Welcome back from Spring Break. Great job posting your first four essays. Compelling thoughts and critiques. Really enjoyed reading them all.
This week (and maybe next) a compilation of shorts to review. Which were your favorites and why? What does this collection tell you about the current state of animation globally? Does this collection inspire you?
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The Animation show we watched in class would have been very exciting and interesting to see...if it was shown five years ago. I remember always wanting to see new and innovative animations and they were always hard to come by. I didn't even have MTV at home so I never even heard of this Animation show on MTV. I would have loved it if I had seen it. The problem is, in the few years since YouTube has blown up, we have all become spoiled when it comes to animation. When I was looking for ideas for my thesis, I watched animations for three days and often times whenever I post a video or check out a video I saw mentioned on the news, I take some time to view new animations.
The amazing thing about YouTube is what people create by themselves. At the end of each animation segment in the film, the credits would show at least a dozen people, no matter how little you might think the production time and effort would be. Our technology has advanced so dramatically that I can literally make a 3D animated short with stereo quality sound on my home computer, by myself. I think back to one Animation on YouTube that was a flash animation with tons of cartoon characters from the eighties and nineties who all battle with an accompanied soundtrack. The animation was crude, but epic, and it matched the sound perfectly with a song that for the most part was on key and somewhat catchy. It's just amazing what we can do today. However, the animations that were good on the film were very good. The german claymation short with the rocks was so completely original and entertainning that the animation could have been poor and it still would have been a good film. The claymation was exceptional though, and the CG elements blended seamlessly with the clay.
Another interesting aspect of the film was it seemed to be the most enjoyed short was one of the simplest. The short where the balloons revolt and begin torturing the kids was creative, morbid, and hilarious. It was pencil sketched with few colors and had some of the shortest credits, but it was just a great story. The timing was great as well.
Timing and creativity is what seemed to be lacking in the other shorts. Not in all the shorts, and actually since some were from other countries, it's hard to describe why they didn't quite appeal to me. I really enjoyed the first short from Japan, the style was different and engaging, but being ignorant of the culture, and perhaps just ignorant, I didn't get the story. I really wanted to get the story though, so in a way that is a good quality in the film.
In summation I would say the animation film was enlightening. Not in the sense that I learned from watching the animations, but I learned that animation techniques have drastically changed in the past few years, and more than anything, story and creativity is still what drives successful animations.
A collection of animated shorts is one of the best ways to evaluate the field of animation and reflect as an artist how critical every element can be. In order to understand the effect that an animation can have on an audience, you must critically analyze the different ways a story can be told. The end result will be conclusive by how the organization and timing of the story develops over time and leads the audience.
These particular animation shorts have their ups and downs, but the value of their complexity will leave the artist wondering, in some parts, how long did it take or how many people worked on it. Short animations in general do not require tons of people to complete, however as a graduate student, we are required to create a thesis solely on our own and to the best of our abilities. We take the knowledge we gain through watching these types of shorts and decide what will be the best way to develop our own stories and render effective special effects. Most of these shorts did not present a variety of so-called special effects, but did render a simple and different way to tell a story.
Let step into the world of the “Balloon Pick-Up” animation. This is not the name of the animation short but I like to call it that because I think it fits. Imagine a little girl playing with a balloon in simple white space. (I think an artist would sketch this while in class because they were bored over a long period of time.) While the girl is playing with the balloon she seems to shake it around a little bit and bounce it back and forth. All of a sudden the mood changes and the balloon decides to retaliate and begins choking and dropping the girl from the ground to the sky. Very cruel, but looks funny when there are several stick figures of balloons torturing other kids in an empty place. There is nothing you can do but watch and laugh. Colorful balloons, but a harsh story for our children.
What I learned from this animation is that no matter what your story is about, its effectiveness will result by how you throw a monkey wrench into the fan to mix it up a little. I never would have thought that the balloons would come alive and torture the little children. It was simple and straight to the point in a very well timed way. It progressed to the climax of the story perfectly.
I plan to use this knowledge and continue to use the special laws of effective animation. Our perception of animation or design for that matter is all about how to make things stand out when they need to. If there is a crowd of people, and you want something to stand out, you have to make it different from everything else just like in a story. In the field of animation, when everything is in motion on screen, the thing that is not in motion will stand out and become your focal point. These laws will help us think more critical about what we decide we want to accomplish in our field. We must make it different from everything to standout from the crowd, but when it stands out please make it interesting enough to have value and longevity.
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