Surogat and The Hand

On October 14th my animation class had a seminar on the impact of historical events and how it affects certain art types. We watched two films, one in class and one on my own time. The first was called the hand. It was a stop motion animation by Jiri Trnka, which depicted a small puppet like man with a love of growing flowers. A hand repeatedly breaks in and breaks the pots that the flower is in, and when the man tries to sculpt new ones, the hand forms the clay into a depiction of itself. the man tries to keep the hand out of its house but the hand keeps finding new ways of getting in. At one point the hand kidnaps the man and puts it in a cage, where it instructs him to sculpt a hand out of marble. The man escapes and gets back to his home, and becomes paranoid about the hand and ends up dying. The hand then enters the house to find the man dead, and makes a coffin and starts a funeral for the man. We talked about it in class and the teacher told us about how it was a metaphor for the hand of communism, and how it instructed the masses to have nationalism. The next video is a short french animation called Surogat. It shows various shapes getting inflated and when they do they turn into things like a girl, some beach supplies, a car, fishing poles, and a boat. When the man who inflates these things inflates the girl, he starts making advances on her, which are immediately refused. Then she runs off with a muscular surfer guy. Shenanigans ensue and the surfer along with the girl ends up being deflated, the other man leaves and his car gets popped by a nail in the road. End of animation. Both of these animations have a sort of hand of god style approach to them, in which both of the things said "god" is trying to control refuses them. An interesting concept, if anything.
It shows the human condition to rebel against oppression, and how the oppression can fight back. On one hand, you have the Sculptor trying to grow something himself, and the hand trying to make the Sculptor make things for the hand. On the other, you have the girl who refuses the man who created her to run off with someone else. In both instances to have an oppressed rebelling against an opressor. A useful story concept in animation, the underdog complex.

The Autere

In our COP Seminar today we discussed how Animation can be seen as something children enjoy, and how it is rarely seen by the masses as an actual art form. It is something that takes an amazing amount of effort, but many animators that work on large projects go unappreciated. We rarely are seen as people who push boundaries, even though we do on more than one occasion. We also went over a form of special effects during the 50's called "Dynamation" and how it revolutionized film special effects, but many people don't even know the person who made it. This seminar showed me that people who do push boundaries can be seen as foolish at first, and only later be seen as visionaries.

Genre

In out Cop Lecture we discussed how genre can define a piece of work as well as misinterpret it. Genre is used as a tool to put different types of work into categories. We use genre in music by making terms like Metal, Pop, Rock, Classical, R&B, Rap, and so on. While in movies we use words like Action, Romance, Fantasy, or Western. At the same time though, we could be classifying things that could use more or two genres as one genre, therefore misinterpreting it. And then there are certain artists who don't want their work to be put in a genre, but people put it in one anyway. As humans we enjoy putting things in categories, whether those categories are constructive or not is up to the people who make them.

The History of Typography

Thankfully I arrived to this lecture on time, so I was able to actually hear the start of it. The lecturer went over some of the key points in the evolution of typography over the years. How different types of font has different types of impressions on people. The use of different types of fonts has changed over the centuries. From the use of gothic blackletter  in religious texts to the nazi propaganda, the idea and feeling of certain font types has changed meaning according to who were using them and what for. I have spent two years as a graphic design student at my old high school.. My class had been over the history of fonts repeatedly during my time there, so I may have more of an appreciation for it.

How an apple isnt an apple

On October 8th first year students went to a lecture about pictures and symbols and their meanings. We were taught how different pictures and groups of pictures can make us see different things. I had the pleasure of getting lost on the way to the lecture hall, because I was still getting used to where things are around the school. I arrived a few minutes late, and rather than entering the lecture hall late and having to go to the front of the class to show everyone my tardiness, I went around to the back entrance of the lecture hall and listened in so I wouldn't disturb the class. I figured being marked as absent and learning the same information was better than creating a disturbance in a learning environment. Hopefully I'll be able to make lectures in the future.