Sketchbook Work: COP Practical

1930s:

1940s:

1950s:

1960s:

1970s:

1980s:

1990s:

2000s:

Animation Styles

So i've been thinking on what I want to do for the practical portion of my essay. I want to do an animation that morphs through different styles of animation throughout history. And since i'm looking at both eastern and western styles I want it to be able to flow in between them without too much of a jarring effect.
I've purchased a sketchbook and wrote "animation style practice book" on it and i'm going to fill it with several different artists styles to try my hand at doing them myself. Hopefully through this i'll be able to switch between different styles more easily and get my animation done more quickly.

Triangulation and Methodology

Last week we had a Lecture with Richard Miles on some of the important factors to think about when writing our essays. He talked to us about Triangulation, a method in which to prove a theory using multiple resources and quotes in favour of and against said theory. He told us that if we use other points of view in our essay to help bolster and strengthen our opinions and theorems, that it would make our essay come out better. He also told us to use opinions against our topic and criticise them in order to do the same.
He also explained to us the concept of Methodology. Simply put, a methodology is a set of methods, principles, and rules for the regulation of a subject, or thinking about ways of thinking. It can also be defined as a structural approach to a subject of analysis, and that the processes are immensley complicated. He told us it was important to show the limitations of our methodology, so we can know that it is only one way of viewing the subject of analysis.
He suggested we look at Successful Study for Degrees, a book by a person named Barnes. I'm going to see if i can find it online.

COP3 Proposal

For my dissertation, I want to look at style within animation. More importantly, how style affects the studio and the artist working in the industry. I want to see whether or not individual artists styles are necessary within large studio animation. And finally, I want to find the importance of the concept that as an animator, you shouldn't strive for a unique style, rather you should strive for a fluid drawing form that lets you emulate styles and drum up new ones in an instant.
This is my Proposal presentation that I made earlier.

Practical Response - Review

In the practical Response to my essay, I wanted to try and make a blend of 2-D animation and live action. Since my essay was about the various messages surrounding animated movies and their live action counterparts. I looked at various things that attempted this for inspiration, but the one that I enjoyed the most was the Take On Me music video by A-ha:

Its a music video that I think connects live Action and animation almost perfectly. I wanted it to be 2-D since I would be able to rotor scope it with filmed recordings I took of a volunteer, Max Ardron. I wanted it to be long enough to get the message across, so I decided to go with 10 seconds. I managed to check out time in a Photography Studio which is where most of the live filming took place. For some animated portions I recorded in the animation classroom, since it was going to be rotor scoped I didn't need a white background. I then put all of the video files I had into After Effects and threaded them together in an outline of how the final piece should look. Then I exported it out as a H.264 encoding as well as a lossless version, for animating. This is what it looked like:

After that I took it into Photoshop, and began the long process of turning most of it into a rotors coped image. I went with 24 frames per second since I wanted it to be as smooth as possible. If you couldn't already tell, I planned for it to be a digital rotor scope rather than a traditional, like the A-ha music video was. My reasoning was that I didn't have enough time to rotor scope the entire thing in analog, so I decided to use a Cintiq, just for the sake of the deadline, as well as my sanity. The most difficult part was probably the transfer between drawn and live action. Since my actor was going to be putting his hand up on a wall that was the barrier between the real and drawn world, I had to animate him phasing through it. It was difficult to tell which part I should draw and which I should leave live. In retrospect, I should have checked out another camera and filmed from another angle just so I would have that as reference to where he was according to where the barrier would be.

The animation part had some easier parts than others. One of the more difficult parts was drawing Max's face close up, since it had to have so much more detail than the other parts of the animation. On average I would say that it took twice as long as animating the other parts.

Originally I had planned to take an excerpt from the song Take on Me, but I decided to create my own audio on the recommendation of my tutor. Here's what the final outcome looks like:

Identity

A person's Identity can be one of many things depending on where and when you live. In the lecture we talked about how there have been many different kinds of Identity throughout history. There was the pre-modern Identity, where the institutions of various forms of power determined the identities of the populace. Things like Marriage, The Church, Monarchy, Government, The State, and Work all had a say in the overall identity of the individual. Some examples of these identities are the farm worker, soldier, factory worker, housewife, gentleman, and the idea of Husband and Wife.

During Modern times, Identity evolved into something different. There were a few different ideas behind it. Some of it was based on social class and fashion that dictates one's outer identity. In this instance, people were more able to "choose" their own identity, meaning people became more outwardly self conscious about how they acted and looked within a group. People were no longer born into an identity that stuck with them throughout the rest of their life.

In the post-modern setting, ones Identity is completely constructed for an by the person. It accepts a fragmented form of oneself, with various discerning points to flesh it out. Examples of these would be Education, Age, Income, Nationality, Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Gender, and many other things. In art, many of these ideas have been explored these identities through various mediums.

“The notion ‘you are who you pretend to be’ has a mythic resonance. The Pygmalion story endures because it speaks to a powerful fantasy: that we are not limited by our histories, that we can be recreated or can recreate ourselves... Virtual worlds provide environments for experiences that may be hard to come by in the real”

Sherry Turkle (1994), Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality

Within the internet as a whole, online communities have become more and more popular, and with that comes the possibility of a completely constructed persona, one that might not be anything like the person sitting behind the desk. This has resulted in a very new kind of Identity, where you don't even have to meet the person or be anything like the real you in order to show an identity.

Identity has been one of the defining traits in humanity since the start of civilisation, and has become more and more broken down as time has gone by. Its an interesting phenomenon to see.

Panopticism

In the early 1600s there was a thing known as the Great Confinement, where tons of "houses of correction" were erected to curb unemployment and idleness. It was the birth of the asylum, where someone who wasn't a boon in life was sent to a place where they would be "corrected" to fit back into society. The birth of the forms of science and knowledge like biology, psychiatry, and medicine legitimised the practices of various doctors and psychiatrists. It rationalised the various correction institutions like prison, the asylum and the hospital, and conditioning institutions like the school. Michel Foucalt, a philosopher responsible for Madness & Civilization, and Dicipline & Punish, said that it was these institutions that 'internalized our responsibilities'. He said that

"Discipline is a ‘technology’ [aimed at] ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’"

(Foucault,1981 in O’Farrrell 2005:102)

The Panopticon was an Architectural Design made by Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 to help discipline and condition people into learning a certain way. Its a large circular design with cells going around the outer edge, with the person in power being in the centre of the building. This design made it so that the only person you could see was the person who was either holding you or teaching you. It was supposed to internalize in the individual the conscious state that he is always being watched. It was supposed to make the individual more productive. The idea was that this building design could help reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct schoolchildren, help confine, but also study the insane, supervise workers, and put beggars and idlers to work.

Foucault described that there was a new mode of power called panopticism. It is the idea that the person in power is always watching, a sort of "big brother" mentality to keep the people in check and always working. That way the people would turn into 'docile bodies' who were self monitoring, self correcting, and obedient. He stated that power was a relation between individuals and groups, and only exists when it is exercised.