One Week in Graduate School: Crazy Making

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Cultural Events - Natural History Museum

On March 14th, I also visited the Natural History Museum on the DC mall. The main reason for attending this museum was the current exhibit on Indian-American culture, showcasing the struggle of Indian immigrants to be successful in America. Featured was a large wall of famous Indian Americans, including M Night Shyamalan, and Mindy Kaling. At the end of the wall was a sign that said "email us if we missed any Indian American trailblazers". I noted to my girlfriend that Aziz Ansari was conspicuously absent from the wall. She pointed out that it was a wall of Indian American firsts, and we couldn't think of anything he was the first to do.

The exhibit also showed many cultural artifacts and religious symbols, as well as contemporary Indian American art. I thought it was very important to see art so closely linked to another culture, but still coming out of an American locale. The culture of Bollywood and of Indian Americans was on show, and as weird as it is that they placed it in the Natural History Museum, particularly with the American History Museum half empty, it was a great show of culture.

Cultural Events: American History Museum

On March 14th, I was in Washington, DC on the mall. I went, with high hopes and childhood memories, to the American History Museum. My hopes were satisfied, my memories were less so. Many of the long-standing exhibits, including the ones that covered the history of television and film, from Seinfeld's puffy shirt and Dorothy's red slippers to Oscar the Grouch's trash can, were under construction, and in their stead was a much smaller version of the same exhibit, lumping cultural artifacts from the colonial era just 20 feet away from Tony Hawk's skateboard and an old Apple II.

Regardless, the cultural importance of the items on display was great. There was a large exhibit about wartime America, which helped to connect me to the time of my grandmother's youth, as well as an exhibit on food culture in america, covering everything from the first drive-thrus to Julia Child's kitchen, remade in the museum's space. There was a large exhiibit on Edison's light bulbs, and on the invention of the Internal Combustion Engine, prompting me to give my girlfriend a long-winded explanation of why we need internal combustion engines powered by hydrogen, and how global  warming wouldn't have happened if the Hindenburg never crashed...

Being in this muesum made me feel like the "American" identifier meant a little more than I'd previously felt. It was also pretty funny to see the exhibit on First Ladies, clearly written before the 2008 election, juxtapose the question "Who will be the First Lady to the first female president?" next to a photo of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Cultural Events - Quilt Exhibit at Scarborough Library

On March 11th, I went into the Scarborough Library to see what the "Quilt Exhibit" that had been run on our calendars all semester was. I was surprised to find, after looking at all the quilts, that they were all made by the same woman, Phyllis Nichols Rowe, when I picked up the program. I was also confused by the date listed on the program indicating that the event should have ended months ago, but that's alright.

I never understood quilts. I've been perpetually confused by what the meeting point between art and blanket is, and why anyone ever thought to make such a thing anyway, but then I remembered that I own 4 different zebra-print blankets, and figured that's probably weird to someone who likes their blankets in basic beige. Quilts, I suppose, must be a fashion, but one that comes from a cultural background that I don't really understand. I respect, however, the artistry and effort that goes into a quilt. I don't think I would be able to machine-sew a quilt, much less hand-sew and embroider a story into each panel.

So I suppose the great value in this exhibit is helping to explain the artistry and  culture behind quilting to people like me who are completely ignorant of the form.

Cultural Events - March 7th - Laurel Art Guild 46th Annual Juried Open Exhibition

On March 7th, I attended the opening of the Laurel Art Guild 46th Annual Juried Open Exhibition at the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland. The program celebrated local artists in the Prince George’s County and Montgomery County area. Many great works of art were on display, primarily photographs, paintings, and drawings, alongside a small handful of digital art and mixed media. The event was attended by most of the artists featured. It was interesting to see so many people able to walk up to the artists and ask questions.

I felt this event was culturally important because local art events show the world that the gallery is not a place of elitism. Anyone can be a great artist and have a chance, and open events such as this one show that off in a beautiful way. There was no notion of superiority at this event. The curator walked the room the same way that the attending audience did, the same way that the artists did. A small handful of children were playing in the hall, and rather than scream or get upset, as one might expect from an art gallery curator, he was entirely gracious and forgiving, understanding that contemporary art is not always a child’s greatest interest.

I think that the world of art as a place of acceptance, rather than elitism, is what makes an event like this truly special and important. I hope that future art events I visit have a similar attitude.

Simba's Fear

For this blog, I'll be discussing this scene from The Lion King.

The scene fades from Mufasa's death to Simba roaming through a cloud of dust, looking for his father. His every expression indicates fear. When he hears the lone wildebeast, he is suddenly hopeful for just a moment, then he sees his father's body and is sunk back into fear and sadness. He tries to wake his dead father, then cries out for help with tears in his eyes.

The magical thing about this scene is the degree to which it follows the old filmmaking adage of "show, don't tell". Simba says nothing to indicate that his father is dead, or that he's sad, or afraid. Instead, those emotions are animated into him. The work on Simba's eyes in this sequence is actually quite fascinating. He says an extrordinary amount with the way he moves his eyes and eyelids.

Simba is a scared little kid, and we can instantly relate to this without any statement from him on the matter. He shows his emotions, he doesn't have to tell anyone he's sad, anyone can see it. In fact, he doesn't tell anyone his feelings, besides Scar, and this ends up setting up the film's second act of repressed emotion.

Realistic Unicorns

What is a realistic unicorn? On the surface, it seems like a contradiction, after all, unicorns are not real, and can therefore never be realistic, but in the world of animation unicorns can still be depicted in a realistic way. How?

Well, let's go back a little and look at how animation allows things to NOT be realistic. The most obvious way is through anthropomorphic depictions of animals. Take, for example, Netflix's Bojack Horseman.

Bojack is a horse, except, he's not a horse. In-universe, he behaves as a human does, though with some minor horse-like actions. In the Bojack universe, as well as in Mickey Mouse or Winnie The Pooh, animalhood is more of a ethnic identification than one of species. Mickey Mouse speaks in a high-pitched voice, Pooh Bear loves honey, Bojack's rival, a dog named Mr. Peanutbutter, hoards tennis balls and chases the mailman, but otherwise lives the life of any Hollywood has-been.

These characters, despite being animals, are realistic as humans. Perhaps, Disney's notion of the fantastic applies here, and the characters are made as fantastic humans with animal heads. Mr. Peanutbutter is certainly a caricature of a golden retriever, but his human-like tendencies are clearly based in the reality of a human.

So what if we want to animate a unicorn? We can't rotoscope a real unicorn, because there are no real unicorns. So what do we do? We rotoscope horses.  Suddenly, we have a creature that runs the way our mind wants unicorns to run. Then the audience gets to praise our film for it's realistic unicorns.

Principles Of Animation

This material is a bit dry, but ultimately useful. For my example, I will be using "It's A Wonderful Day For Pie", A Family Guy song animated in the style of Disney.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlk36vgygh4 

12 Principles Of Animation

1. Squash and Stretch – animated objects should change shape as they move, but retain volume, in order to look interesting to the viewer.

In the Family Guy clip, the way Peter's body stretches as he floats down from his flight to the pie as the song begins.

2. Anticipation – The pull back before motion in a living character.

Before the song begins, Lois's arms move toward her chest with the pie before they move toward the camera.

3. Staging – Where things go in a shot for best effect.

The way, throughout the song, that nothing enters the frame until it's ready to be the active element.

4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose To Pose – animating from start to finish vs. animating with key frames. 

This was clearly done with Pose to Pose, as certain shots are clearly composed as stills, then animated, as well as the fact that Family Guy is always animated Pose to Pose, as they draw the keyframes, then send those to South Korea for inbetweens.

5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action – the whole body doesn’t stop or start at once.

The way the Bird/Quagmire moves his head before the rest of his body when beginning to fly is an example of this.

6. Slow In and Slow Out – the timing of in-betweens for satisfactory motion.

Motion in this whole sequence has slower in-betweens than most Family Guy episodes.

7. Arcs – living things move fluidly, not like the robot dance.

In the whole sequence, everyone is constantly moving in wide circles.

8. Secondary Action – Minor business of a character, not to upstage primary action.

The way characters move their hands while speaking in this video.

9. Timing – the number of drawings taken to show an action.

When Lois spins over to Teakettle/Joe, her spin is only really animated for 4 or so frames, as it happens very fast.

10. Exaggeration – Show the most emotionally effective version of an emotion or action.

The way they use facial expressions on all the characters to show contempt when Mort the Jew comes to the door is very exaggerated in a very Disney way.

11. Solid Drawing – One must be able to make good drawings to begin with in order to animate.

The whole of the scene is essentially a sequence of moving paintings of very high quality. Very solid.

12. Appeal – Creating images which a viewer wants to see, that stimulate the viewer’s imagination.

The image never stays the same for more than a few seconds, keeping the audience interested.

Fred’s 14 Points Of Animation

1. Appeal in Drawing – Essentially the same as Principle 12.

2. Staging – Essentially the same as Principle 3.

3. Most interesting way? - Essentially the same as Principle 12.

4. Most entertaining way? - Essentially the same as Principle 12.

5. Are you in character? - Does this character seem like he would do what you are making him do?

6. Are you advancing the character? – Does this contribute to the characterization?

7. Is this the simplest statement of the main idea of the scene? – Could this be done in a more efficient way for the audience to understand?

8. Is the story point clear? – Does this tell the story effectively?

9. Are the secondary actions working with the main action? - Essentially the same as Principle 8.

10. Is the presentation best for the medium? – Does this serve animation well?

11. Does it have 2 dimensional clarity? – Can the subject of the shot be understood alone?

12. Does it have 3 dimensional solidity? – Does the subject fit with the backdrop?

13. Does it have 4 dimensional drawing? – Does the subject move properly in time?

14. Are you trying to do something that shouldn’t be attempted? – Does the shot make sense?

Must Animation Represent?

In my previous post, I discussed the idea of animation as being the medium freest from obligation to representation. The question this raises, of course, is if this is a good trait for animators to take full advantage of when creating their films. Does a realistic depiction of realistic events have a value over the caricature, or does exaggeration and simplification lend the work a greater deal of relatability and unique charm?

The answer is up to the audience, and to a lesser extent, the animator. Making realistic animation can be good in certain audience targets. If you’re animating something like Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars, realism would be preferred, so long as the animation does not fall into the uncanny valley (Lucas opted to go the opposite way on both of these, creating a caricature that still manages to hit the uncanny valley). If you’re animating something a little more abstract, or perhaps a character you want the audience to relate to easily, a blank slate caricature, like the simplicity of Andy in Toy Story, who looks like every ten year old boy ever, is a good fit.



If we seek to examine how animation relates to reality on the spectrum of realism vs caricature, perhaps it’s a good idea to begin with animation that’s been inserted into largely live-action films. Here’s the judge from The Wall’s trial sequence:


This is an extraordinary amount of caricature in a single image. The judge is so much in caricature that his personality as an “asshole” takes over the entire body of his character. This is extremely refreshing in a film that mostly consists of images of Bob Geldof crying, and ultimately, the animation in the trial sequence is what makes the movie watchable a second time. A realistic depiction of the characters at the trial would have been perhaps the single worst decision to make on this film, as the sequence stands above all others in the film for its brilliant use of caricature as a method of attention-getting.



Here’s the classic puppet vs animation comparison shot of Yoda from Star Wars Episode I. 

On the left is the classic Frank Oz puppet from The Empire Strikes Back, as he appeared in the theatrical cut of The Phantom Menace. On the right is the 3d animated Yoda used in the DVD release. In this particular situation, we notice immediately that the puppet looks like a puppet, while the animated Yoda looks a bit more alive, particularly in motion. In this situation, realism was looked for in animation, because the puppet version looked laughably dead in the well-lit shots of The Phantom Menace, which was not a problem in the dark swamps of “Empire”. By animating to realism, they were able to make Yoda’s motions during his surprisingly coherent speeches look more real than they ever did through puppetry. In this film, suspension of disbelief was a rare resource, and every animated Yoda they could use would improve the film’s charm.

Animation as a Communicative Tool

The word “creativity” seems to imply total creation of all elements of the product. Is this truly the case? Musicians seldom invent new notes. Authors seldom create new languages. Photographers are seldom able to completely shape the world that they wish to capture. They must all go through a communicative middle man to be able to effect the audience. If a musician did create a new note, perhaps by finding an out of tune frequency and playing it as if it were correct, it would have to be amongst known notes and rhythms to be effective as music. If an author creates a new language, such as Klingon or Tolkien’s Elvish, they must include translations in order to effectively communicate. A photographer would have a hard time creating a landscape that was fully created and not merely representational, unless they began to make scale models, unfortunately camera focus and water flow do not scale well, so this could cause problems with communication of the mind’s ideal landscape.

Drawing (which I will use to include any method of laborious fabrication of a single image, including painting, photo manipulation, and sculpture), though it uses tools, is essentially raw visual data that can create things that are completely non-representational. This, of course, has its downsides, as drawing creates a single moment without dimension or sound, it represents only that single moment of pure creation, satisfying our sense of sight. Animation allows for drawings to also tap into our sense of time in a nonrepresentational sense, and our sense of hearing in a pseudo-representational sense (that is to say, the sounds are made from existing sounds, but the signifier does not always match the signified, such as a human voice sound representing a cat’s meow). It’s fair to say that animation is the only medium that allows for this incredible range of nonrepresentational development. Film, without animation’s assistance, could not, for example, create any large, non-real monster, without either animation or puppetry, and unfortunately, Dragon-sized puppets come at a hefty cost.

Wrapping up 4 Inches + Concerns on Distribution

As of the time that I write this post, production has finished on 4 Inches of Danny Jefferson. The first film shoot took place on February 7th, 2015, and the final shots were taken on March 7th, 2015. In the span of the month, there were four shooting days, February 7, 24, 25, and March 7. Over 30 gigabytes of h.264 footage was shot with a Canon t3i camera on it's stock lens with custom Magic Lantern firmware to allow for live audio monitoring, paired with a shotgun mic on it's own tripod. Most of the footage has been processed and color corrected in Premiere Pro CS6, with only scene 8 remaining for editing before the film gets a final audio cleanup and is ready for a final render.

Remaining in the main part of the project is the production of a press-kit, as well as the creation of a deliverable film file and DVD. I am currently considering a few options for distribution. The three contenders are:

Free Streaming - The obvious options here are YouTube and Vimeo. While this has it's perks, there is so much content of quality on these sites that it's very easy for things to get lost in the shuffle if they aren't aggressively promoted. This is good for the audience, but not great for the creator.

Free/Premium Download - I'm very curious as to the specifics of a program like BitTorrent Bundle - where audiences can get into a project with a certain amount of material for free, then pay a small fee for a larger amount of material + extras. This is both audience and creator friendly, and the competition is sparse. Premium download for indies is also available from GOG.com, though it seems they may be more selective than BitTorrent Bundle.

VOD/DVD - Thanks to CreateSpace's Amazon ownership, getting put on DVD or Amazon Instant Video is so incredibly simple that it might as well be the same as YouTube. This comes with the added bonus of IMDB crediting, but ultimately that is little more than a piece of resume flair that doesn't impress many people in the film industry. This isn't good for the creator of the media because it's just as hard to find your media as YouTube, and the audience isn't going to be willing to pay for unproven film.

Ultimately, I'm concerned about self-promotion, and I feel that a unique method of distribution, such as BitTorrent, is more likely to draw attention than yet another indie short on YouTube.

Waiting For My Life: A Graphic Novel Pitch

I've spent the last 3 months waiting for trains. Every weekend or so, I'd wait for the train that brought Charlotte back from DC for the weekend, then, when she had to go, We'd get to the train station ten minutes early, and almost every weekend, the train was an hour late. One day, I turned to her and said "I should write a book about all the things I do when I'm waiting for my life to happen". She laughed.

Of course, it goes back further than that. At least as far as the day I met Charlotte just two years ago. the Spring semester of 2013, as I recall. I'd asked her, a stranger, for romantic advice, but something about the advice she gave me sorta... struck me weird. It was like she was telling me how to woo herself. Curiousity got the best of me, and some months later, I asked what she thought of me. She admitted to our mutual attraction. I spent most of my summer talking to her, thinking that any day, we'd get together, we were just waiting... but Charlotte wasn't ready for a boyfriend. I ended up dating other women for a while, but I found I was sabotaging myself at every turn, first by being flighty, then, after a particularly terrible relationship (that I won't specify), by drinking enough alcohol to make myself fat and unappealing.

There was this girl I'd met online, named Skyler. She was 17, and she was in love with me. She told me all the time that she wanted to move out here and get married to me. She wasn't particularly smart, so my feelings for her were purely physical, an ironic condition in a long distance situation, but it was enough that, even when she was distant, which was always, her appearance of attraction to me kept me docile about my life. I'd just keep waiting for opportunities, and never do anything for myself, then, Saturday night, I'd watch an entire season of Family Guy for the hundredth time, and drink Vodka mixed with grape soda.

 I came back to school from the summer of 2014, and things didn't exactly go my way. I had been waiting for something to happen in my life, and what happened was two terrible days in a row. Monday morning I got on Facebook to discover that Skyler had found a boyfriend where she lives. Suddenly the reality of how miserable and alone I was choosing to be struck me. Was it depression? Not really. I honestly think that the terrible relationship I'd had the previous winter, full of lies and coercion, had just turned me off from the whole prospect of trying. I wasn't depressed, I was just happy for the wrong reasons. Jeanna told me it would all get better, and I looked her in the eyes and said "No. It won't. Sometimes life just sucks and there's no hope of things getting better." I hadn't made eye contact with anyone in months, and the moment felt incredibly heavy. But I had become complacent. The next day was a Tuesday, and that was the day that my ex-girlfriend's boyfriend threatened me in a parking lot, and it was the day that Charlotte heard that story and called to check up on me.

The next time I saw Charlotte, she indicated to me that she was ready to start dating, but that she didn't know who liked her or who was gay or any number of things she needed to know to get a boyfriend. Did I make a move? No. Not in person anyway. I texted her a few hours later to let her know I still was interested. We talked in person the next day, and things looked promising.

Thursday evening, I was driving home from Martinsburg blasting "Friday I'm In Love" by The Cure. By my estimation, we'd get together on Friday. It was a hopeful and ultimately foolish estimate, but it turned out to be right. To this day I'm unsure if the fact that I told her I loved that song factored in, but I never bothered to ask. It took us over a week together to finally kiss, but I waited. Surprisingly, after that, waiting went out the window, and about a week later, we admitted we were in love.

The next thing I had to wait for was to get into Graduate School, but I didn't have to wait long, getting into WVU just 3 days after my last letter of recommendation was received. I'd waited since July of 2013 to make my screenplay, Four Inches, into a movie, and Capstone provided me the moment I needed. So now, I'm waiting for my life's next chapter, as a graduate student with a girlfriend worthy of having a future with, and I am incredibly happy that my life has been worth the wait.

Maus and Ethics

The story of Maus is one that is important to be told, but ethically, any story of it's kind can be tricky.

The biggest ethical dilemmas of a memoir are issues of truthfulness. Essentially boiling down to the following:

Metaphor: Acceptable when obvious. The author didn't mean that Nazis were literally cats, and that Jews were literally mice, and any reader able to handle the material would reasonably understand the metaphor.

Embellishment: Inappropriate, generally. In something like Persepolis, embellishment comes with the unreliable nature of a child's memory. In Maus, we don't know what could be embellished, but it's my suspicion that the father's ex-girlfriend didn't actually get on the ground and beg him to marry her.

Self-Image of the protagonist - Part of embellishment, but perhaps a little more subtle, sometimes, authors change stories to remove elements of their lives where they made mistakes or acted unkind. This is clearly not the case in Maus, as evidenced by the father's disdain for his second wife. It is also not the case in Persepolis, where the author includes the bits about chasing a boy with nails.

Representations of others - The other side of the protagonist's self image is the way he describes other people, whether it is in a good or bad light, and whether that light is an accurate representation of the others. In most cases, we don't get to know what others think about their representations unless they happen to be alive to tell their own story. A good example of this from recent history is the case of Woody Allen, who had abuse allegations levied at him from one of his children, but another one of his children defended him, saying that Mia Farrow had brainwashed the memory of abuse into her child. It is impossible to know which story is true, but knowing there are different interpretations of the same events leads to a greater degree of skepticism in the reader.

Factual Accuracy - It's very important to be able to recognize that sometimes, people's memories don't match the history books. Therefore the question for a memoirist is whether information should be presented as remembered or should it be fact checked when it comes to verifiable things? In most cases, I'd say that the "author's truth" is more important than the "historical truth", so long as it does not stray too far from reality.

Melodrama = Tragedy + Time

The most profoundly important writing on the subject of playwriting is Aristotle’s Poetics, which outlines the elements of a tragedy in the Greek form, with a special interest on the “perfect” play, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. In mythology, this is equaled by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which outlines the essential elements of any mythological text, from Gilgamesh and the Bible to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

Melodrama is rife with “perfect” texts, but has not been analyzed to the structure of Campbell’s mythologies or Aristotle’s tragedies. The closest thing to a structural analysis of melodrama is a series of identifiable motifs present in films of the genre, and the universal archetypes, first theorized by Carl Jung, that are present in all genres. Hollywood Melodramas are, arguably, closer to Greek Tragedies than nearly any other form. The elements that are different between the two genres reflect the differences in attitudes between the eras in which they were conceived. Tragedy is a product of a hopeful time, when gods and kings were the driving force behind society. Melodrama is the product of a cynical time, a postindustrial world where Karl Marx is more influential than god. Thus, the old adage, comedy equals tragedy plus time, is more aptly applied to melodrama than comedy.

Tragedy, in Poetics, is described as the story of a character with a high social standing, with a tragic flaw, or hamartia, that experiences a change of fortune, which in turn provides catharsis, or emotional release, to the audience.

Melodrama is, essentially the same. Class conflict is a heightened portion of the story, with the protagonist being some sort of victim to it, though a high social standing is not necessary. Many melodramas concern the middle class, and the desire for upward mobility, or the lower class, and the desire for respect. The tragic flaw that melodramatic characters have is often related to this class conflict, i.e. vanity (in American Beauty), or disillusionment (in Ordinary People). The change of fortune in melodrama, however, is reversed. Lester Burnham goes from having to worry about keeping up his vain illusion to, in his words, “waking up”. The catharsis comes from the expression of extreme emotion in a character that has previously been stoic.

The essential part of melodrama that differentiates it from tragedy is modernity. Greek tragedy, to the modernist, would be absurd and hamfisted. Melodrama is the imposition of tragic story onto a modern world.

Belongingness in Melodrama

This week, I wanted to do some research into the idea of belonging in melodrama, as a sense of familial belonging is an important element in "Four Inches of Danny Jefferson". For a critical analysis, I will discuss my own viewings of "Goodfellas" and "Ali: Fear Eats The Soul". For a scholarly background, I will be looking at Nichola Rehling's essay “It's About Belonging”: Masculinity, Collectivity, and Community in British Hooligan Films".

In Goodfellas, Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, finds belonging in his life by joining the mafia, eventually forming a sort of family with Conway (De Niro) and DeVito (Pesci). But Goodfellas is not a melodrama, rather, it is closer to tragedy, due to the fact that, unlike Lester in American Beauty, Henry is unable to choose to preserve the sacred because of his tragic greed. Thus it is my opinion that the difference between tragedy and melodrama is what Aristotle called hamartia, meaning a tragic flaw, that prevents the hero from choosing the sacred over the secular, as per Garry Leonard's essay that I reviewed last week.

In "Ali", the theme of belonging comes from Ali's struggles with racism, and his difficulty finding a place where he belongs, only ever finding happiness when with his eventual wife, Emmi. However, even this is spoiled when they return home from vacation and she begins treating his culture as a novelty for her newly-accepting friends. He only finds belonging when he and Emmi reconcile later on, though by then it is too late, and the stress of being an outsider is killing him at the end.

Rehling's work looks at British hooligan films, the type of film that the greater public knows through Trainspotting. The films discussed use violent crime as a meeting point for masculinity, youth, and identity. Identity, here, is found in the homosocial relationships between hooligans. Ultimately, Rehling's work suggests that the violence of the hooligan films comes from a desire of homophobic young men to be masculine enough to maintain strong homosocial bonds with other men without coming off as gay to anyone. Violence is a bonding point that keeps these men together, while also keeping them secure from their own homophobia.

At the beginning of my film, Danny has no real place in the world, but by the end, his place is clearly with Jenny, as a father to their unborn child. This is both a moment of belongingness, because he has found a place where he can be happy for the first time in his life, and a moment of redemption, because he gets to counter his father's parenting methods with his own.

Hollywood Melodrama: American Beauty

"Tears of Joy: Hollywood Melodrama, Ecstasy, and Restoring Meta-Narratives of Transcendence in Modernity" by Garry Leonard explores the Hollywood melodrama first by defining it in psychological and philosophical terms through the works of Freud and Marx, among others. It then analyzes Hollywood melodramatic structure, by comparing themes used in American Beauty (1999) and Broken Blossoms (1919).

The psychological and philosophical portion of the paper is a bit dull, but ultimately boils down to melodrama as an expression of sentiment and overwhelming emotion that audiences are easily able to identify with.

The Hollywood Melodramas explored in the paper are structured as follows:

Disillusioned protagonist must choose between gratification and sacrifice, ultimately choosing sacrifice.

In American Beauty, this is seen primarily in the scene between Lester and Angela, where he begins to undress her, then, upon her declaration that she is a virgin, decides instead to act in a fatherly way towards her. He has sacrificed gratification for something that is, in the film's terms, beautiful, or in Leonard's terms, sacred.

Leonard explains that melodrama takes our secular modern world, and transforms it into something sacred. In American Beauty, Lester feels an overwhelming sense of ennui and disillusionment, until he meets Angela, and she opens up to him the sacredness of beauty. He has the chance to take the beauty for himself, but chooses not to do so, sacrificing his own desires to maintain the beauty.

This essential conflict is present in many films, even those that don't seem to be melodramas at first glance.

In Fight Club, the sacred is identity, and gratification comes from anonymity. Jack is searching for something to end his own sense of ennui and disillusionment, and finds two options: Tyler Durden and Marla Singer. Tyler Durden uses anarchy as a way of creating brotherhood, hitting on the secular desire to fit in with others. Marla Singer, however, expresses herself as an individual regardless of other's feelings. Marla's sense of self is such a point of contention for Jack that he becomes a hypocrite by chastising her for doing the same things as him with the support groups. When Jack fights Angel, he succumbs to gratification, saying, in a line that foils American Beauty, "I wanted to destroy something beautiful". When Jack kills Tyler, he embraces the sacredness of individuality, redeeming his actions of gratification, and sacrificing the power he had as a leader of Project Mayhem.

In my film, responsibility is sacred. Danny quits drinking in the climax of the story, sacrificing his secular desire to remain youthful and free spirited. He could very well have continued to drink, and gratified himself, but he doesn't, because he sees the beauty in a family life and the sacredness of adulthood. He proposes to Jenny not out of obligation, as he might have at the beginning of the story, but out of a desire to experience responsibility. In this sense, I am making good on my desire to create a melodrama.

Nerd Culture and American Culture

In ."The Revenge of the Nerds", Gary Hoppenstand argues that shows like The Big Bang Theory prove that nerd culture has become mainstream. The popularity of that program is credited as showing that nerdiness is no longer something of which one should be ashamed.

While I agree with Hoppenstand's result, I do not agree with his most explored example. The Big Bang Theory may be hugely popular, but it's success may be in spite of nerd culture's mainstream appeal, rather than because of it. It is true, as the author explains, that comic books and reading are interests that receive far less chastising from peers than ever before, but this is, perhaps, not because we are willing to watch nerds on TV, but because we are willing to consume the same media as them.

The top grossing film franchise of all time is Harry Potter, #2 is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Nerdy films make money, and they have been continuously doing so since X-Men came out in 2000. The money train on nerd films shows no signs of stopping, with releases announced into 2020.

Does The Big Bang Theory portray nerds the way they want to be portrayed? In a world where nerd culture is mainstream enough for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be as successful as it is, it seems counterfactual to portray nerds as socially inept, as the show does. While there are people in the world who fit the nerd archetype that are socially awkward, not all nerds are poorly adjusted, and, it has turned out that the ones that are poorly adjusted have tended to have issues beyond an obsession with the culture.

Do people watch Big Bang Theory to empathize with the nerds, or to laugh at them? The characters aren't role models socially, though their academic careers are stereotypically impressive, so one might look to the latter. Then what are we laughing at? The characters' awkward social graces hint at some sort of psychological disorder, such as autism or Asperger's. Is that really funny?

Regardless of whether he gave a good example, Hoppenstand's point about nerds being cool stands as true, though with more credit to Hugh Jackman than Jim Parsons.

Film Bodies: Gratuitous Emotion in Melodrama.

In "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess", Linda Williams describes her theory of body genres, which are those film genres designed to use excess to create intense emotional reactions in the viewer. The genres in particular that she pinpoints in her work are pornography, horror, and melodrama. In my current work, I am particularly concerned with how these elements impact melodrama, rather than horror or porn.

I feel the need to clarify that Linda Williams is a professor of film studies at University of California, Berkeley. I clarify this because there is another Linda Williams on the administration at Berkeley, and a Linda Ruth Williams doing film studies in the UK. There is a lot of room for confusion in this area if a reader of this blog wished to go about their own research on the topic.

Regardless, Williams writes a compelling argument for the value of melodrama, but examines melodrama in a way that is perhaps far too narrow. She states that melodrama is defined by "lapses in realism, excesses of spectacle, and displays of primal, even infantile emotions, and by narratives that seem circular and repetitive." This is an adequate measure of the sensationalism of melodrama, but she goes on to say that, for the purpose of her thesis, she will look only at those melodramas that concern feminist critics, what she calls "weepies", or what we may characterize as the elements of a Lifetime Original Movie, sad movies made for women stuck in traditional gender roles. She rejects a greater definition of melodrama because it could be argued that all three body genres, pornography, horror, and melodrama, are all really types of melodrama. This misses, then, a greater genre of melodrama not directed at women under patriarchy, the type of movie that uses overly intense sensational emotions without losing it's ability to appeal to a wide audience. The prototypical melodrama play, Under The Gas Light, would struggle to stay in the genre under the feminist critical definition.

A broader definition of melodrama brings in things like crime dramas and dark comedies, but doesn't break Williams's thesis that body genres are designed to excite us through excess. Good Will Hunting, for example, could be argued as a melodrama under a broad definition. The portrayal of weeping that qualifies the film as a "spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion", does occur in the female form via Minnie Driver's character, but she is anything but a woman in a traditional gender role, and the more memorable weeping comes from Robin Williams and Matt Damon.

Another element of body genres that Williams looks at is ecstasy, expressed in melodrama as "overppowering sadness" In my film, this will be seen not in tears, as Williams's weepies would show it, but in the alcoholism of Danny Jefferson, who drinks when others might cry. Williams argues that, in all the body genres, women are the "embodiment of pleasure, fear, and pain". In my film, the main character's foil, Beth, is the expression of his pain in the sense that the audience will ask why he is depressed, then her actions will in turn give explanation.

Fun Home and Identification

In the first 2 chapters of Fun Home, Bechdel illustrates perfectly the ideas of identifcation described in Understanding Comics.

In words and images, Bechdel describes her father obsessively, pouring over every detail of the man. Herself, however, she does not describe. She remains mostly a blank slate, almost cartoon like in her simplicity, with somewhat androgynous features.

In Understanding Comics, McCloud says that "through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without -- and through the cartoon, the world within."

Fun Home, Page 19

In the panel above, we see this principle in action. The father is detailed, with wrinkles and chest hair and zig-zag eyebrows. The child is prototypical- a round head with an androgynous hair cut and wide eyes. Anyone could be that child. So who do we identify with? The child, because the features of the child are far more simplified and therefore relatable. Imagine if the child had freckles, would we relate the same? Or if the book had color art, hair color, and skin color could be elements that change the way we are able to relate to the child. The father, with his visible body hair and wrinkles alienates us to a degree. We cannot project our own emotions onto a person who is so far from who we are or ever were, but we were all wide-eyed children at some point, and the child is sympathetic because of her simplicity. 

But this extends into the written word of Fun Home. Bechdel describes her father in vivid detail, both his fashion and his perfectionism, and something that borders on Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Psychologist Alan Rappoport says that narcissistic parents "may also demand certain behavior from their children because they see the children as extensions of themselves". While in Fun Home, Bechdel says "Dad considered us extensions of his own body, like precision robot arms.". These details about her father lend to us identifying more with her, for some because we cannot imagine a father like that, and for some because it hits our own home experience in a certain way, but we grow to empathize with the idea of a selfish father for one reason or another, and it ties us to this character, either out of pity or out of solidarity. 

Statement Of Intent: 4 Inches Of Danny Jefferson

For my Capstone project, I will be making my longest, most ambitious film to date: Four Inches of Danny Jefferson. I have chosen Jason McKahan as my Capstone director. I'll be moving on to graduate school after Shepherd, and this might be my last chance for a while to make a film. I've had this screenplay drafted since July of 2013, and it's received quite a bit of polish as a result of continuous drafting.

The movie will tell the story of Danny Jefferson, a nerdy college dropout (after only one semester) with a taste for collecting toys and drinking whiskey. When Danny's father dies suddenly, he is convinced to return to his hometown and attend the funeral, much to the ire of his stepmother, Beth, that's only three years his senior. When he gets home, old feelings for his high school sweet heart, Jenny, come back, complicated by her revelation that she is pregnant with his child. These factors come together to a point that Danny is forced to grow up.

I plan to also integrate some fantastical elements, such as Beth, the evil stepmother, turning into an 8-bit dragon during a wedding reception. Animation for this sequence would be a simple After Effects job with image manipulation and particle effects.

Rough idea of the 8-bit Dragon, wings would flap in final version.

So far as tools, I'm looking at editing in Premiere, doing titles and the aforementioned dragon scene in After Effects, and composing a soundtrack in LMMS's synthesizer, allowing for a mix of realistic synthesized drums and bass guitars with synthesizers that emulate the sound of Game Boy to fit with the overall nerd-culture feel of the film.

A lot of nerd-culture films and TV shows are either overly referential (Scott Pilgrim) or somewhat reductive (The Big Bang Theory). I want to make a film that integrates nerd-culture in a way that acknowledges the mainstreaming of nerd culture. Research into the mainstreaming of nerd culture would be necessary. I will also be researching the Mono-myth, as I hope to explore how a melodrama can fit into or not fit into the criteria of Hero With A Thousand Faces, despite not being a mythology per se.

A theme of the film is the idea of belonging. Danny proposes to Jenny with an action figure because he attributes a sentiment of belonging to the toy that he wants to attribute to his new family. The use of this theme in other films would be worth looking into.

Of course, to link this work to later research I have planned for graduate school, I'd like to explore Linda Williams's work in the idea of "body genres". Here, the "body genre" is melodrama, as opposed to horror or pornography. Although, Jenny's employment as stripper, and Beth's transformation into a dragon could allow for some degree of crossover, even if the dragon looks cartoonish.

Despite a 35 page screenplay at the current draft, I think that, because I have most of the cast already picked out and committed, I can begin shooting almost immediately, and burn through most of the script in a minimal amount of time. Editing will be very straightforward, and I predict that the soundtrack can probably be composed in a day or two. This gives me plenty of time to do research on the topics outlined above. I am confident in my ability to make this project work well and be well thought out.

Framing In A Graphic Novel: Hellboy

Hellboy: The Third Wish 1

This page caught my eye for it's highly non-linear organization within very clean, straight forward boxes.

These panels are all very straightforward in shape. The rectangular feel holds the action in the pages. The exception is that other pages in the book have dialogue bubbles leaving the panels to rest centered on the borders. In this, we see that the words are the only things not held neatly.

So far as the narrative, these panels don't really give us a sense of order. We see a sequence of events unfold, but are somewhat oblivious to the order of the events.

For the principle of closure, I'd actually like more panels to make more sense of what's happening. Because of a lack of panels going one way or another, I cannot tell if the characters are sinking or floating.

The one really interesting thing in these pages is the di-chromatic frame within a frame. It's there probably because the frame itself is too dark to notice the action without it, but it also manages to catch one's eye before the fish in the other frames do, making the setting somewhat ambiguous at first glance.