CTXA 561: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Animation
Journal
Week 2: New Narrative
Readings
Wells, Paul. “Once upon a Time: Narrative Strategies.” In Understanding Animation, 68-126. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1998.
Taberham, Paul. “It Is Alive if You Are: Defining Experimental Animation.” In Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital, edited by Miriam Harris, Lilly Husbands, and Paul Taberham, 17-34. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2019.
Entry
In “Once upon a Time: Narrative Strategies,” Wells identifies and explains ten devices and concepts that animators may use to craft their work’s narrative:
1) Metamorphosis, the literal transformation of one shape into another;
2) Condensation, the compression of narrational information into a limited period of time;
3) Synecdoche, the depiction of part of a figure or object to represent its whole;
4) Symbolism and metaphor, not to be confused with a sign, which “merely duplicates the thing it signifies” [83] (a true symbol “invests its object with meaning” [84]);
5) Fabrication, the “re-animation” of matter/materials that would otherwise be considered detritus or dead;
6) Association, the use of suggestion and allusion to connect otherwise disconnected images in a way that seems logical rather than surreal;
7) Sound (dialogue, music, and special effects);
8) Acting and performance;
9) Choreography; and
10) Penetration, the display of an organism’s or object’s internal workings.
Comments. I am reflecting on Wells’s idea that sound “creates a vocabulary by which the visual codes of [a] film are understood” [97]. When I think of the word “vocabulary,” I think (it might go without saying) of words and, perhaps more so, their specificity. I have always considered images – even the most abstract – to be more specific (i.e. referential or figurative) than sounds. Wells’s statement makes me wonder if animators view sounds to be more specific or semantic than images. I am also fascinated by Philip Brophy’s idea that “music essentially operates as a ‘present tense’ in most animated vehicles” due to its inherent “sense of now-ness” [98]. If a film’s music is diegetic, I can clearly see how it might suck the viewer into the present, regardless of the animator’s narrational intent. More interesting to me is the idea that non-diegetic music can have the same effect; even though the viewer cannot see the music’s source on-screen, it still comments on, or converses with, the film’s present sequence, regardless of whether it is amplifying or subverting the sequence’s emotional content. I suppose one way that music could operate in the “past tense” or a kind of “omniscient” tense is if it takes the form of a leitmotif or theme, which, if already presented earlier in the film, could harken back to a previous sequence.
In “It Is Alive if You Are,” Taberham defines the “tendencies” [23] that typify experimental animation:
1) Small-scale, self-financed or grant-funded production and distribution;
2) A preference for evoking rather than telling;
3) A preference for drawing attention to the animator’s materials and personal style or concerns; and
4) A distaste for goal-driven characters
Comments. Even though I am new to experimental animation, I am inclined to disagree with Taberham’s idea that characters in this tradition tend not to be “psychologically defined” and do not exhibit goal-driven behavior [24]. As Wells suggests in “Once upon a Time,” acting in animation “represents the relationship between the animator and the figure, object or environment he/she in animating” [104]. If I follow this line of thinking, I am led to believe that animators must imbue some part of their psyche into their characters, even if this “projection” or “osmosis” occurs on a sub-conscious level.
Still from The Street (1976) by Caroline Leaf, featuring paint-on-glass animation
Week 3: Non-Narrative
Readings
Furniss, Maureen. Art in Motion, Revised Edition: Animation Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
"Defining Animation," 4-7.
"Structural Design," 95-100.
“Considering Form in Abstract Animation,” 249-261.
Furniss, Maureen. "Postwar Experimentation" in A New History of Animation, 240-254. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016.
Moritz, William. "Some Observations on Non-objective and Non-linear Animation" in Storytelling in Animation: The Art of the Animated Image, Vol. 2, 21-31. Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1988.
Summary
In Art in Motion, Furniss presents five concepts to describe non-narrative animation:
1-2) Mimesis (the attempt to reproduce “natural reality”) & Abstraction (the use of “pure form” to suggest a concept);
3) Cyclical form, which foregrounds repetition as a narrative device;
4) Episodic form, which illustrates parallel events happening at the same time (or a compilation of vignettes); and
5) Thematic form, which tends towards stasis and explores in-depth an experience, emotion, or abstract concept.
In Storytelling in Animation, Moritz presents two concepts that delimit a continuum of abstraction along which films may be situated:
1) Non-linearity, which features a narrative that lacks or fully rejects a clear (i.e., beginning-middle-end) plot structure; and
2) Non-objectivity, which abandons narrative structure altogether and features unrecognizable figures and shapes (this, then, may be understood as the apotheosis of abstraction).
Comments
I was inspired by the scores to the following films in this week’s unit:
Tarantella, 1940 (dir. Mary Ellen Bute; music by Erwin Gerschefsky)
Dots, 1940 (dir. Norman McLaren; music by Norman McLaren)
Il était une chaise, 1957 (dir. Norman McLaren; music by Ravi Shankar & Chatur Lal)
3/78, 1978 (dir. Larry Cuba; music by Kazu Matsui)
Free Radicals, 1958 (dir. Len Lye; music by the Bagirmi tribe of Central Africa)
Lignes verticales, 1960 (dir. Norman McLaren; music by Maurice Blackburn)
Two Space, 1979 (dir. Larry Cuba; feat. Javanese Court Gamelan, Vol. 2, Nonesuch Records, H-72074, 1977)
Fugue, 1998 (dir. Georges Schwizgebel; music by Michele Bokanowski)
Retouches, 2008 (dir. Georges Schwizgebel; music by Normand Roger)
To limit the scope of this journal entry, I will focus on the music featured in Lye’s Free Radicals, a tape recording of music attributed to the Bagirmi tribe of Central Africa. While Lye does not identify the music’s instrumentation or performers by name, I hear a shaker, a few membranophones, and a solo male singer. (Further research is required to identify and translate the singer’s words.) The music is highly rhythmic and largely groove-based, i.e., cyclical in form. Variation occurs, however, within the music’s orchestration (e.g., the entrances and exits of certain instruments and timbres) and the embellishment of rhythmic patterns. While Lye’s animation is closely synchronized with the music’s rhythm, the fickle character of his images is quite distinct from the music’s predominantly repetitive nature. This contrast, I feel, allows the viewer to digest Lye’s animation; if the music and images onscreen were equally changeable, their composite effect could well amount to sensory overload!
While I do not know the role that music plays in Bagirmi society, this tape recording (and my relative familiarity with other groove-based musical traditions) leads me to suspect that it accompanies ceremonial dancing. Regardless of my assumption’s validity, the music in Free Radicals evoked in my mind the image of people dancing, and this association, in turn, lent a certain figurative quality to Lye’s animation. Were they accompanied by silence, the swaying vertical lines that predominate the film’s first minute (Figure 1) would appear purely abstract (or perhaps remind me of barcodes or the bars of a gate or prison cell). Accompanied by the Bagirmi’s music, however, these lines quickly evoked in my mind the image of bodies swaying together, perhaps in observance of – or in anticipation of joining – some group dance. Similarly, zig-zagging lines (Figure 2) resembled a range of figurative images: e.g., sound waves, stick figures (or even just limbs) moving in step with some kind of extemporaneous choreography.
Captions (Left-Right)
Figures 1-2. Stills from Free Radicals (1958), Len Lye.
Figure 3. Abd ar-Rahman Gaourang II, Mbang (King) of Bagirmi from 1883–1918 (Left) with Muhammad Salih bin Yusuf, Kolak (Ruler) of the Wadai Empire from 1901–1909 (Right).
Week 4: Documentary & Autobiography
Readings
Furniss, Maureen. "Authorship in Animated Shorts: Documentary and Autobiography" in A New History of Animation, 321-324. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016.
Honess Roe, Annabelle. Animated Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
"Introduction," 1-16.
"More Than the Interview Seen: Sheila Sofian's Ilustrated Interviews," 116-120
"Uncanny Bodies,” 80-87
Summary
In “Authorship in Animated Shorts,” Furniss identifies an array of individuals who have worked in the genre of animated documentary: John and Faith Hubley, Frank Mouris, Joanna Priestly, George Griffin, Michael Sporn, Tissa David, Candy Kugel, Vincent Cafarelli, and Sheila Sofian. She also notes the sub-genre of psychological realism (a “highly subjective form of documentary” [324]) and many filmmakers’ tendency to embed personal experience in documentaries’ characters and narratives [324].
In Animated Documentary, Honess Roe traces the roots of the genre, noting early use of animated sequences in live-action documentary in the first decades of the 20th century and the rise of more fully animated documentaries in the 1990s. She claims that animation's contribution to the documentary project lies in its ability to:
shift and broaden “the limits of what and how we can show about reality by offering new or alternative ways of seeing the world” [2]; and
“bring things that are temporally, spatially and psychologically distant from the viewer to closer proximity…[by] conflat[ing] history, transcend[ing] geography and giv[ing] insight into the mental states of other people” [2].
Honess Roe also distinguishes the tendencies of live-action documentary from its animated counterpart, while noting their similarities. Traditionally, live-action documentary “should be observational, unobtrusive, truthful, bear witness to actual events, contain interviews, and, even, be objective” [3]. Animated documentary, too, must be “about the world rather than a world wholly imagined by its creator” [4]. Honess Roe also suggests that both animated and live-action documentaries must be presented or received first and foremost as documentaries to be labeled as such [4]. Unlike their live-action counterpart or early 20th century predecessors, however, animated documentaries must be “recorded or created frame by frame” and contain animated segments without which the film would be incoherent [4].
Comments
This week I enjoyed learning about different techniques and materials used in experimental animation:
Conté crayon, featured in Sheila Sofian’s Survivors (1997), originated in France during the Napoleonic wars. Since graphite was in short supply (due to England’s blockade of France’s ports), the French used charcoal and clay as a supplement or replacement. Today, conté consists of pigment, clay, and a binder.
A cel is a single image used repeatedly during an animated sequence; it does not move and can be overlaid with other images.
Pixilation is a technique whereby animators manipulate a live-action image frame by frame.
Paint-on-glass is a technique whereby an image is painted onto opaque Plexiglas, photographed, re-painted, and photographed again.
Rotoscoping is a technique whereby live-action footage is traced frame-by-frame.
In-betweening is the process of making two disjunct frames and “filling them in” (as opposed to working frame-by-frame in a linear fashion). Rotoshopping digitizes (automates) this process.
I also enjoyed reading authors’ views on the moods or associations that certain techniques and materials evoke or carry with them:
Animations drawn with crayon may evoke a “friendly” or “childlike” quality [Honess Roe, 114-115];
Painting-on-glass may be particularly well suited to the evocation of ephemera [ibid. 115];
Metamorphosis may pair well with themes of uncertainty and destruction [ibid. 116];
Both rotoscoping and CGI may evoke the uncanny insofar as both create “hiccups” whereby “reality ruptures the veneer of the [animator’s] make–believe world” [ibid. 82]. Rotoscoping features the “ghost” of live-action footage [ibid. 83], and CGI features “characters that look too human, yet not human enough” [ibid.].
I wonder how subjective these views are. While I do agree with them, I also feel that in the hands of a skillful animator, an array of techniques and materials could be used to evoke the same mood or theme.
Week 5: Women/Feminism/Sex/Love/Trauma
Readings
Hayes, Ruth. "The Animated Body and Its Material Nature" in Pilling, Jayne, Animating the Unconscious : Desire, Sexuality and Animation, pps 208-210.
Furniss, Maureen. "Authorship in Animated Shorts: Women and Authorship." A New History of Animation. Thames & Hudson; 2016. Chap.18., pps. 324-329.
Furniss, Maureen. “Issues of Representation.” Art in Motion, Revised Edition: Animation Aesthetics, 2nd ed., Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 229–48.
Hosea, Birgitta, "Beyond a Digital Écriture Féminine: Cyberfeminism and Experimental Computer Animation" pps. 132-149.
"Michèle Cournoyer: Comments on Making The Hat" in Pilling, Jayne, Animating the Unconscious : Desire, Sexuality and Animation, pps 31-39.
Summary
In “Issues of Representation,” Furniss highlights certain points in the history of gender representation in (US) studio animation. In the first half of the twentieth century, women were primarily relegated to technical roles in studio animation, e.g., inking and painting, color keying, and background painting [234]. In the 1940s and 1950s, women started their own companies that specialized in these services [235]. In the second half of the twentieth century, women’s role in the industry began to expand, in part due to increased enrollment of women in college animation programs in the 1970s [234]. In the 1990s, women started to occupy executive positions in studio animation, especially in children’s TV, an industry that men did not take seriously until the early 2000s, at which point they competed for women’s power in this market [235-236].
As for their on-screen representation in studio animation, women have historically been hyper-sexualized and assigned passive behavioral traits. Nickelodeon’s Linda Simensky recalls male animators claiming that it was “easier” to draw women “top-heavy” [as quoted in Furniss, 238]. In the 1990s, studios opted for animals characters in an attempt to avoid gender (and racial) stereotypes, but they still managed to assign them genders through their names, voices, and narrative roles [238].
In “Beyond a Digital Écriture Féminine,” Hosea notes that feminist animation has often been hand-drawn/handmade rather than digitally created [145]. To understand this trend it is first worth noting animator Mary Beams’ claim that “[w]hat characterizes the feminine side of the creative process […] is the tendency to work with what is at hand” [Furniss, 241]. Computing technology, Hosea argues, has not historically fallen under this category, for its access typically required affiliation with male-dominated institutions, e.g., corporations, research labs, and universities [145-146].
Comments
I was struck by Jean Derome’s original score for Michèle Cournoyer’s film The Hat (1999). In her article featured in Jayne Pilling’s Animating the Unconscious, Cournoyer notes that Derome’s score features rock and roll music, children’s toys, animal sounds, the composer’s voice, and the composer’s wife’s voice [33]. The viewer will also hear a flute, saxophone, and a small string and percussion section. To me, one of the score’s most striking elements is the string section, which seems to serve a role similar to Cournoyer’s use of metamorphosis as a means of connecting disparate scenes from the protagonist’s life. Initially, the string section offers an eerie high-pitched drone that carries through the film’s first minute, uniting two scenes and moments in time: the first features the protagonist as an adult exotic dancer, and the second features her abusive father ascending a staircase before entering her bedroom and molesting her as a child. Though faint, Derome’s drone acts as a kind of glue that strengthens the transition between these two scenes. Later, the strings occupy a more prominent place in the film’s soundscape. During the first scene of molestation, they pluck a whimsical waltz that stands in stark contrast to the act of abuse portrayed onscreen. The music’s surprisingly light character, however, deftly suggests the protagonist’s innocence and naivety, and, perhaps more darkly, her father’s apparent nonchalance. The strings metamorphose with Cournoyer’s animation when they join the rock and roll music of the ensuing exotic dancing scenes; angular melodies and dissonant, rhythmic double-stops allude to the protagonist’s trauma while enhancing the cohesion of the film’s non-linear form.
Jean Derome, composer (The Hat)
Week 6: Centering Racial, Cultural, Ethnic, National Identities
Summary
In “Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation,” Nicholas Sammond summarizes the history of racial and ethnic stereotypes in US studio animation. From the late 19th century through the early 1920s, vaudeville – and the early silent-era cartoons that it inspired – stereotyped a broad range of racial and ethnic stereotypes (e.g., German-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and African-Americans). Beginning in the late 1920s, however, stereotypes began to target African-Americans more exclusively and turned blatantly hostile in the Swing Era. While overt racial/ethnic stereotypes gradually receded from studio animated film over the course of the latter twentieth century, Brian Anthony Hernandez notes on the online blog Mic that people of color were still dehumanized on-screen as late as the early 2000s, a period when Disney and Pixar released several films that featured BIPOC protagonists but cast them in stories in which they frequently turned into animals.
Comments
I am captivated by the original score for Catherine Anyango’s film Live, Moments Ago (2015), which manipulates and reconstructs mobile phone footage of Michael Brown’s corpse, which remained on the streets of Ferguson for four hours before it was finally covered and removed from public view. The score (whose composer is uncredited) features a lone, throbbing drone that is occasionally distorted via frequency modulation and, possibly, a noise generator. The drone’s quivering pitch evokes in my mind the shell shock and mind-numbing grief experienced by those who witnessed Brown’s murder and the callousness with which his body was treated. The drone’s periodic distortion, in turn, serves as a musical analogue to the degradation of Anyango’s paper and evokes a feeling of unbridled rage at police brutality.
Analog distortion pedals create a sound effect similar to the one featured in the score for Catherine Anyango’s film Live, Moments Ago (2015).
Week 7: Queering Animation
Summary
In her editorial “A Queer Thing, Indeed: Queering Experimental Animation,” published on the online blog Fantasy/Animation, Lilly Husbands asserts that “animation and queerness are all connected by the ways in which they bend, break and question our concepts of the real and the normal, respectively.” Experimental animation, Husbands claims, is particularly well-suited to queer storytelling insofar as it “resists codification” and often seeks to present viewers with “conceptual and perceptual challenges.” Viewers, Husbands seems to suggest, may be more inclined to question heteronormativity if they are primed to be challenged and open-minded.
Comments
I am moved by Elijah Jamal Asani’s original score for David Delafuente’s film uuuuuu (2015). Delafuente’s animation periodically depicts human eyes and hands floating freely amidst abstract, rigid geometric shapes. This imagery, I feel, pays homage to the queer community’s refusal to be “put in a box,” so to speak. In Asani’s score, the bass/kick drum sound exhibits a similar kind of independence: constantly syncopated (i.e., landing between beats), it “refuses” to be locked into the music’s rhythmic grid. Additional noteworthy aspects of Asani’s score include its resemblance to house music, which has historically played a prominent role in queer culture, and its manipulation of the human voice. Asani uses electronic processing (perhaps a vocoder) to transform the singer’s voice into a synth pad-like instrument and pitch-bending to musicalize the sound of rhythmic exhales. The resulting texture is sensual (and therefore well-suited to the film’s sexual undertone) but also ghostly: the singer’s voice is manipulated to such an extent that only traces of its original sound remain. These ghostly traces present to me as a kind of musical analogue to the rotoscoped figures featured in Delafuente’s film.
Elijah Jamal Asani, the composer featured in David Delafuente’s film uuuuuu (2015)
Week 8: Animation for All Bodies and Minds
Summary
In "Toward Accessible Spectatorships," the fifth chapter of Animated Film and Disability (Indiana University Press 2022), Slava Greenberg summarizes various approaches to crip animation, that is, any animated film that seeks to portray the “inner worlds” of people with disabilities without sensationalizing or making a spectacle of them (159). Greenberg notes:
Experimental techniques may be particularly well-suited to portraying the “subjective sensory experiences” of people with disabilities (160);
The accuracy and care with which animated films address the experience of disability depends on the authority afforded to people with disabilities in the films’ narrative and production (160);
Animated films may subvert mainstream film’s “hierarchy of the senses” by undermining the primacy of visual information and dialogue (161).
Comments
I was struck by the soundtrack of Alex Widdowson’s film Music & Clowns (2018-2020), specifically, the use of big-band music to underscore the “chase scene” in which Jamie runs away from home and is pursued by his father. First, it is worth noting that the music is not an original cue; rather, it is a recording of the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own” performing “Not on the Bus” live at Blues Alley, a jazz supper club in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, this lively music effectively captures the scene’s dynamic energy. Furthermore, big-band music, a sub-genre of the jazz tradition, typically features moments of solo improvisation balanced with coordinated, preplanned ensemble performance. These musical attributes carry symbolic weight in the context of the film’s subject matter: on the one hand, Jamie’s family must be flexible and ready to adapt to Jamie’s at-times unpredictable behavior; on the other hand, caring for Jamie requires a significant amount of family coordination and planning.
Duke Ellington and his big band, pictured here in Munich in 1967, exemplified the genre of music featured in the “chase scene” of Alex Widdowson’s film Music & Clowns.
Week 9: Studio Ghibli and its Impact
Summary
In “The Culture of Japanese Animation,” the twenty-second chapter of A New History of Animation (Thames & Hudson 2016), Maureen Furniss outlines the origins of Japanese visual media:
700s – woodblock prints document sacred Buddhist texts
900s – illuminated scrolls are produced for monks and the wealthy; humans are depicted small in comparison with the natural world; visual effects include parallel action and zoom-ins
1600 – woodblock prints begin depicting secular subject matter for the merchant class
1850s – woodblock prints are abandoned for cheaper European/American printing methods
1910s/1920s – newspapers begin to include comic strips (early manga)
1930s-1950s – comic strips become serialized and gain wider national popularity
1980s-1990s – manga gains a global fanbase; Japanese government begins to view manga as a cultural legacy and art form rather than a moneymaker
Comments
I was deeply moved by Mizuki Kiyama’s film Bath House of Whales (2019) and its original score (Taeil Lee) and sound design (Naoko Kagata). It is first worth noting that Lee’s score only consists of two minutes of music; roughly one third of the film’s six-minute duration. Kagata’s sound design, however, is featured throughout the film, often void of musical accompaniment. The film’s sonic form may be represented as ABABA, where A represents sound design (by itself) and B represents music (accompanied by sound design).
Kagata’s sound design largely consists of water sounds (e.g., drips, splashes, and bubbles) but also includes the sound of TV segments, wet clothing being whipped before hung to dry, and more musical sounds like rhythmic scrubbing and heavy breathing. Even when occupying a more atmospheric role, Kagata’s sounds remain expressive and complex while allowing the viewer to concentrate on Kiyama’s metamorphosing paint-on-glass animation.
Lee’s score consists of a plucked string instrument (likely a koto); bowed string instruments (including, perhaps, a kokyu or electronically processed violoncello); an unidentified Japanese drum (some kind of deep, resonant membranophone); a double-reed wind instrument (likely a hichiriki); and a traditional Japanese vocalist. The drum’s sound has a ceremonial quality that amplifies the ritualistic nature of the bathing tradition depicted in Kiyama’s film. Many of the other instruments featured in Lee’s score demonstrate a wide vibrato; the wavering pitch produced by this technique, typical of Japanese (and other East Asian) court music traditions as well as Western classical music, mirrors the unstable quality of Kiyama’s metamorphosing imagery. Finally, Lee’s periodic use of a low-pass filter on the singer’s voice makes it sound faraway and muffled; or, in more poetic terms, as if it were heard under-water (a nod, perhaps, to the film’s bathhouse setting), in a dream-state (evocative of the child protagonist’s imaginative point-of-view), or as a fragment of a distant memory (while Kiyama’s film is not explicitly autobiographical, I feel that it carries a nostalgic tone).
Captions (Left-Right)
Figure 1. Koto (Japanese plucked string instrument)
Figure 2. Kokyu (Japanese bowed string instrument)
Figure 3. Hichikiri (Japanese double-reed wind instrument)
Week 10: Crafty Animation
Summary
Crafty animation refers to the practice of animating physical materials, e.g., clay, paint, grains, textiles, paper, and even film (“direct animation”). Dan and Lienors Torre provide the following framework for analyzing crafty animation:
Materiality, i.e., the original substance used, whether it be physical or digitally simulated (86);
Process, i.e., how the material is used (ibid.);
Identity, i.e., what the material becomes – and what meaning it might assume – as result of the way in which it is processed (95)
For additional information, please see my Google Slides presentation!
Comments
I am moved by Cesar Díaz’s film No Corras Tanto (2009), which is essentially a sand-animation music video for the eponymous song by the band El Combolinga. Díaz’s decision to use sand as his material is clever, for the song’s setting takes place (in part) along an unnamed seashore. The song also references the idea that “everything flows” and leaves a trace. Sand, as Maureen Furniss notes in “Alternatives in Animation Production,” is particularly well-suited to portraying fluid movements (45-50), and its granular nature often entails that sand-animated images linger from frame to frame.
El Combolinga, whose song “No Corras Tanto” is featured in Cesar Diáz’s 2009 film of the same title.
Week 11: Sloppy Craft
Summary
“Sloppy craft” refers to the practice of animating in a style that appears intentionally unpolished. Typically discussed in the context of digital animation, sloppy craft seeks to subvert trends of hyperrealism that have historically dominated computer-generated imagery (CGI). As Lilly Husbands notes in “Craft as Critique in Experimental Animation,” sloppy craft entails deskilling – abandoning inherited techniques or executing them “poorly” – and reskilling, i.e., exploring alternative, non-traditional techniques (61).
Comments
I am struck by the ways in which the score for Amy Lockhart’s Landscapes (2012), the composer of which is uncredited, represents sloppy (musical) craft. The score’s very foundation – its instrumentation – exhibits a certain sloppiness: the featured synthesizer sounds harken back to early video game “chiptune” music, which was composed at a time when synthesis was very rudimentary (e.g., early synthesizers could not replicate acoustic instruments as accurately as they can today). Furthermore, the score contains virtually no dynamic variation (i.e., fluctuations in volume), a feature that is arguably critical to any “musical” (i.e., expressive) performance or composition. This trait contributes further to the score’s unpolished sound. Additional examples of the score’s “sloppiness” include rhythmic “hiccups” or lurches (during which it sounds as if the music “skips a beat,” so to speak) and moments when the music abruptly cuts out for no apparent reason.
An example of an analog chiptune synthesizer, the sound of which features prominently in Landscapes’ score.
Week 12: Expanded Platforms
Summary
In Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward’s co-edited book The Crafty Animator (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), animator Paul Dyer claims that “the screen-based moving image has become almost dismissively commonplace, with diminished power to impact viewers viscerally” (211). In response, perhaps, to the ubiquity and relative mundanity of film, animators have expanded their practice through installations, projections/site-specific works, and live performance.
Comments
I am captivated by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar’s installation work Ghostcatching (1999). As a composer, I am used to listening to music in such a way that I can remember, for instance, the highest and lowest notes of a given melody as it unfurls. These melodic “benchmarks” help me to make sense of a musical work’s form and development. My visual memory, however, is not as well-trained when I observe contemporary dance; I sometimes have trouble understanding choreography’s structure. I find it mesmerizing and quite helpful, therefore, to see Bill T. Jones’ movements “frozen” in time and space: Kaiser and Eshkar’s artful use of motion-capture allows me to appreciate fully the complexity and overall progression of Jones’ performance.
“Shelley had to model every stroke of a hand-drawn figure as a 3D object in the computer. In other words, he executed the “drawings” entirely on the machine, in a process more like building wire sculpture than like putting pencil to paper.” Source: http://openendedgroup.com/writings/steps.html
Week 13: Games and Animation
Summary
In “The Emergence of Electronic Games,” the fourteenth chapter of A New History of Animation (Thames & Hudson 2016), Maureen Furniss notes that the gaming industry has contributed an enormous amount of capital and state-of-the-art technology to the field of animation since the 1990s (295). Despite its financial and technology contributions, however, the gaming industry has raised concerns among experimental animators due to its tendency toward hyperrealism and hypersexualized depictions of women (ibid.).
Comments
I was deeply moved by David O’Reilly’s game Everything (2017), featuring narration by Alan Watts. I believe that art’s power and societal value lies largely in its ability to cultivate patience, presence, and empathy. The vast majority of video/computer games that I have encountered are highly goal-driven, action-packed, and violent. First-person shooter games aside, I remember feeling stressed even when playing Frogger (1997)! At any rate, O’Reilly’s Everything instills in its players a sense of wonder; not for hyperrealistic graphics (O’Reilly’s, in fact, appear to espouse a “sloppy craft” aesthetic) but for the natural world and experiences outside our own. Part of me wonders if O’Reilly’s game might garner even wider acclaim if it did feature less “sloppy” animation, but then again, I feel that the simplicity of his animation focuses players’ attention inwardly, i.e., on their emotional response to the game.
English writer, speaker, and philosopher Alan Watts (1915-1973), whose voice is featured in David O’Reilly’s game Everything (2017). Watts is remembered chiefly for disseminating Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy to Western audiences.
Week 14: Generative Animation, AI, and Data-Driven Animation
Summary/Comments (No Assigned Reading)
The music for Maja Gehrig’s film Average Happiness (2019) is composed by Joy Frempong, a Swiss-Ghanaian singer and electronic musician. Frempong’s first cue occurs during the film’s opening title sequence and features, broadly speaking, electronically processed voice accompanied by synthesizers. More specifically, the voice (presumably Frempong’s own) sings only vowels: “ah”, “eh,” “ee”, “oh”, and “oo.” These sounds are the five basic vowels that are fundamental to many of the world’s languages. While Frempong may have chosen these vowels for their familiarity/universality, sonic quality, and/or variety, their presence and musical treatment also carry a deeper poetic meaning when contextualized in relation to the film’s themes:
Graphs and numbers – the dominant source material for Gehrig’s film – are typically understood and presented as abstractions; vowels carry no inherent meaning either.
Gehrig’s animation centers largely on the transformation of abstract graphs and numbers into figurative images. Similarly, Frempong uses electronic processing (trimming and sampling) to transform abstract vowels into percussive sounds that evoke (in my mind) the tone of a marimba. By processing her pre-recorded vowel sounds in a sampler, Frempong can “play” them in real-time on a MIDI keyboard as if they were notes on a piano (or marimba!); this, in turn, extends her vocal range beyond its natural limits and lends her voice a certain android-like quality that artfully mirrors the “impersonality” that we often attribute to statistics and mathematics, more broadly.
Gehrig’s film inspires reflection on the purpose and, perhaps, futility of measuring happiness with statistics. What crucial information about the experience of happiness might be missing from statistical studies? This idea of missing information is musicalized in Frempong’s first cue: not only are the vowel sounds clipped and therefore fragmentary but the melodies that they form are also derived from pentatonic (five-note) scales, which are sometimes referred to as “gapped” scales, since they are “missing” notes that are featured in the heptatonic (seven-note) scales with which many listeners are more familiar.
Composer Joy Frempong (Average Happiness) is pictured here performing with a vocoder, a device that allows her to “play” her own voice on a keyboard; this, in turn, allows Frempong to create choir-like harmonies and virtuosic melodies that would otherwise be impossible for an individual singer to execute.
Week 15: Future Visions: What’s Next?
Summary/Comments
In Greening the Media (Oxford University Press 2012), Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell pose the question: “Could constant connectedness be actively diminishing our ethical ability to dwell on interconnections between the present and future, between media and the Earth?” (4). Citing, for instance, the detriments of e-waste [2] compounded by planned obsolecence [3], Miller and Maxwell detail the un-sustainability in our current production and consumption of visual media.
One film that I feel inspires hope for the future of experimental animation is Michael Hughes’s film Xylem (2020), which harnesses the power of technology (i.e., microscopic imaging) to unveil the wondrous inner-workings of plant tissue. I am also intrigued by Keith Duncan’s original score for Xylem. First, I find interest in Duncan’s choice to underscore natural imagery (specifically, microscopic images of plant tissue) with purely electronic – i.e., synthesized or “unnatural” – sounds. Perhaps this choice reflects the notion that plant tissue, presented in such great detail, does appear otherworldly and surreal to human eyes. Furthermore, I admire the form of Duncan’s score, which gradually transitions from a chaotic energy to a more settled, celebratory, and joyful mood. This transition, I feel, reflects the shift in my perspective as I view Hughes’ film: at first, I am overwhelmed by the plant tissue’s complexity as I try to take in every flashing image; eventually, however, the images begin to wash over me, so to speak, and I start to feel more at ease, noticing, for instance, patterns among the images, which, in turn, appear increasingly beautiful.
Edinburgh-based musician, vocalist, sound engineer and sound designer Keith Duncan, whose original music is featured in Michael Hughes’s film Xylem (2020).