The nature and history of animation

The main point that Bill seemed to want to get across to us in this lecture was simply 2D animation is still just as useful and good as 3D.

Also he informed us of the processes of when modern 3D techniques were invented originating from pixar led by John Lasseter and other animators. Such as motion-blur and particle systems etc then led on to the achievements in 2D animation using the example of Bambi which I've personally never seen.

It was interesting knowing the process of how Disney created bambi such as they brought in real deers into the studio to use as reference to get accurate anatomy for the movie and using paintings as reference for the forest background and surrounding.

The idea of synthetic nature was quite interesting that we grow up with an idea of what nature is as a result of watching movies aswell as ideology being passed onto new generations through the use of children's movies which I agree with. Children are influenced by the world around them and learn from what they see and hear including movies, especially children will be affected by this. As people are older they are more aware and can interpret things in their own way and have knowledge of how to act. A not so passive influence.

Animation

Bill focused on aspects of 2D animation such as the frame by frame process allowing the animator to create something unique and different in every frame. That a character never makes exactly the same expression when hand drawn unlike with software movements and expressions can be copied.

This made me think of the debates of modern animation in contemporary times, many feel that as a result of software that modern animation is not like it used to be when it was hand drawn. That there is a loss of expression and character and an increase in blocky, straight lined characters that are only ever seen from one view. Examples such as South park, phineas and ferb etc. Mostly because of not only likely to be tight deadlines on producing a series but also software replacing hand-drawn animation skills.

Bill went back to 2D animation to emphasize to us how important it still is which I agree with as it is the core and origin of animation to begin with. 2D began the development of animation which eventually led to 3D
animation and core principles of 2D are used in 3D. As in basic they are trying to achieve the same goal bringing characters and stories to life.

He assessed the looney toons characters bugs bunny and daffy duck and told us that the animator said that they are portrayels of aspects of himself which I found to be interesting. That bugs bunny is how he would like to be and daffy duck is how he actually is.

He reflected on the dynamics of 2D animation something which I have covered in my essay research and writing on how their is a conflict between realism and believability and he even used my example of roadrunner that I used in my essay. The great thing about animation is that a world where a completely different set of rules apply such as in roadrunner coyote seemingly falls off the cliff and dies yet always comes back, yet the audience dont find this odd because this is what happens in this world. This is what is normal for these characters and this place - believability factor. If coyote did actually die the believability would no longer exist and therefore the illusion of realism would be gone.

Violence around us

And another lecture!

Lecture started with video of "headshot" compilation from different games.
In the game industry FPS games are becoming very popular and headshots are the best, fastest and in some games are even funniest way to kill! There are many other games, violence in games expanded even to online sector in example World of WarCraft and many many other online games... in which you have a choice whether to fight the NPC's or other players known as PVP (player vs player) and for killing others the winner might get rewards depending on how good you are, which in fact stimulates you to carry on doing it more and more repetitively.

PVP Arena in WoW

Many people criticise games with violence and demand to restrict them in one or another way. Couple of years ago when a game called Manhunt 2 was in development it was banned in many countries for its violence and all work on a game was stopped as far as i know and only after developers cutted down all the gore in the game it was launched, this game was litteraly a killing simulator! I dont blame people who criticise games like that, but from another point it is a stress relief that helps us to get rid of tiredness, anger and so on... but there are times when some take real guns in their hands because of those games...

         in example Columbine shooting in school. It was influenced by game called "DOOM"! As bil was reffering to this horrible event I did search for it later and discovered that one of the guys that was involved in shooting had a diary where he described his addiction to the game and his hate to entire world, blaming people saying what he hates in people and basicly that it makes him feel good when others suffer!

     At some point Bill showed us videos with very first few games and people considered them as a danger to a society(!) but when I saw these games it made me laugh that it was just bunch of pixels :D 

And still they have managed to develop into more realistic, games now are really good looking like CG videos that were cutscenes few years ago with unreachable graphics and realism when now most games dont even have pre created cutscenes, its just a live rendering with very good visuals which is still can be improved but thats another story!

 Some people recognize gaming addiction just as drinking, drug addiction, smoking...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00wlmj0/Panorama_Addicted_to_Games/

Violence is everywhere around us and I think we dont take it seriosly anymore as we are constantly exposed to it even in cartoons, apart from the itchy and scratchy series in sympsons I remember that I heard or saw somewhere about Tom and Jerry cartoon that it is just as violent as everything else but just because it is a cartoon it is fine, so it was with the roadrunner cartoon.

Lecture about sci-fi and semiotics.

Bill caried on talking about where we pretty much left off last week lecture, also by correcting Ivan saying there are three types of semiotics, which are:

First:                 Symbol: arbitary or linguistic

Second:             Icon: likeness or resemblance

Third:                Index: existentially linked (where is smoke there is fire)

Andre Bazan- All photographs are dead masks.

Also analogue photography was replaced by digital which means that now it can be manipulated easily, no need to care anymore about if the shot is good or bad just take hundreds of photos and see which is good or bad, combine together, crop etc?

After that bit we moved on to Sci-Fi bit and genres in general that movies connected to each other... in example star wars movies took many many things from other sources as inspiration for their own... 

Also Bill said that all sci-fi movies are being critisized that they are all the same and they have no good plot and its just excuse to put in all the visual effects.

Most movies can be related to few genres at a time, in example Sci-fi, action and buddy comedy eg "Men in Black". 

Apart from that Bill was talking about that most sci-fi movies have something where people rise their powers and unleash it as they can control everything. Also we spoke about robots taking over... in example matrix movie etc...

Overall I dont have many thoughts about that lecture as we were not given many facts to think about and whatever we spoke about wasnt given clearly enough to understand it completely in depth. However I got the concept of the idea with the sci-fi movies that they keep repeating themselves...

lol what? :D

Seriosly I didnt get anything at all until certain point, I couldnt Understand why Bill was talking about paint colors as a medium or "tools" that we use... in example Maya, zBrush, photoshop and so on... I didnt get the point of it at all, what was the purpose of talking about it? I cant say much about that bit of the lecture to be honest, but I found it very interesting when we were watching old movies with no structure in them, when there was no understanding how to tell the story to audience which I should say impressed me as I never thought about it, but it was pretty much obvious that it started somehow. I found it kinda silly to look at one of the movies where same scene was repeated twice from different angles to pass the story onto me and others. Silly isnt it?

But thats how it all started anyway, however games at the moment are in the same situation as movies were ages ago... which is truth and I agree with, I remember myself playing games since I was like... 3 years old? There was loads of types of games and still is... Its still not clear how to tell the story... Bill was refering to "Max Payne" at the end of the lecture, saying it was a good example where story line was "sewed" into the game very well. I cant disagree on that, I loved that game!

Thats how story was given to audience in "Max Payne"

Another good example in my opinion is Final Fantasy series, every gamer played it atleast once. People loved one or another part of the game for its simple and amazing gameplay and ofcourse storyline. SquareEnix also known as SquareSoft defined for me how successful RPGs should be like, but in same time I cant agree with myself looking at MMORPGs, as the games have a base story that unites all the players... Which is not the point tho... 

Either way... It was a good lecture and I really enjoyed it, but I wish Bill wasnt going off the track that much anymore, because he lost my attention after certain point and it took loads of effort for me to carry on listening to him.

Update: another great game that came to my mind is Mass Effect, I absolutely loved it for its story and gameplay and I am amazed how developers managed to put these two things together so well. After playing the game I even forced myself to read a book about it, which is an achievement for me as I hate reading books... Story was so deep and full of interesting and diverse characters that many movies... I will dare to say it, all people that were behind the scenes of "Avatar" should learn from Bioware, even that Avatar is a top movie right now its still bad!

Structuralism and Binary opposition.

This lecture was quite interesting to me as I never thought of it before, It was interesting to find out that we humans think of everything in compare to something else- comparing each thing, what it is or not. in example we know what is light by knowing what is darkness. 

Ivan put forward a nice example at the lecture with sea and sand we can stand on, saying its under constant cycle or rotation... same relates to light and dark... and even me!!! Like my girlfriend says "your halo being held by devil horns". We humans constantly under cycle of doing bad things and good things too, most of us somewhere in the middle. This middle is called the zone of anomaly. 

The anomaly zone is the middle ground between the opposites such as cyborgs (half human half robot). It's used a lot in movies as it makes characters more interesting, it attracts us to them, as they may have interesting background or anything like that. 

In example frankenstein movie story was remade many times based on peoples reaction to this middle ground.

After the lecture with Ivan we had a seminar where we were shown quite interesting movie where everything was absolutely mixed up and opposite from normal, I dont remember the name of the animation movie tho, but i found it quite interesting after I thought of it for some time, that in example light in it was considered as evil and darkness as good, apart from that there was few more things that got my attention. 

This lecture will be good to look back on and consider for future work to use when necessary for making my own films.

Intertextuality

It was quite interesting lecture at some points, when we were talking about things repeating such as quotes in different movies aimed for certain audience and has no meaning to other people as they simply wont be able to interpret that code.

It was kinda weird to hear that we can't do anything original and some part of me probably disagrees as there always someone making something original, but another side of does agree with what Ivan was saying...
In our todays life we spend many hours talking to friends, browsing web, watching tv and so on. We are constantly under "attack" from outside with new information that may not be original and may influence us to create something that was already done, but perhaps to make it better?

All this makes me think that all we do right now is just constantly repeating each other. In example books keep their information for decades on its sheets, we read them and suck in the information, as Russians say- "by reading a book you copy authors mind" which I agree with.I'm not talking about books with pretty stories etc as they have no meaning apart from pretty stories, I am talking about educational aimed books, as they are passed from decade to decade between different generations of people to teach us and no matter if the books were renewed or not they still keep same information or "code" in them.


Although at some point Ivan said that we cant control how viewers receive things, it's quite interesting statement. As I mentioned in last post about semiotics- each person may interpret same thing different from the others.

Semiotics

Second Lecture we had was about "Semiotics" also known as "Semiotic Studies" and "Semiology".

During the lecture at first I couldnt understand what it was all about, but as Ivan was going through the lecture it became very clear to me what he was on about and I found it quite interesting.

This lecture triggered some of my memories when I spoke to one of my friends about relationships between people, languages and how we understand each other.

So thats what we spoke about:
Language we all speak is some sort of a code and each person interprets it differently... We can speak same language and still may not understand each other, find difficulties communicating with each other, but lets say if its a man and a woman in love long time together, they (not all) dont even have to talk to show what they feel or what they want and feel what other person needs.

In my opinion all people are natural semiotics.
And its not just "language" thing I mentioned above, also we had a lecture recently about drawing quick compositions very quickly so that our mind has no time to think what we draw, in the end of each drawing it looked like a mess, but in same time what I found weird is that all of us in a class saw something in this mess we all were creating, looking for recognizible shapes etc.

I think this information is pretty much useless for regular people, but for me as an animator it might be very useful and powerful tool in my hands now!

Real or not?

This week seminar was about "Realism".

We spoke about different aspects of it, if people accept it and not.
Realism is an interpretation / transformation of what we see.

It is very hard to do something very realistic for me as a 3D animator. One of the main things I have to consider is photo realism which is next to impossible to achieve at the moment, although I'm not saying its not possible as I saw examples of it personally. Like recreation of photography in 3D.  But some think that even photography is not real, which is debatable, as it captures our every day life, moments of our life. For about past hundred years people doing photography as it is one of the most realistic things we can do.
By looking at the photo we see colours, shape and depth that convince us of it's realism, but at the same time it lack's movement that can push it forward.

But even paintings can be very realistic, we were shown one painting in the seminar that looked just like a photo, that gave an impression to our eye's that it is real when it is clearly not.



Some people can't or don't want to see the line between the real world and the imaginary world, in example World of Warcraft. It has more than 12 million of players who play it on a day to day basis, as it has became part of their life. People have friends in that game, they socialize with, co-operate, share laugh moments, betrayals and so on... Games like that change the reality for these people although it was created by others. However looking at that game it has no photo realism but it has its mood and theme that gives an impression of realism and it works.

As an animator I personally think that it is not necessary to create something that will make our eyes think it's real, there is other ways for it such as animation and expressions characters should have.