After graduating from Shepherd with a BS in Communication in May, I began my transition into a new life as a MA student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at West Virginia University. Last Thursday was my first day of orientation, so today marks one week in grad school.
If you're going to go to graduate school, know that nothing can prepare you for the experience. You will be incredibly stressed the entire time, and there is no longer such a thing as sleep. For this week, I had to read 19 scholarly research papers, with an average length of 15-20 pages, and write a research proposal. By next Tuesday, I'll need to read three more 20 page articles. The only other people I ever see are the other 12 people in the MA program, and we are practically required to be friends, as we all share an office. For comparison's sake, this would be like 6 people sharing Jason's office at Shepherd. We have 5 classes a semester, with each one requiring a ten page APA formatted paper, with one class also having three exams on top of such a paper. While doing this, my GTA duties include being the immediate supervisor of seven undergraduate teaching assistants (who are basically paper-graders that do what I say for 3 credits), running the gradebook for two sections of Introduction To Mass Media, totaling 350 students, and being present in my office six hours a week. I also have the great opportunity to give a guest lecture for one section of Introduction To Mass Media, which I will likely take up.
I'm not writing this to complain about how busy I am. On the contrary, I have never felt more fulfilled in my life. This is an incredibly challenging program, but it is a challenge that I can not wait to complete. I write this because some of you readers may be thinking about graduate school.
If you hate classes like Kevin's Media Studies, or Jason's Gender In Film classes, because of all the complex ideas and long writing assignments, grad school is probably not for you. If you love these courses, love writing APA papers, and want to learn how to do empirical, quantitative research (the work done in most classes at Shepherd, Kushin excluded, would be described as critical/rhetorical research), then WVU is a great program. In fact, there has been actual research done that suggests that WVU is the best Communication Studies university in the nation when analyzed by how much published research comes out of the school. Also, if you like producing media, graduate school doesn't really involve that, and you will not have time to do it on your own.
Kevin Williams once told me that when he got to his masters degree program, he realized he really knew nothing about what he had thought he knew everything about in Undergraduate. This is a statement that I would totally agree with. In fact, I probably know less today than I did on Monday, and if this blog is incoherent, being in one classroom from 9 am to 5 pm everyday for "hell week" is probably the reason. Next week will slow down considerably, but I will still be very busy.
So, to recap:
Go to grad school, you'll love the challenge and all the things you'll be learning!
Don't go to grad school, because Dr. Rold told me today that I'll stop being tired around Christmas.
Doing this much work is making me lose my mind.
I've learned more in this past week than I did in entire semesters of undergrad.
And, if you're far enough away from grad school time (you should start applying in November of your senior year of undergrad), take some of Kushin's classes, because that stuff that I completely missed out on at Shepherd would have been really helpful as background material.
Finally, go find a Comm Journal Article by Alan Goodboy, Scott Myers, or Melanie Booth-Butterfield and read it, regardless of whether you have interest in graduate school.
Seriously, right now. Get on Ebscohost and read "Funny Students Cope Better" by Melanie and Steven Booth-Butterfield and Melissa Wanzer. Go read "Instructional Dissent In the College Classroom" by Alan Goodboy. Go read "Perceived Aggressive Instructor Communication and Student State
Motivation, Learning, and Satisfaction" by Scott Myers. This department has some amazing researchers on staff.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Thursday, April 23, 2015
The Most Important Aspect Of Animation Is...
Motion!
Okay, that's a cop out. Saying the most important part of animation is motion is like saying that the most important part of a TV is the screen. Animation IS motion, so motion is the most important part for a good reason - once motion ceases, it is no longer animation. Motion could also be thought of as the activation of time in a visual medium.
But motion comes in 4 flavors.
1. Actor/Object - Balls bouncing, Mickey running, Gumby doing a big stretch, things that activate time in the 3rd person (effecting the characters) visual sense.
2. Camera - Sweeps and pans, things that activate time in a first person (affecting the viewer) visual sense.
3. Sound - BANG!, "Hello, I'm Artemis!", or even CRASH!, things that activate time in a third person aural sense.
4. Incidental Music - Probably the William Tell Overture, things that activate time in a first person aural sense.
I would argue that, unless at least two of these types of motion is happening, you do not have an interesting animation, while unless at least one is happening, you cease to have animation at all, and revert to still visual art, as in photography or painting.
So, being that motion is the essence of animation, and the only thing that, when removed, also removes the notion of animation, it's pretty hard to argue against it's importance.
Okay, that's a cop out. Saying the most important part of animation is motion is like saying that the most important part of a TV is the screen. Animation IS motion, so motion is the most important part for a good reason - once motion ceases, it is no longer animation. Motion could also be thought of as the activation of time in a visual medium.
But motion comes in 4 flavors.
1. Actor/Object - Balls bouncing, Mickey running, Gumby doing a big stretch, things that activate time in the 3rd person (effecting the characters) visual sense.
2. Camera - Sweeps and pans, things that activate time in a first person (affecting the viewer) visual sense.
3. Sound - BANG!, "Hello, I'm Artemis!", or even CRASH!, things that activate time in a third person aural sense.
4. Incidental Music - Probably the William Tell Overture, things that activate time in a first person aural sense.
I would argue that, unless at least two of these types of motion is happening, you do not have an interesting animation, while unless at least one is happening, you cease to have animation at all, and revert to still visual art, as in photography or painting.
So, being that motion is the essence of animation, and the only thing that, when removed, also removes the notion of animation, it's pretty hard to argue against it's importance.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
How Pixar proved Detheux wrong in five minutes of Up.
Detheux accused Disney of being bland, predictable, and tasteless. Detheux views films like The Lion King as what Kurt Cobain might call "Radio Friendly Unit Shifters". When the essay was written, of course, it was absolutely correct.
But then something incredible happened. Pixar made a five minute short film without a single line of dialogue or sound effect, and it told an incredible story with nothing but moving images and a little music. Then they delivered it to the world wrapped in a 2 hour adventure film about a rare bird. I'm talking, of course, about the "Married Life" sequence of Up.
Subtlety? This piece is loaded with subtlety. Detheux accused Disney of "whispering the plot into our ears", and at no point does this do that. Of course, this is actually following a set of rules in itself, established by Pixar when they first started out:
No songs
No “I want” moments
No happy village
No love story
No villain
But then something incredible happened. Pixar made a five minute short film without a single line of dialogue or sound effect, and it told an incredible story with nothing but moving images and a little music. Then they delivered it to the world wrapped in a 2 hour adventure film about a rare bird. I'm talking, of course, about the "Married Life" sequence of Up.
No songs
No “I want” moments
No happy village
No love story
No villain
Up breaks two of those rules in the course of it's run, as it does tell a love story in those 5 minutes, and it does have a villain in it's final scenes, but the essential idea behind Pixar's rules is to stop telling fairy tales, folklore, and fables. Usually where Pixar falter's is the "no villains" rule, though most of the villains act only in ways that are justified by the story. Randall in Monster's Inc is more concerned with the energy crisis than with humans, Sid in Toy Story is more concerned with how cool explosions look (very) than with the possibility that toys are sentient. All Pixar villains act in ways that are justifiable. They are not pure evil. This gives their stories complexity and depth, which is, I think, something that Detheux is accusing Disney of lacking.
Incidentally, Brave is based on folklore, but still manages to follow all the rules, perhaps in this case it was a matter of choosing a more diverse source material.
The Plato's Cave of Animation
I think, when we look at what Detheux is saying in "Prozac or Kyosaku", that is, that we should question the established modes of aesthetics, we must consider the question first outside of animation, as it applies to the general ideas of the human mind. If we are to question the authority of aesthetic, we must understand that aesthetic is here to serve our minds.
All western, and most modern eastern music, serves the same aesthetic rule, Pythagorean tuning. I'm not an expert in music theory, but the basic idea is that before Pythagoras, it was hard to write down music. This isn't because notation didn't exist, it is because the idea of a set pitch representing a note was completely unheard of. Things were just done to what sounded good. Pythagoras came up with the idea that notes should be evenly spaced frequencies of sound waves. The problem was that this wasn't the way it always had been, so music was slightly off from the natural place of the notes, as our ears hear them, but over time, our ears got used to Pythagorean tuning, and now all music rests on this principle.
In Plato's Cave, we get a pretty good idea of why new ways of seeing are so hard to give onto others. If you're not familiar with Plato's Cave, here's a pretty good animated version:
So, to relate that to animation as a mode of communication, let's consider the elements of Plato's Cave as they relate to our perception of Disney. We are all blindingly used to two forms of animation, Disney and Warner Brothers's exaggeration, and the broader field of representation, which includes Claymation,Special Effects CGI, and, to an extent, animatronics. Representation works because it's real to us. Gumby lacks most of the big principles of animation that mandate movement, but we still believe Gumby because it is representative of something. Disney exaggerates because it's two dimensionality is not real to us, and it gains credibility through exaggeration. These styles are all we ever know in animation, and the idea of anything else is impossible in our brains. But if we did find something different, it would be impossible to describe it to others. To completely divorce ourselves from Mickey and Gumby, we would have to first throw out all the rules. Then we could try to find new ways of perceiving movement. Perhaps we could play upon our persistence of vision? What would happen if some happy modernist made an animated film at 5 frames per second? Wouldn't the strobe-like animation be enough to be different? Except that won't work, because there isn't an audience for strobe lights with pictures. In order to play on our perception of motion, perhaps we should look at making animation at 60 frames per second? Here is an example of the effect of frame rate on animation, and even from a simple animation, we see a major difference, what if subversion is as easy as making our animations more fluid?
This isn't quite what Detheux was going for though. Simple changes like this are post-modern, and I think what is desired is a more modernist rejection of all things Disney. As with the modernist art movement, rejecting one thing (western art, Disney) just gives us more of something else that already exists (African art, Gumby).
All western, and most modern eastern music, serves the same aesthetic rule, Pythagorean tuning. I'm not an expert in music theory, but the basic idea is that before Pythagoras, it was hard to write down music. This isn't because notation didn't exist, it is because the idea of a set pitch representing a note was completely unheard of. Things were just done to what sounded good. Pythagoras came up with the idea that notes should be evenly spaced frequencies of sound waves. The problem was that this wasn't the way it always had been, so music was slightly off from the natural place of the notes, as our ears hear them, but over time, our ears got used to Pythagorean tuning, and now all music rests on this principle.
In Plato's Cave, we get a pretty good idea of why new ways of seeing are so hard to give onto others. If you're not familiar with Plato's Cave, here's a pretty good animated version:
So, to relate that to animation as a mode of communication, let's consider the elements of Plato's Cave as they relate to our perception of Disney. We are all blindingly used to two forms of animation, Disney and Warner Brothers's exaggeration, and the broader field of representation, which includes Claymation,Special Effects CGI, and, to an extent, animatronics. Representation works because it's real to us. Gumby lacks most of the big principles of animation that mandate movement, but we still believe Gumby because it is representative of something. Disney exaggerates because it's two dimensionality is not real to us, and it gains credibility through exaggeration. These styles are all we ever know in animation, and the idea of anything else is impossible in our brains. But if we did find something different, it would be impossible to describe it to others. To completely divorce ourselves from Mickey and Gumby, we would have to first throw out all the rules. Then we could try to find new ways of perceiving movement. Perhaps we could play upon our persistence of vision? What would happen if some happy modernist made an animated film at 5 frames per second? Wouldn't the strobe-like animation be enough to be different? Except that won't work, because there isn't an audience for strobe lights with pictures. In order to play on our perception of motion, perhaps we should look at making animation at 60 frames per second? Here is an example of the effect of frame rate on animation, and even from a simple animation, we see a major difference, what if subversion is as easy as making our animations more fluid?
This isn't quite what Detheux was going for though. Simple changes like this are post-modern, and I think what is desired is a more modernist rejection of all things Disney. As with the modernist art movement, rejecting one thing (western art, Disney) just gives us more of something else that already exists (African art, Gumby).
Bad Cartoons
In chapter 14 of Illusion Of Life, it is said that "A good story cannot be ruined by poor animation, but neither can a poor story be saved by the very best animation". I wanted to find examples of each and see how much this statement holds up.
For a good story with poor animation, let us consider the Soviet version of Winnie the Pooh.
I must be clear, I am not saying that "Winnie Pooh" is an outright bad animation. The way the characters move is delightful, the issue of the animation is that, rather than going for the look of an airbrushed story book, like Disney's version, they went with the look of a child's drawings. Because of this, the camera movements seem like a cheap way to fill space, rather than an interesting shift in image. By not trying to emulate the multi-plane camera, they sold their abilities short, but did not harm the story. The story is still just as interesting as Disney's Pooh, so long as we hold our attention during some of the less interesting animation spots.
For a poor story with good animation, let us consider... It actually pains me to do this, because it's still one of my favorite films, but Disney's Dinosaur.
So, the story of Disney's Dinosaur is that they took the same basic dinosaur migration story of the smash hit Land Before Time, and ruined it. In Land Before Time, we want the dinosaurs to survive so that they can see their families again. In Dinosaur, we want them to survive... so they can die later? These are dinosaurs. We know they all die, and if the meteors have started coming and extinction is already started, then watching them struggle for 2 hours to live another month is less a plot of a family movie and more of a Dinosaur hospice. There's no winners in this movie, even if the dinosaurs survive, except maybe the monkeys, who get to evolve into humans and warn their descendants that even though it's one of the most visually stunning films ever, it's really not worth watching more than once for the plot.
For a good story with poor animation, let us consider the Soviet version of Winnie the Pooh.
For a poor story with good animation, let us consider... It actually pains me to do this, because it's still one of my favorite films, but Disney's Dinosaur.
The Cutest Common Denominator
Big Hero 6 was, in the 90s, a comic book about some former X-Men members teaming with some new heroes to fight crime in Japan. The plots were as complicated as anything else that came out of that era of comic books, and the bigger tie-ins to the Marvel universe are not exactly super family friendly. Silver Samurai, one of the original team members from the comic, was, at one point, a Daredevil villain. Daredevil being one of Marvel's most violent comics, this would not be a good association for a children's movie.
So, when the time came for Disney and Marvel to make the film version of Big Hero 6, what did they do? They cut all reference to the X-Men, partially for legal reasons with Fox's X-Men series, but still to the benefit of the lowest common denominator. Then they changed the characters of Hiro and Baymax.
In the comic, Hiro built Baymax himself, then, somehow, Baymax's internal memory absorbed the brain of Hiro's dead father. Baymax was built to be a shapeshifter, allowing him to transform, Gundam style, into a few forms, from humanoid male to dragon monster.
In the film? Well, the comic was a little thick for most people, so they made it simpler. Baymax was the invention of Hiro's genius brother, and didn't have any hard-to-understand shapeshifting abilities, but rather had a suit of armor.
But the connection to Hiro's brother gives the film a lot more heart than the comic. Hiro has to deal with his brother's death, and deal with Baymax as an extension of his brother. Having Baymax absorb his father's brain allows Hiro to see death undone. Growing to deal with his brother's memory is a much more heart-warming experience for the audience, to the point where the dumbed down mass appeal film is unarguably a better story than the comic.
So, when the time came for Disney and Marvel to make the film version of Big Hero 6, what did they do? They cut all reference to the X-Men, partially for legal reasons with Fox's X-Men series, but still to the benefit of the lowest common denominator. Then they changed the characters of Hiro and Baymax.
In the comic, Hiro built Baymax himself, then, somehow, Baymax's internal memory absorbed the brain of Hiro's dead father. Baymax was built to be a shapeshifter, allowing him to transform, Gundam style, into a few forms, from humanoid male to dragon monster.
In the film? Well, the comic was a little thick for most people, so they made it simpler. Baymax was the invention of Hiro's genius brother, and didn't have any hard-to-understand shapeshifting abilities, but rather had a suit of armor.
But the connection to Hiro's brother gives the film a lot more heart than the comic. Hiro has to deal with his brother's death, and deal with Baymax as an extension of his brother. Having Baymax absorb his father's brain allows Hiro to see death undone. Growing to deal with his brother's memory is a much more heart-warming experience for the audience, to the point where the dumbed down mass appeal film is unarguably a better story than the comic.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Cultural Events: becoming: Hillary Erin Russell at Gallery 924.
On April 3rd, in Indianapolis, Indiana, I attended the opening of the very first solo art show of Hillary Erin Russell, "becoming". I've been following Hillary's art for about eight years, since she was first starting out as a Photography major at Shepherd. Her art (or HER's art, if you like funny acronyms) covers many of the walls of my house. Hillary, incidentally, is my sister.
Her art deals with pornography, and how it's images can relate to her own feelings, as well as her own personal stories. One of the most striking pieces is a folding table we had bought for her on clearance at Target. In it, she has carved the names of every girl she had a crush on, growing up in the closet in West Virginia. Her art touches a lot on her experience as a lesbian, and it happened that her show was scheduled for the weekend after that law was passed in Indiana allowing for discrimination against gay people by local businesses.
I think that her art was the perfect amount of provocative at the perfect time to really effect culture. She was featured in several local publications, including Indianapolis's biggest gay newsletter. Her opening was packed, and it seemed to garner a really positive response. I think that going out and exhibiting art that deals with lesbian issues, in one piece she used photos from OKCupid and gold-star stickers to obscure faces of the women she met, is very important to create understanding of the struggle of lesbians.
Her art deals with pornography, and how it's images can relate to her own feelings, as well as her own personal stories. One of the most striking pieces is a folding table we had bought for her on clearance at Target. In it, she has carved the names of every girl she had a crush on, growing up in the closet in West Virginia. Her art touches a lot on her experience as a lesbian, and it happened that her show was scheduled for the weekend after that law was passed in Indiana allowing for discrimination against gay people by local businesses.
I think that her art was the perfect amount of provocative at the perfect time to really effect culture. She was featured in several local publications, including Indianapolis's biggest gay newsletter. Her opening was packed, and it seemed to garner a really positive response. I think that going out and exhibiting art that deals with lesbian issues, in one piece she used photos from OKCupid and gold-star stickers to obscure faces of the women she met, is very important to create understanding of the struggle of lesbians.
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