Context of Practice Lecture 6

Animation

Derived from the Latin word 'animare' meaning 'to give life to'.
Animation is the act of creating a series of images that create the illusion of movement using the persistence of vision.
Humans have created image sequences for thousands of years decorating vases, walls, bowls and lots more.
4,000 years ago Egyptians were drawing on walls. Then came the magic lantern by Christian Huygens in 1650. It was a projector that when it revolves, produces different images. There are only two images but its still creating movement.
Next came the Phenakistoscope designed by Plateau and Von Stampfer. This was a disk with a series of images drawn on evenly around the centre of the disk they are all put at different distances from the centre. There was also slots in the disc so you can put it in front of a mirror and look through it and spin the wheel and it would look like the image was moving from the inside out.


I think this is so clever for its time! I love the effect.

Next was the Zoeatrope- 1834. This is a cylinder with slots cut out of the sides and a series of images stuck inside so when you look through a hole and spin it, the images appear to move!
 
Then came flipbooks in 1868 by Piere- Hubert Devignes.

'Animation is not the art of drawing but the art of making movements that are drawn' Norman McLaren 1949

I particularly like an original animation by Windsor McCay called Gertie the Dinosaur.  It's lovely and a huge step in its time, combining a human with animation and they seem to interact. It was also the first to use key frames, registration marks and tracing paper.
1928-1957 was the golden age of animation. Beginning with Walt Disney. This started out with steam boat Willie which had a synchronised sound track. He went on to do a number of 'silly symphonies'
In 1937 Snow white was made costing $1.7 million. Silly symphonies was then re done as 'Fantasia' in bright colour and so much better than the old ones. I remember this to be fabulous.

Then came the television age 1958-1985.Things like the Flintstones from 1960.
Then toward the digital age there was wind in the willows in 1983 and Pixars Luxo jr. in 1986 using 3D animation software. After that the first 3D animated feature film toy story was made in 1995. This made way for lots of new things.

Context of Practice Lecture 5

Print

Chronology - The sequential order in which past events occur.
Print-1-to pruduce (a text, picture etc) by applying inked types, plates, blocks, or the like to paper or other material either by direct pressure or indirectly by offsetting an image onto an intermediate roller.
2-To produce or design a pattern by engraving on a block.
3-To form a design or pattern upon, as by stamping with an
engraved plate or block: to print calico.

4-To cause (a manuscript, text, etc.) to be published in print.Print is documentation its communication and reproduction and it's factual.
Knowledge is power.
Unfortunately the phrase ;if its in print it is seen to be factual' is quite unfortunate in today society because things you read in newspapers such as the star are hardly ever accurate.
We had to miss this lecture because we were at Bradford animation festival and the PDF was not very helpful as it didn't have any lecture notes or anything so this is all I could get from it.

Context of Practice Lecture 4

Pictures at work

what is illustration?

Illustration is strategic image making, used within the context of visual communication to convey meaning or concept.

A drawing of Mel Gibson isn't illustration. It has to portray meaning, purpose, problem.

Tony the tiger on the Frosties box is illustration. It was created for a reason- to sell the cereal. It was done on a brief.

The earliest form of visual communication was done in illustrations. We naturally respond to imagery.
The difference between Lance Wyman's U.S national zoo stuff and Jillian Tamaki's stuff for the national geographic is that Lance was creating visual signs that were simple and universally recognised and Jillian's work was designed to look nice. But they are both forms of illustration.

There are SO many different styles of illustration and each person has their own and that makes them unique. I particularly like this image we were shown in the lecture. James Jean for Prada. It's truly beautiful. I love the colours and the mix of techniques.



There is a massive demand for visual content within media like websites, magazines, t-shirts etc. We all need each others skills too for example a graphic designer might employ an illustrator to help with a magazine or poster. They also may employ a web designer to get their things online. Or visa versa the web designer may employ an illustrator to put an arty edge on the website they were designing.

Good illustration is more than illumination- it can be functional. An illustrator was used in the making of GTA. Many things like this that you wouldn't think of, like portraying war from first hand how it really was.

Context of Practice Lecture 3

Chronologies

The first thing we learnt in this lecture was that Microsoft are the enemy of time. Basically they stole Helvetica as soon as it stopped being protected by copy write laws.

The need for typography comes from the need for a physical representation of our language to document history.
It started in Mesopotamia 3200 BC and Mesoamerica 600 BCE, a settlement based civilisation in the Persian gulf- Mediterranean.

The alphabet consistently assign letters to continents and vowels on an equal basis. Knowing this, we can see that the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet which was adapted from the Phoenician. Latin is a further development from the Greek.

It was when people started living closer and had the need to talk to each other that this was needed and made.

William foster passed the elementary education act in 1870-1895. This made sure that children got the education they needed because there was now a need to produce more written things an no one to do it.

Because of this rise in demand, they had to do mass production. This meant there was no time to do pretty hand made things so then came the time for things like letterset and typewriters. Johannes Gutenberg 1450, worked on the first printing press what was later developed for this mass production use.

They had to make new typefaces for example Helvetica was made to be clear and readable and mass producible. The same with Arial 25 years later.

In modern times, type is everywhere. Type is image, object, animation, print, internet.
Unfortunately it is more difficult to read long documents on the web as it strains your eyes and as the internet is all around us now, our brains have gotten used to reading short documents and is 'poisoning our ability to read long documents'
Unfortunately also is the fact that Microsoft limit our type options...one of them being comic sans...say no more.

Context of Practice Lecture 2

Visual communication

Is this an apple?

Our job as designers is to solve problems and communicate through art an design. 'Visual communication' is based on a world wide understanding of signs, symbols, gestures and objects.
This is like the universal symbol for male and female, which can be altered to mean male and female toilets. Pictures can be read. You can create universal instructions using images.
 'All that is necessary for a language to exist is an agreement amongst a group of people that one thing can stand for another'. I think that is a very good quote. When you think about it, it's strange that people have different languages that they have developed because of agreement. For example sign language is like a visual representation of this. You can see that one movement means a word and people have learnt to understand this. Its all very interesting! it started off with drawings on caves and things sending messages of danger of people being attacked, and now we have alphabets in all different languages!

It's also interesting that symbols can mean multiple things until put into context for example ...+....could mean plus, and, religion, hospital, etc but when you put it with ...+-x... it can only mean plus.

Colour is also information for example red is danger, green is good.

Visual syntax is the way the image is framed/ constructed. It can be read in different ways but the way its constructed defines this. for example a picture of an egg. a picture of an egg in a cup, a picture of a fried egg, a picture of a fried egg with a fry up. They're all eggs, yet they're all telling different stories.
This fits into our social ideals. Somehow, we have all agreed that certain things look good, and certain things don't. This can be to do with the colour, lighting, placement, quality. If these elements are wrong, people subconsciously don't like it. It can be the same thing but if its positioned better and lit better- it is better.

Visual semantics is the way images fit into our cultural process of communication. Created through form and meaning, for example, road signs. Most people know what they mean because they have been taught, they are everywhere, they are familiar.

Semiotics is the study of signs and sign process.  Sometimes signs can look like one thing but stand for something else. The apple, is it just an apple? it could mean new York-the big apple! it could mean apple computers, but all when put into context.
 

The Hand vs Surogat

In this essay I will be comparing and contrasting two animations. The first one is Jiri Trnka- The hand, and the second is Dusan Vukotic and Zagres Film Surogat (ersatz).

The hand is a stop motion animation with a bit of pixilation about a little man who likes to make pots on his pottery wheel. He owns a little plant that he looks after that stands in one of his pots. He seems like a happy man until one day a giant hand comes into his home and tells him to make a hand sculpture. The man refuses and as a result gets forced into doing what he's told. He still stands up for himself and tries to get away and because of this he dies.

Surogat is a 2D hand drawn animation about a little triangle man who has everything he needs in the back of his car, he just has to use a bicycle pump  to blow them up. He is having fun until he blows up a woman for himself that doesn't like him and he tries to win her back. When he fails, he kills her and the guy she liked by deflating them, then leaves but on the way home he runs over a nail which bursts his car and he dies.

I believe both of these stories are about consumerism. The hand was about a man making things he likes but wasn't selling them and the hand wanted him to make something that the public wanted. He would be famous and honoured for his work. He didn't want to do this though he was just happy with his life.
Surogat on the other hand was about a man who had everything he wanted or needed and was very happy. The only thing he couldn't conjure was love.

In this respect the two animations are quite similar. They both also end in death, have no dialogue.

In my opinion The Hand is quite a long animation and to me, not particularly interesting however the art work was good if a little dull in colour but the guy had no facial expressions which could have made it better. It was a neat idea having a big hand forcing him to do things as that's just like what big bosses and society does in real life just with laws and things not physically moving you.
Although it is 'one of the milestones of Czech and world animation. In 1984 the American Film Academy declared it the fifth best animated picture in history', I did not enjoy it. 
Surogat was a more captivating story with really clever ideas and a catchy tune, but less than inspiring artwork although brighter than The Hand. It was also very funny whereas The Hand was  more of a drama. I really enjoyed Surogat and thought it was quite cleaver that to kill someone, you deflate them. It's like a funny and less gruesome way to die but still getting the point across. Also the fact that the whole world deflates reminds the audience that the whole thing was fake, but you still feel empathy for the character.

Both animations get their point across they just do it in very different ways.

OUAN401- Context of practice Lecture 1

Lecture 1

Today was our first lecture on context of practice. The photography part was quite interesting. It was about the Mass Observation founded in 1937, documenting life in Britain. We learned that it was done from a Posh persons perspective, so they went to the worst places they could find and this is how the lower working class ended up being portrayed to everyone else, when in actual fact it was not all like this.

The image to the untrained eye looks like a 'carefully composed, gentle, humorous photograph' but it's actually a guy with a camera under his coat and the guy holding his hand up like he is waving, is actually objecting to the photograph being taken. I find it fascinating that things can been seen in a totally different way to what actually happened. If someone tells you its one thing then that's all you see.

The second part was on animation. We watched 'The hand' or 'Jiri Trnka'. It was quite strange and almost a little scary.

It was about a little man who was minding his own business when a giant hand decided to force him to make a statue of a hand. The giant hand make the little man into a puppet and forced him to work. When the little man tried to run away, the hand killed him. This portrays a message of how society works, how we are to conform to rules and regulations and how we are told what to do and if we don't, there are consequences. We are all puppets to the higher powered people.
We also watched 'Tested for the unexpected' by tony Kaye.

It was to advertise Dunlop tyres but it was a bit off the wall for its time. It was shot in black and white then coloured in post production. There is debate about whether it is an advertisement or a piece of art in its own right.

We then had a bit on illustration. It started off about Norman Rockwell. He illustrated small town American life which became very popular.

This art was done in a time of depression and in the rise of abstract Avant garde art. It was basically like the fairy tale version of America, but it isn't how everyone lives. It was a bit of a front. a 'mythic identity for America'. His art was very technically good and other artists like graphic designers depended on that skill to help them, but with new technical and digital processes, there was a decline in the need for illustrators.

Lastly we looked at graphic design, particularly typography. We were taught about three typefaces. Times New Roman, Fraktur and Universal. Firstly, Times New Roman which is an English typeface by Stanley Morison in 1932.

 It started as a Roman font, which the English decided to use to link the Romans great empire to Britain's great empire, showing cultural superiority.
Fraktur was a German typeface used for signage and propaganda posters in the time of the war.

 Its supposed to represent the Germans superiority of cultures and people and national superiority. I just found it difficult to read (yes I know the poster was in German).
Universal was a European typeface created at Bauhaus, proposed by Herbert Bayer but never actually created.

 It was to be a typeface that everyone can use, with no political connotations or historic content, no uppercase letters, very plain and neutral. He wanted to create it to unify people not separate them like the previously mentioned typefaces.

In conclusion these contextual studies lectures will be about seeing things we don't usually get to see from the 21st century outside of the cultural paradigm.

"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates