Master of Giants

Over the course of this master I have come to realise that all film is about connection and disconnection. While my film is dealing with trauma, the traumas within most people lives have come about due to connection or disconnection with the world and the people in them. This idea of how people connect with the world comes into every film. Every film has a point of view that is all about connection with the environment they are in. Within my trailer, the idea fo connection, disconnection, public and private get explored. The use of live-action backgrounds with animated characters highlights the disconnect one can feel with their environment while feeling very connected to their inner lives (and in this case, their traumas). How the public and the private interact is (hopefully) highlighted by the use of audio. The trailer has definitely helped me better define what technical aspects I need to work on. While I was already able to create animation in photoshop, the use of After E

banality /bəˈnalɪti/ noun the fact or condition of being banal; unoriginality. In recent weeks I have returned to reading a book I started in the summer, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem . The subtitle of the book, The Banality of Evil has been used often in other works and in conversations surrounding ethics. While Eichmann is by all accounts not a good person, he sees himself as a traumatised person who needs to be let of the hook due to his personal trauma. His trauma trumps the public trauma of all the (specifically) Jews he made to leave their home countries. Arendt states that Eichmann tends to brag about everything he has achieved and often relates it back to the lack of achievement he felt when he was younger. The main defence Eichmann used in his court case was that he was simply following orders. He was simply finally doing the thing that he search so long for, something he was good at. The idea of the 'banal' with Arendt's

Identity and community are interlinked in too many ways to count. The ideas of who we are and what we are are intrinsically linked to who we see and what we experience. As Jane Batkin (2017, p. 2) puts it:  Identity is a way of inferring meanings from the world and from other selves. It is interactive, it can be performative and is always fluid. It attaches itself to culture and nationhood, to place and past, to self and other. Its malleability means that it is often problematic to define, just as animation is; there is a refusal to be fixed that resonates through identity theory and permeates the animated world. Identity politics ... refers to the bringing together of characters who have a shared identity, as well as those marginalized for their 'difference'.  The way we explain the self and the other is linked to ideas surrounding personal biography , a topic brought up by Jim multiple times within my feedback. We explain who we are through explaining our experiences of th

While at the end of the last semester I went back to creating everything digitally, the idea of using physical spaces and lights has come back to me. As such, I am working on building a city street out of cardboards, and I’ve been thinking of populating it with silhouetted people, and only having the giants as colour within the frame. Part of this new development comes from the feedback I have received on my work from the last semester. This stated I should look at using a different medium. While I disagree with the idea of finding a completely different medium, as I believe this story can only be told in animation, it did make me reconsider how I can use the medium and my own strengths to my advantage. This move was also influenced by the evening of Colombian Contemporary Animation I went to recently. This evening showed me many ways animation can be made, but also showed me that mixing a medium can work very well. The idea of rotoscoping to create lifelike animation is something I

Much of my independent work can be sourced back to poetry. Whether this is part of the written word, spoken slam poetry or visual poetry, they all inspire my work in equal measures. On the 4th of February Mark Cousins came to the university to give a talk about his work as a writer and filmmaker. During this talk he stated "Film is closer to magic, to poetry, than it is to prose". With this he crystallised my belief that poetry can be the basis of much artistic work and reminded me of the works of Margaret Tait. Tait's work combines the spoken word with images to illustrate their power of their subject. This type of work is interesting to me due to it's clear connection of the two different mediums, both of which I try to base my work in. While Mark Cousins mostly concentrates on the image and the visual aspects of film, sound is not to be forgotten in the equation, especially not regarding poetry. No matter how well a movie is visually put together, film in this da

When talking about genre in film, one often thinks about putting a film in a box. There is very little wiggle room between the idea of what a comedy is and what a drama is supposed to be. However, within the perceptions of genre the idea of a spectrum returns again and again. What if a comedy can be seen as both pure comedy and have elements dramatic enough to make it a drama?  What is what by some is considered a genre is actually a style? Genre theory has been a part of film studies for decennia, as it has been a part of literature studies and fine art studies. The concept of genre could however only become part of film when the medium moved on from being a cinema of attractions to a cinema of storytelling. The constant shift in the lines of genre started the moment stories were told through the medium. As such, genre can be considered a spectrum and borderless. However, as we have been discussing the concept of the documentary and what its base elements are, the conclusion can be

As preparation and research for creating my own animated short, I recently watched the short animation which have been shortlisted for the 2019 Academy awards. As voting for the category was open until the 14th of January, the shorts were made available online so they could be seen by members of the academy, as well as the general audience. CartoonBrew, an online animation magazine made an article with all the videos, available here . Due to the closure of the voting period, some of the shorts have been taken offline again, or have been made unavailable to the public. While watching the shorts, I was struck by the length of many of them. While I am aiming to make a short film of 7-8 minutes, these shorts were either under 5 minutes, or over 12 minutes long. (Due to the assessment criteria, I can't really make anything shorter than 5 minutes, as this is the length of our supposed trailer.) The stories told in the shorts were mostly human-centric, with a few shorts with anima