Both animation lectures together....

The first lecture on animation made sense to me. From a modelling perspective things like puppets, automata and stop motion mean animation in models. It is the movement that makes them appear 'animated' the cogs the axels that form the basic movements that we presume to us through the various signs that mean running, walking, rolling etc.

Looking through the seminar things like model cars must appear to be a car but almost must appear to have the same movement as a car.... or must crash and burn like a car when travelling at a high speed.

The 'uncanny valley' has been mentioned several times through these lectures. How as a human a model cannot be half way between being the real thing and being an arbitrary symbol for it. It is how as a human we could respond to a puppet for instance. We would accept it if it were something along the lines of looking like a wooden puppet such as pinochio:

However if this puppet then took the form of a real boy this would be entering into the uncanny valley. We would know it is not a real boy... and find it unbearable that it looked like one. It would scare me I know!

The second lecture for animation was between Disney and the Japanese area Anime of cartoons. To be honest I cannot think of anything model wise that would be linked to either of these genres. Apart from the area of Disney where the animatronic models of the cartoon characters are made to mimic those that we see in the films.

Violence in media...

The week of this lecture I watched Fight Club.... hadn't watched it literally years, but still a brilliant film even though it is 11 years old.

Violence in culture is not agreed with, not nurtured but it is still heavily part of our society. 'Fight Club' to me almost shows how society likes to keep violence a secret and how injuries affect the way people react to you as a person.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show....

Went to go see The Rocky Horror Picture Show this weekend.
Absolutely loved it!
I recommend who ever hasn't seen it must see it!!!

It also kind of fitted into last weeks lecture about Science Fiction.... even though it is a very cultish production/film, it was developed along the principle lines of a science fiction film... listen to the opening song....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5MHNvOVl8Y

Listen and enjoy. x

Science Fiction....

Science Fiction is such a broad genre with in the film industry that I think it is very hard to put just one film in it that isn't related to another genre like comedy or romance.

When looking from a model perspective the genre of science fiction means whether something is convincing to the eye. Whether the craftmanship gone into this piece is realistic; whether it gives off the right signs; whether CGI makes a backdrop to a fantasy film or whether a model would be better.

In the seminar the topic of conversation moved to Physical Modelling vs. CGI. Watch this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_03l-qtyij0

The monster compared to the dragon does look so much better because it is made in the real world it is a physical object and so we recognise the signs and then the movement to show that it is real. Where as the dragon just looks like something out of a video game.

Taking something from the science fiction genre such as The Thing 1982. It looks realistic because it was an amazing piece of modelling work where as something modern such as the newest remake of the Clash of the Titans is mostley done with CGI and in my opinion looks nothing as good as the first make.

Binary Opposites and Structuralism....

Binary opposites are the groups, as humans, we like to put things in.... eg postive and negative, good and evil etc.

As Human's we like to see things as just black and white. There is no middle ground. In a film a hero must be a hero he must be purely good - like Superman for example. He is not allowed to have a dark side because he is a hero he ultimately belongs on the good side.

Culture feeds the structuralism on this society we live in. We think that people, objects, characters, etc have to be categorised. But life isn't like that. Characters in films are not like that as much as we want them to be.

Take Shrek.... we know he is the hero of the plot... but we also know he is an Ogre that eats people, he is grumpy and bad tempered. He depicts both set's of binary opposites between humans and ogres. He is in the middle ground.

Human                 Ogre
Happy                  Angry
Clean                    Dirty
Houses                Tree Stump
Water                   Mud
Community         Alone

But Shrek over steps these boundaries and becomes immersed in the middle of these groups as he begins to inhabit both qualities.

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is how things link together, say between different films, photographs, adverts and so on. It’s almost like semiotics how signs and signals refer to each other to make a contextual link like a pun for example.

All the examples I can think of right now are all in children’s films, and this is usually because adults need something to entertain themselves as well, when sat in a dark cinema watching some character they would fall asleep, but if there is another level of wit and humour, along with a small reference to an adult film, this can make it entertaining. Like the example in the lecture of Madagascar and the visual and oral reference to Planet of the Apes.

Also spoof films such as the Scary Movie franchise are all based around intertextuality. Without the original films this branch of the film industry wouldn’t have developed.

From a model perspective, all models must be intertextual otherwise they would not be models? They need a level of meaning to gain the audience’s attention and understanding otherwise they just wouldn’t work. 

Semiotics

Well since dear old Alan gave us the seminar on semiotics before we had the lecture, our group kind of had a leg up...

Signs, Signification, Signified, Iconic, Arbitrary, Paradigm, Syntagm and on and on and on. So many words with definition which you have to remember.

Thinking about semiotics and the meanings of iconic and arbitrary, no matter how realistic you make something to be iconic, as a human you will always know that it is not the real thing, but usually something pretty close to it. Looking at something that is arbitrary, as shown in the lecture, something as simple as a circle with two dots and a line can be interpreted as a face. But because of the lack of detail there, the two dots and a line becomes symbolic. It becomes the very basic sign for a face.

Like when the Police have ‘training’ days for fake catastrophes and they use fake bodies with injuries and others for actors. These must be iconic to some degree other wise it will take away from the reality of the practice. Same within horror films like Saw and Hostel for example. The gruesome scenes need to be iconic otherwise it will not be believable! And it would look like the film would have a very cheap budget. Just even comparing the Saw images above to something like Starship troopers for example (I love Starship troopers by the way), the Saw effects and models of the injuries blood and guts are a lot more believable. The lionk below is a link to a part of the film, about 6mins in is where a guy gets his leg chopped off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWhrGGrs3Ow