Animation History (continued)

This week the topic from last week (Animation History) was continued. Pixar is currently the most dominant Animation Studio in the world whose work are unrivalled. Disney's Pixar has created one of the most loved and entertaining animated films such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc., The incredibles, Wall-E, Cars and Finding Nemo. Warner Bros. is another company that has done remarkable contribution in the field of animation with famous pieces of work like Bugs Bunny, Batman, Superman, Looney tunes and many others. Japanese animation which uses certain techniques that are rather different than western style of animation was also developed side-by-side. These Japanese style animations are called anime. But to understand the developmental phases of the animation in media we have look at its history.

Finding Nemo (Pixar)

Bug Bunny (Warner Bros.)

Naruto (Anime)

To learn about the approaches to history of an art form we need to understand the fact that technology used in art progresses in a linear fashion while art itself does not. The recent artwork are not necessarily better than older ones. But artists generally relate to the history of their art form ina non-linear fashion.

Ideology is a term that is defined as a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations and actions. Louise Althusser states Ideology as the false obviousness of everyday life. Ideology naturalises the social and treats changeable relations as fixed things. This can be found in artworks featuring visions of nature so the ideal place to explore this approach is in cartoons which is a medium for children. Children are generally fascinated with cartoons and often found watching cartoons a lot of time. These cartoons help the children see   the world in imagination.

Effects of Violence within Media

This is a very big topic that we discussed in the lecture today and it has been very controversial throughout the media from past to present. The session started with the display of some movieclips of violent acts found in many movies and video games. These sort of movies and video games are often considered as murder simulator but there are other controversial thoughts in the defence of these media products. Violent movies like Alien, Natural born killers and Men behind the sun, and violent video games like Mortal Kombat, God of war 3 and Fallout 3 are thought to be capable of inflicting the act of violence among the youngsters that watch these movies or play these games.

Mortal Kombat

Alien

Outrageous violent acts such as school shoot-outs are blamed enormously as an influence from games and cinema. One of these incidents was a high school shoot-out in America where the shooter admitted that he was obsessed the game called "Doom" (a first person shooter game with violent contents). Also "Wild Boys of London" is a very controversial publication that was considered to have caused a lot of fear on young men and corrupt their mind irreplaceably. So even in the old days of media, controversies about social violence emerged from these products.

However, many experts believe that the violence in the video games and movies are for entertainment purpose  only and they do not have direct and immediate effect on the viewers of players. Those who do commit violent crimes and blame it on films and games are just using it as excuse and they are likely to commit these crimes with or without these movies and games. Many experiments have also done to support this statement. For example, in certain Universities, students were given a game with violent contents to play and then the same game was let to be played by the students but this time they took out the violent contents and replaced them with non-violent content. The results came out as the excitement level in the students remained the same meaning that violence included in games do not influence one's desire for violence.

Violence and video games are also related in different manner in the field of modern technology. Video game consoles come with the gaming controllers which are designed to be small, easy to use and fit perfectly on average size of hands. This concept was taken and implemented in the modern military where the soldiers can use a controller similar to the video games controller to easily use the remote controlled weapons like guided missiles and RC car with explosives and spy camera attached to it.

Symbols

A symbol is anything that represents something by convention or association. Usually it a written or printed sign that is used to represent something. Symbols are important part of human communication specially among the literate communities. A symbol that has been learnt to represent a certain specific object or activity by a community makes people within the community to communicate without even having to be present with each other. One can simply leave of note in symbols and others would understand what he/she is trying to tell.

For instance, this cave painting was printed many many years ago by our ancestors and although they are no longer present among us, leaving this symbol has helped us understand what they used to do (such as hunting what kind of animals and using what kind of weapons to hunt). Thus, the use of symbols can help us communicate even long after we die.

Symbols can be created using the resemblance and these kind of symbols are more obvious and easier to understand even for those people who have not learnt the symbol. For example, the following image shows two symbols where the left symbol represents female while the right symbol represents male. These are quiet obvious and easy to understand as the female symbol shows a clear resemblance of a general female clothing and male symbol shows a clear resemblance of a general male clothing.

But some symbols are arbitrary and do not show any resemblance. These symbols are created and generalised and people to learn it and keep the symbol and whatever it represents in memory. For example, in English language, the word "tree" represents a real life tree although this combination of letters does not resemble the tree in any form and does not relate to the actual tree whatsoever.

Icons are the specific type of symbols. Icons are created more due to the resemblance and likeness and are very different from words, letters and scripts. The above image is a fine example of icons. These icons (symbols of female and male) are created and used due to their resemblance in appearance with the actual objects (female and male human genders) they represent.

Two sides to everything

Today I missed my Media Histories and Cultures Lecture because I was feeling a bit sick. But with the help of internet and my friends who managed to attend the lecture, I was able to gain some understandings from today's topic. And it was about "Two sides to everything".

From what I have understood, it means that everything in the world has a different side to it to counter it. For example, black colour has white to counter, good has evil to counter, male has female to counter, fat has skinny to counter, dark has light to counter and so on.

Everything having two sides helps us to create a contrast between them and distinguish between things. If there were just days and nights did not exist, we would not even know about the days. So, in order to identify the days we needed to know the existence of nights as nights are the other side of the days that creates a contrast between themselves and helps us distinguish between them.

Understanding this topic is definitely beneficial to my course study as in Digital Animation, we often have to make certain things stand out from the rest where creating the contrast by showing the two sides can be handy.

Intertextuality

Once again I attended the Media Histories and Cultures lecture with my colleagues. Today's lecture was about "Intertextuality". I came to an understanding that Intertextuality means the transposition of the one or many sign systems. So, it is still related to what we learned last week (Signs and Semiotics) in this lecture.

We were shown some fine examples of intertextuality used in the Media world. Such as, the name of the famous boy band "Beatles" relates to the insect "Beetle". The band was originally named "The silver beetle" and later changed to "Beatles" where the word itself relates to the insect "Beetle" and term "beat" in terms of music.

If I have to come up with my own example, then in the movie “Shrek 2”, characters re-enact the scene from the movie “Spiderman” where a half-masked man hanging upside down kisses a woman, with some differences such as the characters are ogres instead of humans and the upside down character has mud half way down his face instead of being half masked. But even so, the relation is very clear and obvious and hence, shows the Intertextuality.

In one of the theories, something interesting caught my attention. It was said that no ideas are unique as every idea goes through the process of intertextuality and in some way relates to something that already exists. And when I thought about it I could not agree more. Even when someone thinks of something all on his/her own and creates something totally new, it will have some relation with something else that already exists and the creator might not even know about it.

This helps me up in my course as we can have countless inspirations from all sorts of things to add up to our creations. For example, when creating a 3D model of an alien creature  for instance, we can merge features of different animals found on Earth to create a new creature.

Signs

Today in the Media Histories and Culture lecture, we learnt about signs. The basic form of communication that exists between us. What we did this lesson was a bit of practice to help ourselves understand the concept. Some of us were told to get out a pad and a pen and turn around and face our colleagues sitting behind us. We weren't allowed to look on the front screen. Our colleagues sitting behind would look at the screen and tell us what is being drawn in the screen. We, then, had to draw them relying on the information given by the colleagues. This exercise was quite fun to be honest and definitely helped us grasp the concept. Soon after this exercise we were shown the process model of communication to further ease our understandings which was something like this:

       Signs, messages, information
T    ----------------------------->    R
      <-----------------------------
                     Feedbacks

Here, T means Transmitter and R means Receiver. Transmitter communicates (provides information) to the Receiver via various possible methods (speaking, signalling, gesturing) and when the Receiver responds back to the transmitter, he/she is giving feedback in response to the transmitter's information. This is the basic form of communication.

In this lesson, we came across a term "Semiotics". I didn't know the meaning of this term but this lecture sure helped me understand it. From what I gained, I take the meaning of semiotics as certain signs and their arrangement that create certain meanings which can be used in the communication. All the text created in different languages all around the world are the examples. But also the certain artefacts, objects and codes used in various cultures can also be considered as the valid examples.

This artefact has a meaning as it clearly represents the structural figure of a wild Rhino.

This is a form of visualisation. This is very important stuff to understand in my chosen course of Digital Animation as it is mostly about visual communication. We, as animators and artist students, have to have clear understanding on the visuals to be able to successfully create them in the digital world of animation.

Realism in Media

Today in the Media Histories Lecture, we were given the understandings of what role realism plays in the Media Industry. From what I have archived, realism is a lot more interesting subject than I originally thought. I always thought higher the realism, better the quality but it is not the case. Sometimes having high realism can make the product (film or game) loose attraction or interests in the audience or viewers.

For example, when creating a cartoon show for children, it is a better choice to use childish drawings in the animation that stays away from realism than making the drawings extremely real.

Here is the image of Spongebob and Patrick. The show is very popular among kids. It has very less amount of realism on it.

(If this image does not show use the URL below)

http://static.funnyjunk.com/pictures/20055_313243692524_708987524_4021396_1943704_n.jpg

Now this image can be considered as more realistic (comparatively) version of Spongebob and Patrick but this image quickly makes these character look a lot less interesting specially among kids. So, I learnt that affect of realism can be bad as well.

Also, the animated movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, was not a hit movie even though the realism in the movie is of high level. People were definitely amazed with the realistic graphics but it was not enough to be appealing among larger number of audience.

So, the main lesson that I learned from this lecture is that the effects of realism should be used very carefully and within a balance in the Media Industry in order to attract the audience.