Animation First Year

I attempted to take a second attempt at doing my after effects animation and sort of gave up halfway through. I didn’t really like my choice in film but I couldn’t come up with any other ideas I felt comfortable with. I think this could have been avoided if I put more time into the initial exploration part of the creative process. I feel like my inexperience shines through really brightly in this part of the unit and that I should have reached out for more guidance with it.

I don’t feel like I took very well to initial lessons too and I think that really set the negative tone of the overall project. I found that I was getting lost even when we were covering the basics. I really should have put more time into familiarizing myself with the program.

My after effects animation was somewhat of a flop. I am really not happy with the way it turned out but feel as though i should direct my energy more towards finishing my sketchbook and essay at this point. 

I can honestly say that I tried with after effects but just found the whole process to be very frustrating. I feel as though I should have more openly asked for help with my project but I think the overarching issue is that I really didn’t know what I wanted to achieve with this animation.

Well. This came out terrible. 

I can confidently say that my after effects morph was the week point of this project. I kind of don’t even know what to say. There’s so much wrong with it. 

The timing is really off. 

The movements are stiff and jerky. 

I don’t think it communicates it’s film particularly well. 

Not too sure about my use of colour in this.

Overall it’s a hot mess. 

But hey, at least it’s finished. Link is below.

Today we discussed the unique suitability of animation to deliver specific types of narratives. Animation benefits from having a unique dialogue generated as a result of the personal touch of the animators. You could have the same tale animated by many different animators and each version would communicate differently because of the artistic spin of the specific animator.  

We discussed in particular the application of “Fabrication” in animation, the process of taking existing materials whether man made or naturally occurring from the everyday world and reinterpreting or re purposing them. We watched a variety of films the demonstrated the suitability of animation to tackle subjects that could otherwise be dark and morbid in other mediums in a lighthearted and more approachable fashion. “Bottle” by Kristen Lepore was able to convey a somewhat tragic romeo and juliet like tale in a fashion that made it charming and easily digestible. Kristen’s use of stop motion in general is really good at tackling the style of story telling as she often uses her dialogue free stop motion pieces to effectively communicate somewhat tender narratives. 

This week was focused on furthering the sketchbook project and digging further into narratology. We explored a lot of the reasons behind writers’ choices in the particular structure of their work as as well as the impact that these choices have on the overall delivery of the message of the story. I found it particularly interesting when we discussed the reasons that audiences consume media as I feel as though this was very well suited towards my question of choice. 

In this lecture we discussed the Hero’s Journey and what in particular makes that narrative structure so effective and relatable. We examined the fact that the hero’s Journey is one of both physical and psychological growth and change.

Hero’s are often vessels for vicarious learning or entertainment and so their possessing flaws is a key factor in their ability to effectively communicate the intended moral of the narrative. Some of the motivations for consuming narratives that we discussed as proposed by John Yorke are: 

- The rehearsal reason

- The healing reason (vicarious resolution)

- The informational reason

- The Panacea reason (stories with happy endings give hope) 

- The procreation reason ( story ends in sexual union) 

- The psychological reason (story separates aspects of our psyche if the form of characters that can pan out and resolve internal issues)

I did another version of a possible rough draft for the after effects animation in tv paint and feel as though this version really helped clarify exactly what I wanted to achieve in my final After effects version of the animation. I was frustrated while even doing this but found that rough story boarding in tvpaint first made animating in after effects a lot more approachable. 

I mostly devoted this week to essay research and my sketchbook project. I did a line by line analysis of the ghost in the shell film and made notes about the various key moments of symbolism in the film. It’s interesting that the 10 years of work that went into the film really stands out when you stop and do a watch along analysis, as there is so much to unpack in the film. In particular, there are a lot of really hard hitting quotes which directly deal with the question presented by the film in a way which encourages pondering. There’s a lot to unpack in there. 

Today we were asked to write a plot summary of “Up!” and to identify the roles of characters in the narrative along the lines of Volger’s archetypes. 

My analysis of the characters based on Volger’s archetypes are: 

Charles - VIllain/false hero Carl - The Hero Russel - The Mentor Kevin - Princess Dug - The Sidekick Ellie - The Dispatcher My summary of Up is as follows: 

A young quiet boy named Carl meets an adventurous young girl named Ellie and they fall in love over the backdrop of their mutual fanfare over Charles Muntz, a defamed adventurer who set out to Paradise Falls to redeem himself. Sadly, Ellie dies before she and Carl get realize their dream of following in Charles’ footsteps, leading Carl to becoming a bitter recluse.

The world around Carl changes but he does not and he resists it. One day, Carl snaps and assaults a construction worker who damages the mailbox he and Ellie had painted which leads to him forcefully being sent to a retirement home. On the day he was supposed to be taken to the retirement home, he also met a young boy-scout named Russel who attempted to approach him in order to fulfill the conditions for his assisting the elderly badge. Carl shuts the door in Russel’s face an focuses more on letting his balloons loose so he can escape to paradise falls. Unfortunately for Carl, Russel was on his front porch when he launched his house and the two end up stuck together. They get caught up in a storm that takes them to South America, right near Paradise falls. 

Today we went to the Norwich castle museum and did some observational sketches. I decided to use watercolor and pen and ink while there. I didn’t managed to produce anything I was really happy with. I was kind of uncomfortable drawing in public like that. But I did appreciate being pushed out of my comfort zone in that regard. Halfway through I managed to relax a bit and get into drawing more. I definitely spent a good amount of time just wandering around and not actually drawing anything. I would like to go back and try drawing some more on my own time in that area. 

I found that because of my nerves I really wasn’t able to capture anything interesting or very well. My hands were too shaky to really get anything done with my watercolour and I was using a pen that I was really unfamiliar with to draw. I still really struggle to draw figures in motion. While I understand the idea of breaking down the forms that you see to their simplest shapes and really spending a few minutes committing your subject to memory before attempting to draw them, that idea is a lot harder to execute in practice. 

Wow. What an unproductive break. 

I really struggled to accomplish much this week. I found that I ended up avoiding animating in after effects as much as humanly possible. I allowed my frustration with the program to cloud my better judgment and have set myself back as a result. Going forward I will try sticking to an outlined schedule in an attempt to remove some of the emotional blockage making it hard to work on this project. 

I am really enjoying the process of researching for my essay as the film that I have chosen is one that I greatly enjoy. I found it easy to get invested in closely analyzing the narrative and learning about Oshii’s other work and motivations as well as the work of those around him. I feel as though I can really relate to a lot of the messages presented in Oshii’s work so I’ve really enjoyed getting to better understand his approach to storytelling.

I decided to do an analysis of the film Ghost in the Shell as I watched having done some research already. I feel as though this was a really insightful experience and that there was a lot of subtlety to unpack in the film. 

At this point, I am actively avoiding after effects. I’m being completely candid here. I’m not enjoying the process of animating in AE at all. The learning curves is very steep for me. I’ve instead placed most of my efforts into my other projects and am definitely avoiding dealing with this problem. 

I understand that avoiding it won’t help me improve but something about the program just doesn’t agree with me. I don’t like making excuses so I am still trying though. I still don’t feel very strongly about the film that I picked and generally am really struggling with the minimalism aspect of animating in After Effects. I’ve been trying to traditionally storyboard in the hopes of making it easier to wrap my head around animating in AE but haven’t had much luck there. 

In this week’s narratology session, we discussed the narrative framework commonly found in fairy tales. We discussed the fact that many fairy tales are at their cores larger moral narratives that cultures use to navigate through greater fears and present ideals of justice and righteousness. Fairy Tales often present the simple fact that actions have consequences in an unambiguous way that clearly delivers this narrative focus. 

We also discussed how fairy tales often also served the purpose of encouraging reproduction socially as the common structure of a fairy tale is that a family is broken up at the beginning and a new one is formed at the end through a union such as marriage. Another core element of Propp’s philosophy is his argument that events in and of them self don’t actually hold the most significance in a fairy tale but rather but rather it’s structural role does and that actions matter more than the actual characters within the structure of a a fairy tale.

Today we were given a brief for our project of filling out a sketchbook. This project was aimed at the idea of taking notes of details from observational drawings and using them to develop ideas. I particularly liked the liberal angle taken with the project and the fact that we were left with a lot of room for interpretation of subjects.