Week 11

Lotte Reiniger was an extremely detailed oriented silhouette animator, using stop motion animation to capture her animated movie shorts. Just watching her with a pair of scissors was unexpectedly fascinating, she shows her years of experience cutting out an intricate character in about ten seconds. Her style of character development reminds me greatly of our work in class putting together the skeleton piece by piece. The way the pieces of her character were hinged together also reminded of the bone tool in flash. Her type of animation relies only on silhouettes, therefore impossible to show character emotions and facial features. Her expression is shown through body movement and interaction with surroundings.





The Art of Lotte Reiniger (1953-1971) by baraqueafritz

Week 10

It's OK Michael

It is a simplistic rotoscoped animation that shows the relationship between the narrator and a homophobic bully Michael, that is revealed to be gay. The animation does not show facial expressions and relies heavily on dialogue and metaphors. The growing red ink coming from the side of the screen could illustrate many things and in that sense is very effective. The audience could believe that the red is the narrator being beat up or Michael releasing his anger and frustration at being a gay teen. The note paper background could show school boy innocence and also expression. Paper is used for writing down words, words are used for expression, therefore it using the paper as a background could be an artistic choice of expressing oneself.

Week 9

Surgat by Dusan Vukotic is a fascinating piece mainly because it has such an experimental vibe. It incorporates character animation. Since there is only music and no voice-work, the key to understanding expressions among the characters is through hand and facial gestures. Everything created in the world is simple shapes. Vukotic creates a world filled with balloon type objects and leaves the audience guessing what is real and what is just filled with air. The entire piece I assumed the triangular main character was real and the world was his creation, but that was dispelled within the last few seconds as he too explodes. The piece is very clever and funny, something as simple as shutting a dead fish's eyes had me laughing. I believe that this experimental animation was very well done.

Week 8

Imperial Silence: Los ABCs

An eerie animation chronicling deaths and misadventures through upbeat song. All of the characters were skeletons, giving the image of death returning to share last moments. The animators use simple, little detailed features for the cartoons: big eyes, teeth and slits for nose. The animation has minimal movements with a primary focus on the clothes of the characters and the background. There is no use of walk-cycles or wheel movement in cars. Characters and trucks glide across the screen. Despite this lack of detail, the animation still works because the primary focus is not on how the characters are moving but what they are wearing and where they are. Besides, each segment is so short that there is not need to be entirely detailed to still get the message of each section.

Week 7

I Met the Walrus is a pretty fantastic example of experimental animation. There are instances of kinetic typography, rotoscoping, original design, and it even appears as if there is some live-action video as well. There are also tons of instances of a vector mask throughout the piece: to reveal a sidewalk, to show a building, to illustrate a flowery design and much more. One example of the shape tween used appears at 4:10 to shift each country into another.

The interview comes alive in a way that is only capable through animation. Every word is animation in a cohesive way, each part is connected and leads into the other.