Master of Giants

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 t...

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 conclusio...

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 ...

In the past few weeks I've come to the conclusion that we (I mean the generation born in the late 80s until now) live in a world with a collective trauma. We live in a post-9/11 world. This is something that comes up now and again, but for me personally it seems that the impact of the Twin Tower's going down has far reaching personal consequences for everyone in our generation. Even when most people do not realise.  The idea of collective trauma is not new by any means. The trauma's generated by the Great depression in the English speaking world, the trauma of the World Wars, the trauma of colonisation are all valid and far reaching traumas that are still being dealt with, some more and some less as time marches on. However, the trauma of 9/11 and its repercussions is one that has been coming up more and more in recent years in all my research into film and imagery in society. The questions being asked of our generation and the next are all somehow tied to this loss tha...

During my recent meeting with Jim he reminded me that I should upload the weird notes and the camera movements I had planned up on this blog. During this semester I have been to many interesting lectures outside the field of Film and Media, some of which have inspired me and made me make leaps in my imagination. While many of these leaps where in interesting directions which I would like to explore some day, they did not feel suitable for this project. To cut a long story short, inspiration can strike anywhere, and can be useless in current projects bu t be useful for the future. Here are my notes and drawings of the past few months: And the camera movement sketches:

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend a screening of Scottish Experimental animation organised by the Glasgow Short Film Festival at the CCA. The full program for the event can be found here: link . While my work is definitely more aimed at a narrative approach, the visual and artistic way these animations were made was incredibly interesting.  One of the many things that stood out was the use of sound. While I am currently in the phase of animation where everything is still silent, the experimental animations I watched used their sound to guide the image. This was the case both for the modern animation as well as the older animations. This was something that was already flagged up by Jim as he stated that the use of the cinema is a good time to check how our sound is working in the space. The sounds used in the animations screened was mostly either just sound effects or electronic music. The use of electronic music does not appeal to me, but fit with the style of...

The ideas about trauma and grief that keep being a part of my reading come to me incidentally. I think this partly proves my point that trauma and grief are something that everyone deals with, no matter their social standing or financial situation.  The idea of what grief is and isn't is very dependent on personal outlooks. As in my previous post it was stated that grief is partly showing that a person was worth it to be grieved for, Nick Cave has stated (as discussed in this New Yorker article ) that love and grief are linked. He is quoted within the article as saying:  “It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal,” he wrote to Cynthia. “Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves.” The very idea that love and grief are so intimately connected speaks to me. Would that mean that a lack of love leads to a lack of grief? And as c...

colour blocking   noun Definition of  colour blocking  :  the use of usually bold and bright blocks of colour in clothing design  (Merriam-Webster, 2018) The term colour blocking is best known from fashion and design, however it can also be applied to many other arts and in this case, animation. The idea of the colour blocking background is especially of interest to me, as this gives the characters a chance to stand out. One of the examples I have seen that inspires me is the background colourisation of the American cartoon Ed, Edd & Eddy (1999-2009), in which often unrealistic colours are used to fill the background, but where the line work is allowed to be more detailed.  The idea of having one colour and variations on that colour being the background will help the characters stand out. As I am still in the process of deciding what colours I want to give the characters, this idea of colour blocking might not b...

While most films and other media follow one person as the protagonist, or follow a group of connected people, this does not feel like a universal enough way of telling this story. As such, I have been looking at other narrative modes and found that the way Richard Linklater's Slacker  (1991) constructs its narrative might fit well with my theme of universality. In Slacker  the camera follows people around the city of Austin, Texas. While some of the stories and conversations we hear are strange and unusual, most characters within the film are just going about their everyday life. We hop from one character to another when people cross each others paths, even if it is just passing each other by on the sidewalk. The skipping between characters is always done smoothly wiht the camera simply redirecting to the new character, instead of continuing to follow the older one. While there are many changes of shot and cuts to shift our views of the characters, this transition remains....

While I'm working on this project, sometimes I come across works that make me feel so deeply that they need to be included. As I am dealing with people's internal lives, emotions come into play. Emotions which are difficult to carry alone. Today I read a wonderful, painful, well-researched article by Kat Lister (2018), who has been dealing with the loss of her husband for the past few months. In it, Marie Curie bereavement co-ordinator Jacquie Leahman makes the statement "People are so keen to believe that time will heal, that one’s loss – which is so overwhelming and all-consuming at the beginning – will get smaller". She goes on to say that instead of loss and grief disappearing, life starts growing around it. After some time, grief can not and should not stop you from building a life for yourself.  Thus, the idea that simply because it has been a while meaning something is no longer affecting you should be taken out of the process of grieving. Even afte...

Fantasmagorie  by Emile Cohl is often considered to be one of the first animated films. With its fast pace and constant metamorphosis of the characters, it gives an indication of the absurdist and abstract way animation was conceived. The idea of the line as the most important element of animation is clearly seen and felt. Within my work I hope to explore the idea of the line as one of the core components of animation. However, I am interested in more abstract and stylised animation, which does not rely on characters as much.