Month: January 2023

Loop Animation: Cycle of forests

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NgjW5cvUnb9PpYn8leGH5JeiYKid8maCDVzAJ6ERK6s/edit?usp=sharing

I played the game Her Story, though I did not finish finding and watching all the clips, I figured out most of the story. This game is not like any other games I have ever played, due to its unique story-telling method and interactions. Instead of the mainstream games that show you the stories directly or those detective games that require you to solve the puzzle to achieve something else (like winning the suitcase), Her Story provides no clear timeline and specific goal. To you have to do is input the keywords to watch video clips, and that is all you can do. While playing the game, after picturing the rough story, I wonder for some time that what is the next step, what should I do next? Should I report the murderer to someone else? And it turns out that there is no such option, the game ends whenever I want it to end, whenever I am no longer curious about what happened to the murder case.

To some point, I think Her Story is not exactly a game, its more like an application to search for video clips. But the story behind those clips provided me the motivation to figure out what really happened out there. I think such motivation, which let me use such “application” more, makes Her Story a game. Therefore, Her Story also widens my definition and thinking about what a game is, what requirements are necessary to call something a game.

Back to the concept of interaction, I related a lot to the idea of two entities (actors) listening, thinking and speaking to each other provided by Crawford. Such definition closely relates to the other books about interaction I read before. Start from this definition, I always found much of those interactive projects not to be with strong interaction. Because I often think that those computer programs are not “thinking” hard enough. I also found such pattern in Her Story, there is no denial that it involves interaction, but the computer program is not doing fancy thinking. It would show the result that contains a keyword, like a basic database. If using Crawford’s idea to let interaction have scales, I would personally think Her Story as low interactions.

However, such weak interaction already generates a new way of telling a story. Her Story reminds me of the film Memento by Christopher Nolan. They were both telling a story by cutting it into small clips and showing them in some way other than linear timelines (which makes them very hard to understand). But just like Crawford said, films are not interactive, we cannot search and choose which clip to watch like what we did in Her Story, but to accept whatever mess order Nolan gives to us. The interaction in Her Story, enabling us to form our own storyline, creates much difference comparing the Memento. And I do think that such interaction makes the whole process more entertaining, and more engaging than watching the film. Therefore, I think interactions do add more possibilities and fun to storying telling. Though I might also just want to see a straightforward story sometimes.

Reference

Crawford, Chris. The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software. No Starch Press, 2003. 

Nolan, Christopher, director. Memento, 2001. 

Sam Barlow, Her Story, 2015.

       One design I found really lovely is Andrea, an air purifier that uses a plant to clean the air, created by Mathieu Lehanneur and David Edwards. I love this design for many reasons. The most intuitive and simple reason is that it looks nice and cute. A green plant inside a half transparent half white box just looks clean and neat, which is just consistent with its function, to clean the air. The second reason is for its dual function. It is both an air purifier and an indoor green plant. Andrea combines two different items in the household into a very harmony one. So that it gives beauty to air purifier and gives concrete function to a green plant. The third and the most invoking reason is the design of combining these two together. It is known to all that trees and plants are the most original, and most important purifier for earth. But in households, we usually see machines using electricity to purifier air. Andrea brings the important function of plants back to people’s attention in this way. To me, this design also seems a little bit irony towards the heavy machinery in our world. We build machines for everything but neglecting that the natural have evolved many lives and patterns to fulfill the needs. Therefore, for me, I do think this design is beautiful, useful, and invoke us to think about the natural, machines, and their relationship.

Reference

Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, 2014. 

Sarah Housley |14 September 2009 23 comments (2022) Andrea by Mathieu Lehanneur and David Edwards, Dezeen.Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2009/09/14/andrea-by-mathieu-lehanneur-brand-david-edwards/ (Accessed: November 6, 2022). 

One Minute Animation Loop

Post-Mortem

       I learned and enjoyed a lot in the process of making the animation. One major lesson learned during the process is to live with constraints. Almost every asset and every action are chosen after trying something else but failed. For example, I spent a long time trying to find more delicate leaf and tree images, or creating by myself, but it did not turn out well. So, I tried to keep all assets in the same “cartoon” style instead of more realistic and delicate. I tried to use puppet tool for more complex actions for transport belt and arms, but it also did not result well. Although I tried and failed many times, it turned out that most things worked out at last, maybe not exactly as what I imaged. The whole process was also a bit easier when I noticed all those constraints, as I could narrow down my design and had more concrete expectations of the result.

       Though I succeeded in taking advantage of several cool effects in AE, such as remnants and Gaussian blur, I finished most part of the animation with the most basic actions like rotate and position changes. It would be wonderful if I may explore more built-in functions in AE, I might be able to achieve a lot more than what I have now. The problem was I do not how much could AE do, and I would love to learn more about the fancy animations in AE in the future.

       To moving forward this animation, I think there are many actions and details I could add. For example, I could show how the leaf is equipped to the twigs, how the leaf is “blown” to increase its size. Although I do not have exact ideas about the scenes to animate these actions, I think it would be really fun to continue on this imagination.

       Buchan argued the concepts of “a world ” created by animation and “the world” that we lived in. She used the example of puppet animation “street of crocodiles” as one example that puppet animation creates an animated world using physical objects in our world. In this way, puppet animations seems to be in the middle of “a world” and “the world”. I agree with Buchan that the two worlds are not that kind of separate as described by Cavell. Although animation provides movement and life to inanimate objects in real life, but there are always some similar elements within the two worlds. Since the animation world is created by human, our imagination is based on real life, so the connections between two worlds are actually strong, many elements will be projected into animation even without notice.

       I thought of the animation “Alita: Battle Angel” when reading the paragraph that Cavell disagreed cartoons as movies. Just like other science fiction movies, “Alita” used much CG and animation. Although the main character is played by a human actress, what we see on the screen is an animated girl. How can the audience decide Alita as a human actress or an animation, she is both. I feel that the boundaries between animation and real human movies are becoming less and less clear. These two categories are merging together to produce films, and one might not be able to regard animation not as movies.

       As for the animation world and our real world, just as argued by Buchan that everyone has his or her own “the world”. It might be the case that a little child would think the cartoon she just watched is in the real world. There is no difference between “a world” and “the world” for the little child, or to someone with great imagination.

Reference

“Alita: Battle Angel.” YouTube, YouTube, 11 Feb. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwlu7jkYI1A. 

Buchan, Suzanne. “The Animated Spectator: The Quay Brothers’ Animated ‘Worlds.’” pp. 15–38., https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt22p7j2j.5. 

 

       This animation by Margaret Hayford is about making an ice-cream and it being eaten by a dog. Quite a few of the “12 principles” can be found in this short animation. For example, there is a “follow-through” action after the corgis ate the ice-cream that the dog’s ears and hair were still waving after finishing the movement. The speed of the dog’s action of opening mouth shows the “ease in” principle, that the corgis opened the mouth from slow to quick, and closed it all in a sudden, represented the changing of speed. To some extent, the circling movement of ice-cream making can be regarded as a representation of “arcs” principle. Also, there are “secondary action” in the animation, such as the slight drop of the cone, the ice-cream melting and the animal’s winking. The dog opening mouth widely is a kind of “exaggeration”, and the overall cute appearance of the dog can be seen as the “appeal” principle.

       Although it is a very short animation, a good number of details can be found representing elements in the 12 principles. When reading the 12 principles, I found some common factors shared by multiple principles. For one, we should make the major movement more realistic, closer to real life. We have to think about the shape changing, the pre-movement, the speed changing in movements, and also secondary movements. Such things are details that could make the major movement more vivid and easier to understand. For the other, we should make use of the advantages of animation to simulate things cannot happen in real life. The exaggeration and beautified appeals are not real, but they are characteristics that separate animation from other media, to convey feelings and ideas in a more dramatic way.

Reference

Hayford, Margaret. “Panimation Gif”. Margarethayford, https://www.margarethayford.com/panimationgif.

Ritchie, James. “The 12 Principles Of Animation (With Examples) – Idearocket”. Idearocket, 2017,https://idearocketanimation.com/13721-12-principles-of-animation-gifs/?%3Futm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=animation-principles.

 

Genre Video

Post-Mortem

Two major lesson I learned in this video project are to change with the situation and to deal with the short time. It is always the case that the reality would not follow the plan, but this seems to be amplified in video making. We made the storyboard with the perfect setting we imagined, an actress sitting in front of a big mirror with a make-up table. But actually, we have neither big mirror nor a table. Not to mention all other minor settings and details that exist only in the plan. On the shooting day, we had to cooperate with all kinds of constrains, give up some initial plans and make up with new ones. For example, we have to choose different shooting angles and scenes because of the settings. And what I learned from this experience is that we should always be aware of the possibility of such situation. We cannot make plans about the last-minute changes, but we can be positive about it and not be afraid of it.

One other obstacle is the short time, we have very limited amount of time to finish editing. Also, since the video project is not very convenient to share and edit at the same time, it was a big challenge for teamwork. Therefore, we separated works in a manner that each does one part without affecting others work, and we all have the chance to review and make changes to the piece. Although this project is not the most perfect one, and I believe that we can make it better with more time, I think we overcame all challenges and finish the project smoothly.

       “In the Blink of an Eye” talked about the edition of film, especially in the work of cuts. The excerpt provided me many cool ideas to think about. And there are two points I found most interesting and surprising in the book, one is the six criteria for making a cut, and the second is the myth of why does cot work.

       Murch ranked the six important elements when deciding a cut, from emotion and story as the most important to the continuity of dimensional space as the least important. This ranking is very novel to me as I previously held the idea that the coherent in spatial is very crucial to film cuts. While Murch argued that when the film is conveying the emotion and story in the right way, audience may neglect the incoherence in spaces. I found this ranking reasonable when I read the article and also when I thought about the movies I have seen. As in many situations I did not necessarily notice the cuts when I was into the plot or the emotions.

       Murch provided two answers to the question that why human accept cuts so naturally. One is that in dreams, we may experience discontinuous stories. The other answer, the more fascinating one, is that human blinks create such discontinuity in real life. Murch related film cuts to human blinks and argued that an editor can determine a cut when feeling it is a potential moment for a blink, and that a good actor would blink in the same pace with the emotion of the character. His theory of blinks strikes me a lot because I never thought about blinks in this way, that the blinking behavior can have such significance. Human would blink to separate dialogues, feelings, and thoughts, transforming our continuous life into discrete pieces. And such behavior is done unconsciously in our brain. The comparison of the film cuts and human blinks made me have a more natural feeling about cuts. That film cuts no longer represents a distinguishable difference between movies and real life, but they become a tool to bring movie world into reality. That the movie story is more alike to the experience we have in everyday life.

Reference

Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. Silman-James Press, 2001. 

 

       “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” by Scott Mccloud is a comic book discussing the origin, the form, the development, and the characteristics of comics. Reading this book, I learned a lot about art, not only the genre of comics, but also the concept of art as a whole. Mccloud talked about many things that strike me, including the history of comics, the relationship between image and language, the contract between reality and icon, the closure in comics, the presentation of sound and time in comics, the function of color and so on. Here are some thoughts about the points in the book that are related to the course materials.

       Firstly, chapter three “Blood in the Gutter” talks about the closure, the space between panels. This topic is very related to the image sequence assignment. To some extent, the assignment requires the same as a comic book, that is to tell a certain story using a sequence of panels, while the difference is that no word is allowed. Mccloud’s knowledge about the panel-to-panel transitions are highly consistent with the story-telling requirement. He discussed what would happen in the audience’s mind between two panels, that the space between two images can be filled up by the reader’s imagination. Although nothing is shown on the paper, the audience could find the connection based on their experience. I keep thinking about this idea when doing the image sequence assignment, that how much blank space can I leave without having the story less clear. I cannot include every motion and changes to the limited images, so I have to capture the several most important moments and make them connected to each other. I want to leave the audience with as much imagination as possible, but still telling one concrete story. Mccloud’s moment-to-moment, action-to-action, and subject-to-subject scene concept really helped me a lot in choosing which moment and which movement to capture.

       Secondly, in chapter four and chapter five, Mccloud talked about how simple lines have the ability to represent motion, sound, and even smell that audience should not simply see in an image. This reminds me of the sound video “The World Is Sound” by Christine Sun Kim, in which she made use of musical signs to present the sound of a certain event, even some events that should not have sound at all. Both comics lines and Christine’s work use one sense to illustrate other senses, use images to show sounds or smells that eyes can not see. While in Christine’s work that the musical signs might require some explanations to understand, motion lines and “smell lines” are just so intuitive in comic books. Without any explanation or background knowledge, a reader can easily get the idea that the food went wrong, the man was running, or the dog was barking. These examples provoke me the think the human’s five senses are not separate, without really “receiving the signal”, our imagination allow senses to be conveyed through other channels, and we can enjoy the information of multiple senses while using only one organ. This idea of sense sharing let me think about what I can convey within one form, can I show brightness with sound, or show pain with images. I think Mccloud’s comics book and Christine’s video expended my understanding of the information contained within one art form.

       What’s more, the comics book also talks about content and form. Although the main topic is comics, Mccloud also paid some attention on drawing and writing, as they are two essential elements of comics. In the discussion of these art forms, he talked about the growth expressionism, impressionism, surrealism and so on. Some paintings in going in the domain of abstract, while some writings are becoming more understandable. But the mainstream of art critiques is still using the standard of the past to interpret and judge new arts. To some extent, it comes across with the idea in “Against Interpretation”. In the writing, Susan Sontag argued that we should focus more on the form, but not the content of artwork, and that we should not overthink the meanings of artworks. It seems that Mccloud and Sontag are talking about similar things, that we are using the same standard to interpret artworks in different times, so we might press too much irritant information to one piece of art.

       In short, though this book is about comics, it also mentions many other art forms and presented many interesting ideas that are suitable to all art forms. Techniques and concepts used in comics can be adapted into other expressions. This is exactly the idea of storytelling through different kinds of media.

Reference

Christine Sun Kim. “The World Is Sound”. Youtube.Com, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vU4TCKxZlc&t=180s.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York :Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: Writing and Art. Harper Perennial, 1993.