#uniblog

BORN TO WRITE SILLY HOCKEY ESSAYS, FORCED TO LEARN ABOUT SEMIOTICS SECOND-HAND BECAUSE EVERY ARTICLE ABOUT CULTURE REFERENCES CHARLES PEIRCE ... (voice of a guy at his wits end):

In The Culture Peddlers Anne Freadman contends, ‘All cultures are constituted by their neighbourhoods, and the social agency of individuals is constituted by the plurality of borderlines that they live on.’ (2001:277) Freadman’s ‘plurality of borderlines’ refers to the multiplicity and permeability of cultures and identities, or worlds, that people inhabit. Moreover, these worlds, far from being siloed by language barriers, exclusive customs, ethnic lines, or other strict categories, have necessary and inevitable crossover. This essay explores novels as a space where we may look to find examples of worlds that bleed together, and worlds that may be in tension with or influence each other. Freadman, in opposition to the rigidity of contemporary linguistic and cultural teaching practices that assume one can encompass a whole culture, draws on Charles Peirce’s theory of semiotics to propose an alternative pedagogy — one that inculcates a kind of fluidity of understanding: ‘There is no system to be mastered; all we can do is make functional connections, and they may be provisional.’ (2001:290). Like Freadman’s proposed alternative methods, this essay acknowledges that novels are incomplete models of a complex reality that we can never ‘master’. Incomplete as they are, this essay will demonstrate that by examining the novels So Long A Letter, Giovanni’s Room, Outline, and The Vegetarian — all of which contain examples of cultures, identities, and relationships — we can come to understand that there is always more than one world within every world.

I have consumed. so so so much academic text and it’s all very interesting and i want to know more but there really is no time, lessons move so quickly and it feels like we barely brush the surface of any theory. i desperately want to know more about Mahmoud Darwish and Palestinian resistance through poetry, i want to know about the lineage of black feminists that informed Audre Lorde and bell hooks and i want to read everything they have and know exactly what they’ve given us, i want to sit with the subaltern and postcolonial theory and the ethics of writing life but we just… aren’t allowed. this unit is about listening to global voices. listening. but how can i listen if i’m barely given time, if i can only hear it once??? we go so fast and everything feels like it’s just a prerequisite to how you can fill out the rubric on the assignment. and i get it, they have to assess us, i want that bit of paper too!!! but it’s like there’s no time to really learn or breathe or think. i’m being hustled through an academic tasting menu because the restaurant is shutting soon and they have to close the kitchen. that’s how it feels.

On each frame I outlined each principle that will be applied to the shot. I forgot to add Secondary action and overlapping through the hair and cape. 

Heavily being influenced by Disney’s Tangled, I took a lot of inspiration from there environments as a lot of the film is set in a forest and my story is mainly set in a forest too. Below I like how the colour is captured and the light is captured and directed towards Rapunzel. I liked looking at these because they’re all pretty different in style but are successful in capturing a certain style basis for the scenes. I love the particular compositions they’re very intriguing to look at. Especially the one by Kevin Nelson (the second one down). Kevin Nelson one inspires me a lot because I want to create a scene in my animation with a stream in it as I think it will add a lot of character to my characters setting.  

The images below show how during creating the Tangled environment the creators wanted to create the environment to be a mix between the environments in Cinderella and Pinocchio. As Cinderella had a lot of fluid and graceful shapes and Pinocchio ‘the thickness of Pinocchio’ (Lasseter, ‘The Art of Tangled’). This is interesting because it makes you think about the shapes and lines that are in the composition of a scene and their impact on the environment overall. 

Below shows the body reference I made for my character and the lining up of the head in the blender file.

For making the torso instead of doing poly-by-poly I decided to make two cubes subdivide them and then shape them and join them together in the middle. Overall, doing it this way was a lot more efficient and quicker than doing poly-by-poly. Also, I like the end result. However, the second photo down to can see a strange edge that goes around the top bit of the torso. I wasn’t sure how it got there, maybe it was due to the subdivision but I ended up deleting the edges and it was fine.

Below is the finished body. I forgot to show the process of making the arms and legs. However, overall I like how it came out and the body doesn’t contain a lot of polys which is good. I didn’t make feet just yet as I didn’t need the feet just yet and I plan to give her boots as her clothes.

First I started with importing my reference and stared with making the top of the head. Just making the head and head shape was easy enough. 

Moving on to the nose and eyes were a bit more difficult but I managed to get there. I’m proud of the end result. I like how it came out, I think it looks good and similar to the designs and drawings of my character. I tried to keep it as low-poly as possible. 

Then I moved on to making the ears. This was before starting the body or even storyboarding the animation. Therefore, I made this ear below and thought to come back to it later on when my character has a body.

The image below is the edited ears I made after I finished the body. I elongated the ear a little and changed the shape a little to make them stand out a bit more and then I attached it to the body.

Here is a rough sketch and colouring of my Alter Ego character which I am calling Lyra 2.0. I wanted to keep a lot of the colours similar to the original design of Lyra to show the connection between them. Therefore, Lyra 2.0 has a similar colour on the cape as the dress in the original character design. The hairs are the same colour as well as the eye colour. Furthermore, I added a little mushroom shaped pin to her hair to represent that before she was a toadstool.

Below is the colouring of the original character from term one, for comparison reference.