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.
Feb/100
Defining Digital Storytelling…
My Digital Storytelling class was asked to try to define “digital storytelling.” Below is my reply.
It seems to me like we’ve got one of those blind-men-and-an-elephant problems, here. I’ve been playing around with trying to come up with a working definition of “digital storytelling” for a couple days, now, and honestly, anything I can come up with is simultaneously:
- So broad as to be meaningless.
- Still far too restrictive.
This does not bode well for the prospect of coming up with anything that even resembles a “definitive answer” to the question of what “digital storytelling” is.
Which makes this class seem a bit amorphous.
The best I can come with is this: “Digital storytelling” is the use of digital (non-analog, usually computer-based) media to create (or suggest) a narrative (or set of narratives or narrative possibilities).
I could unpack that a little, but I’m afraid to do so too much, because the more you do, the more restrictive your definition becomes. So let me just sort of ramble about a couple of the implications of this.
The use of digital techniques alters older technologies by lowering barriers to use in both cost and necessity of technical skill. While techniques like sophisticated 3-d rendering are still prohibitively difficult for amateur users, digital photography, videography, sound recording, and image alteration have continued to get cheaper, faster, and easier. Looking at a the technological forces behind this, things like Moore’s Law, Rock’s Law, and Nielson’s Law all suggest that this pattern will continue. All things digital will continue to get faster, cheaper, easier, and better, as long as research and development continue.
Not only is this true with individual digitized media, but it is also true of the ability of computers to integrate various forms of media into a coherent whole. Digital technology continues to make it easier, faster, and cheaper to put together still and moving images, sounds, and written words, to combine them into new integrated wholes.
And just like the words and pictures of a comic strip, each of these elements gains something in combination with other elements– it’s a synergistic relationship. Looking at just the words or just the images of your average comic strip, you realize that either element is less meaningful when not interacting with the other. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. It’s the same thing with digital stories that incorporate multiple media.
While words, pictures, sound, and video are all clearly important building blocks for digital stories, it is important not to exclude the “natively digital” media that can be incorporated into digital storytelling projects– the two that spring immediately to mind are simulation and databases.
Both of these technologies present us with some of the most dramatic possibilities of digital storytelling: they do not necessarily follow– and indeed can be used to actively undermine– the traditional notions of narrativity we have from old media. Storytelling is no longer necessarily limited to a single beginning, middle, and end. Instead, creators have the ability to chart various paths that audiences can take, indeed– audiences are no longer limited to “passive” intake, but can actively guide their own user experience, taking the driver’s seat or even helping to build and extend the story itself.
Of course, audiences have never been particularly passive, and have always re-purposed, remixed, and reinterpreted the media they consume. The difference now is that we can construct stories that encourage or even force audiences to do just that. It can be built into the medium itself, now, rather than just being built into how humans consume stories.
