Bambi and Miyazaki

The  famous clip of Pixar lamp, a simple and incredible piece of digital art, still communicates a lot of power to audience.  

However, why lecturers are so obsessed with Disney Pixar, sometimes people think it is the only big company of digital animation, what about Dreamworks, Weta Workshop, etc.  It seems we still live like 60 or 70 years ago when it was Disney and nothing else.

We watched a clip of a bee considered one of the first animation clips in 3D, Bill highlighted the motion blur system and the particle system of this first attempts.  Logically use of polygons was quite basic.

But the most interesting and important think of the lecture was the Bambi and Miyazaki works. The thing which shocked me was that Bambi’s scene with Thumper was considered a homosexual complot.  There are thousands of conspiracies against Disney in this fact, most of them related with sex. Bambi, surprisingly I haven’t seen the full movie yet, is a fantastic piece of art, the rhythm of the movie fly, like editing the animation tools in Maya

Miyazaki’s work is not as speediest as Western animation but is more deep, he just need a few words to communicate a lot of information to the audience.  

Animation

In this lesson Bill was ready to avoid any technical problems like the past two weeks; he even spent a significant quantity of money to improve the quality of the videos.

 First of all, we watched a homage clip to the first cartoon ever created “The Fantasmagoric”. The clip was basically a mirror between the old version and the modern created in 3D software.  Usually the older versions have more value but not always.

Then we watched the initial version of snowhite, quite different from the classical from Disney, Bill remind us that in the past decades any kind of animation was related with Disney, he emphasises a lot this aspect.  And know everybody talks about Pixar, any change?

The next clip was about Chuck Jones cartoons, and I watched with a bit nostalgia because I used to watch this cartoons some years ago with my sister, anyway, the clip was a tribute of Duffy Duck to animators. Looney Tunes characters are symbols of one quality, some are winners (Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner...) while others are losers (Duffy Duck, Coyote, Sylvester...), and actually there is not a middle character in this saga. This is a fact which was always in front of me and I knew a couple of days ago.

The last one, and the most boring (I’m not the only one who considered this) was a clip called “The street of crocodiles”, I still cannot find the sense in this clip.

Violence

The lesson of this MH started surprisingly with Ivan and Bill giving explications about the clips watched last week because of some students complained about their violent content. Personally, I don’t undertstand this fact, since someone said nobody is going to hire us just to draw some teddy bears or Pokemons, probably in some parts of our life we will need to create a modern version of the AK 47.

This lesson was about violence and his relation with the contemporary culture.  We watch a clip of a school shooting and then Bill told us something about shooting games that I have never appreciated before, the fact that a person reminds with nostalgia his great shoots in these games, personally still I am very proud of my headshots in Gears of War but then you think and ask yourself “ and I’m proud of this?”

Tarantino said: "Violence is the best way to communicate with the audience" Unfortunately we are too much connected to Quentin's films. 

 

Then Bill demonstrate by some samples of modern games and some comments of Malcom how governments influence the games for their purposes, specially USA. And then somebody asked me “ John Wayne was a famous  actor for killing red Indians or for being a good actor?

Science Fiction

The lesson of this week was a about a very popular and well-known genre: science fiction.

Bill show us one clip of a studio of San Francisco to demonstrate what kind of person is behind a great movie, a funny a modest one. Also he wants to show us his relationships in animation industry.

We check the difference between symbol, icon and index, this was quite boring, and it reminds me my psychology lessons in Spain. The concepts are the same in both fields.

Then we viewed one of the most famous fake photos of modern history, the tourist on the top of twin towers, then we view another from Iraq tortures, it still can produce a bad rough.  Probably they still worse things but who cares?

The session was full of scenes of alien creatures and other similar stuff originated in the past decades. As  Bill and Malcom later talked about this films, you can check easily they love them.

The conclusion of Bill was that science fiction is a genre full of intertextuality, like the saga of Stars Wars. 

New Media

The first class with Bill Schaefer after the lessons of Ivan Phillips started with a bit of nostalgia. The personality of Ivan of Ivan was still in the theatre, it was strange to look at the central stage and see somebody else, but whatever, always we need to be prepared for new experiences.

Bill with a very different style, personally I how he moves around the stage, it is an impressive pose.  He talked about New Media, he has the ability to create quickly some confusion between the students.  The most interesting part I appreciate from his Bill it was that all kind of New Media (magazines, books, websites, films, etc.) can be manipulated.  Totally agree with that, it is quite strange why people are easier to manipulate when they know to read and write instead of when they are illiterate.

We watched some interesting clips of movies and famous games such as space invaders and Dragons lair ( I became crazy after watching the same clip repeatedly) , Bill had some technical problems but anyway it is a good beginning. 

Binary Opposition

When Ivan started giving  examples of binary opposition in order to understand better this concept I remembered my philosophy classes two years ago in Spain, the defined land between elements such as good-evil, win-lose, black-white,... it seemed quite similar to Plato’s theory about pure ideas (Beauty, Truth, Love,...).

However, this was just a small part of a theory and know we the main problem how we arrived at this point, in other words, how we made  a significant difference between two elements. It’s quite interesting how sometimes we find the meaning of a fact just looking at the opposite direction.  

The most interesting part was when Ivan Philips mentioned the zone of indeterminacy, especially the sample of the quay, it is shocking how our unconscious choose these locations to certain prohibit activities, it is like a join point.  Adding some intertextuality to this fact, in “The Ghost & the Darkness 1997” Val Kilmer (an engineer) was asked: “Why do you like to build bridges?” and he answered “Because I’m joining two different worlds...”

Intertextuality

This lesson, one of the best I have ever witnessed, started with Ivan giving various definitions of intertextuality,  probably the more easy to understand was by Julia Kristeva : “Transposition of one (or several) sign system (s) into another...

I’ve never thought before watching the scene on Thursday there was a relation between the scene of Madagascar 2 and the original film Planet of the Apes (1968), definitely for some adults  it should be a great experience, for next generations it was just a stupid scene. 

 In recent times, if we look at some of the most famous series like The Simpsons or Family Guy, they are full of intertextuality; every scene reminds you something if you watch carefully. Personally I think it is due to a lack of new original ideas. 

The funniest part of the lesson was the intertextuality between John Travoltas’s films. A part from the song of Grease (which still produce sense of moving the body), intertextuality has an important role to influence human behaviour. If you think, a person is a group of influences which has he has received and sometimes influences are similar to intertextuality. 

Anyway, one of the lessons I will always remind.