Feb/103
My digital storytelling project pitch…
We were asked to “pitch” our final projects over in my Digital Storytelling class.
In movie-making, a pitch is usually an oral thing– the short written version is a “treatment.” And given that the project that I want to work on would involve in me taking video of myself and putting it up on the web, interacting with people via sites like YouTube– something that I am not at all accustomed to or particularly comfortable about– I figured that doing my “pitch” via video would be particularly helpful.
So yeah– here’s my pitch. Do you think it sounds like a worthwhile/interesting/achievable project? Are there pitfalls I haven’t thought of that I should think about?
Feb/100
Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards Video
For Digital Storytelling this week, our assignment was to make a video with Animoto.
I decided to do a very brief sketch about the life of Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards– best known today as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, but a superstar in his own right in the 1920s.
I don’t know what to think of Animoto. It’s a nice tool in that it makes things quick. The video I made looks, to my eye, far more professional than the amount of time I spent on it would indicate.
That said, a lot of that “look” is somewhat distracting flash, and honestly, it PAINS me to sacrifice so much control. There are some transitions that work quite well– I especially liked the one between the cartoon of Edwards and the picture of Jiminy Cricket. But some others were far less effective– and a couple were just downright ugly.
The trick, of course, is to have lots of tools, and to use the appropriate tool for the appropriate task. Don’t go after a lug nut with a hammer, or what have you. And Animoto is a nice tool for turning out something quickly with a good deal of flash and apparent polish. I wouldn’t trust a tool like this for anything that I wanted closely related to my name, though– or anything on too sensitive a topic. It seems like a good tool for working fast and loose, and less so when a sensitive hand is called for.
At any rate, it was a fun little project, and I’ll definitely try to use the site again before the end of the semester.
Feb/100
Pacing over time
Watching Gertie the Dinosaur in History of Animation got me thinking about pacing, especially after one student post about the relative “interestingness” of Windsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania and James Cameron’s Titanic.
It’s not a really shocking revelation to say that the pacing of animation has gotten more and more rapid over the last 100 years. Cuts have gotten quicker, scenes shorter, exposition has gone from painstaking (and painful) to nonexistent.
But the extent to which this is true becomes quite striking when you look at the change over time of a single, specific thing. I decided to look at the quickening of pacing in animation somewhere where you might not expect to find that much change– in breakfast cereal commercials.
A few examples tell the story better than I could ever hope to.
From 1939, a cartoon featuring the “Breakfast Pals”: Snap, Crackle, and Pop.
From some time in the 1960’s, an ad for Sugar Crisp Cerial (later renamed Super Golden Crisp.)
A pair of Fruity Pebbles ads, the first from the 70’s, and the second from the 80’s.
…I expected to find ads getting shorter, cuts getting quicker, exposition getting more minimal. But I was honestly shocked at the extent to which they did. From a minute and a half commercial, we move in a few decades to a fifteen second commercial. It’s a really amazing transformation, when you think about it.
Part of what happens is that audience expectations veer toward the rapid-fire approach. Simultaneously, audiences become used to the conventions of the genre– of animated cereal ads. These ads have a certain set of tropes, of conventions– there is a trickster, who wants the cereal, and there are those who try to keep the trickster from the cereal. The trickster utilizes subterfuge, misdirection, cartoon physics, or even violence to claim the cereal, proving that the product is so good that it requires extraordinary measures to attain it– so don’t be afraid to throw a fit if it makes your parents buy it. As audiences get used to the conventions, less explication is necessary.
The difference is striking, and it makes you think.
Feb/100
Student Posts of the Week
It’s yet another really great week of student posts for HIST 389, History of Animation. To run through just a few:
Bonnie Hansen explores the business side of the House of Mouse, looking at the selling of Disney’s famous princesses– not to young girls, but to grown women. Specifically, she looks at the marketing of Disney-branded weddings. It’s a view of a small but no doubt lucrative market that I was unaware of; one that, while I would never want such a wedding myself, I find fascinating.
Sandra Kellerhals historicizes and contextualizes The Jetsons, in terms of the futurism and optimism of the 1960s “space craze.” I was taken aback to realize that a show that– however fanciful– so influences our views of what “the future” might look like only lasted a single season.
In a pair of posts that work best taken together, Alissa Potter and Megan Pettry discuss the use of the Xerographic process in the first two Disney features to implement it, Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmations.
And finally, Erica LoMonaco looks at Pixar’s Cars as a paen to Route 66 as the “Main Street of America,” before the advent of the interstate highway system. Any blog post that makes me even consider watching a movie that features Larry the Cable Guy deserves some special kind of kudos.
Feb/100
Taking the simple and making it sublime…
Because nothing encourages learning like actually doing, each student in HIST 389: the History of Animation is required to produce a short animation.
Now, a lot of students are probably going to want to do a zoetrope or another persistence-of-vision toy, because it seems like the most accessible, simple technique. There’s no software or camera concerns– it seems like something a kid could do:
But just because the basic principle is simple doesn’t mean that the application of the principle needs to be simplistic. The following film uses the basic zoetrope technology to create something really powerful and beautiful.
(Watch it in hi res for maximum effect.)
Animator Eric Dyer, of Baltimore, spent a period of time biking around the city of Copenhagen, shooting things he saw. He then took the images and built a series of zoetrope-type devices using them. Finally, he filmed the results.
Here’s what his set-up looked like:
I think the project is amazing, both just because it’s visually beautiful and moving, and because it is such a fascinating reinterpretation of an old technology. In the below interview he describes his next project as involving hand-painted objects designed on a computer and printed out using a 3-D printer, and finally animated using the zoetrope technique. It’s a fascinating idea that, if it’s executed as well as “The Copenhagen Cycles,” will likely be stunning to see.
