There is your grounding element to ‘realism’ and with that what one sees unfold on screen carries the weight ‘notions of realism’. While of course some audience members could struggle to identify with it was much as they would a traditional documentary that is no reason to deny animated documentaries their status as documentaries. Their imagery is no less real than that of a traditional documentary.

This week we engaged in learning about abstraction in film going over the main two categories. Formal abstraction: meaning that the abstraction elements deal with the formal aspects of the media, for film an example would be scratching the film tape after shooting on it to produce an effect. Conceptual abstraction: meaning abstraction dealing with concepts and ideas, while it doesn’t necessarily mess with the form of the media it uses the language of the media to attempt to portray something conceptual like fear or a nightmare.

For my blog post I looked at the surrealist film ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. I would firmly place the film in Conceptual abstraction rather than formal. For why not formal it is because that while the content of the film is strange it does not mess with any formal elements of the media. No film reel has been scratched on, no cameras have had their lenses or cases cracked for light to leak in, formally the film is normal. The actual content of the film is conceptually abstract as despite being in 1943 it forgoes any use of sound at all, instead through iconography like the record player it alludes to sound. Its use of reverse footage and high speed footage to make the protagonist ghost like and move strangely conveys the dream aspect of the film. To me the film seems to be about a nightmare as a woman is trapped in a repeating loop, perhaps alluding to the entrapments of an abusive household?

For the homework I picked the movie Silent Hill

Archetypes are as follows:

• Hero: Rose Da Silva, the protagonist
• Mentor: Galia, the creepy old lady who tells her how Silent Hill works
• Threshold Guardian: Her first encounter with the monsters of Silent Hill
• Herald: The siren noise that indicates the world shifting into it’s nightmare state
• Shapeshifter: The cop Sybil
• Shadow: Chris Da Silva, her husband
• Trickster: The Cult Leader who initially appears to be helpful to our protagonist
• Allies: Galia, Alessa: the child controlling Silent Hill, The Darkness: the dark god granting Alessa power, Sybil

The 8 stages are as follows:

• You: Start of the film, Rose saving her child Sharon who sleep walks talking about Silent Hill
• Need: To find out what is wrong with her daughter/rescue her once she’s lost in Silent Hill
• Go: Enter the hell hole town that is Silent Hill
• Search: Rose’s journey to find her daughter
• Find: Getting her daughter
• Take: Sybil’s sacrifice to be burned alive to save Sharon
• Return: Leaving Silent Hill
• Change: They arrive home but are seemingly still trapped in the fog filled parallel world

Timeline: Presumably Rose Da Silva is born and leads her life till the point where she marries her now husband Chris, she then 9 years prior to the start of the film adopts a child and names her Sharon. She raises Sharon till the events of the film. The timeline becomes significantly shorter now as the events of the film take place. She takes her daughter to Silent Hill, goes through the events of the film over the course of what appears to be two or three days, exits Silent Hill and it ends with the final shot of the film which is her and her daughter home but stuck in a parallel reality.

This week our class focus was on discussing Mise-en-Scene, as I already have a BA in Film Studies this served more as a refresher for me though for a few others I’m certain it was their first interaction with film theory. For practice we analyzed a scene from High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952). What I got from my analysis was this:

The shots of the railway make use of one point perspective to create a feeling of dread as our eyes are forced by the sightlines to the inevitable train approaching the town carrying the bandit ready to kill our protagonist. It also uses the soundtrack of the film to cut to the beat of the loud swells to help build tension. Along with that cutting comes a consistent motif of shots that started out as mediums becoming closer and closer shots ending in extreme close ups. This too works to build tension as it works as a visual metaphor of the impending dread our characters feel as the clock, being shot closer and closer as well, strikes high noon and the train arrives. These elements all come together to create an overwhelming sense of dreaded anticipation.

I’ve also begun to look into my topic which with my current understanding and research I have settled on it being:

The Ludic Nucleus is the idea that the city is a contradictory playground that is imbued with the ability to liberate. With this in mind I will examine how BBB use’s its Urban Fantasy setting of New York as expressed through its use of crowds and crowd shots to convey this idea.

Keywords: City Symphony, Urban Fantasy, Cities, Crowds, Urbanization

Works:
Webb, L 2014, The Cinema of Urban Crisis : Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam.

The city symphony phenomenon : cinema, art, and urban modernity between the wars / edited by Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, Anthony Kinik.

Mannolini-Winwood, Sarai (2016) Urban fantasy: Theorising an emergent literary subgenre. Masters by Research thesis, Murdoch University.

We spent most of the lesson going over the technicalities we had to follow for the class’s 1500 word critical report. Discussing what referencing format we had to use which was the Harvard Referencing system. This was a new system to me as in Canada the standard was MLA. I will have to learn this system.

We also broached the subject of coming up with topics though I found this difficult as I am unsure as to what the class itself is meant to teach us. As we only went over the technicalities of the critical report I’m lost as to what else the class will be spend discussing and learning. With some groupmates we did come up with some topics in loose relation to VFX. These topics were:

• How advances in VFX technology through the Harry Potter franchise affected its language
• Development of AI and its threat to creative development and copyright
• How changes in technology lead to changes in the reimagining of older films. IE the original Nightmare on Elmstreet Vs the remake
• VFX’s effects on beauty standards, creation of unrealistic beauty standards
• VR Game Immersion: Stylized Vs Realistic graphics and its effects on player immersion
• Risk of Deepfake on privacy and employability
• Metaverse data collection on children and their habits online with a focus on how this info collection endangers the children
• In Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is a lack of readability in scenes a useful tool for conveying the confusing nature of a reality gone wrong or is it a hinderance that leads to confused readings and detracts from the experience.