ESSAY COMMENTARY

Manipulation, aesthetic choice, lack of identity… How is the concept of nostalgia utilised by creators of animated content?

When considering the topic for my essay, I realised that there were many different ways in which nostalgia can be injected into the process of making animated content. An obvious one is in Disney's remakes, where that simply take the vintage traditional animations they made around a decade ago, recreating it with their groundbreaking animation technology. This was an interesting topic to discuss because it was relatively ambiguous in the responses to it (having positive and negative repercussions). The fact that the directors of these remakes are playing on the nostalgia millennials have from these films created a backlash of some with nostalgic thoughts and others saying it was a rip off.

My conclusion for this issue was that films which pay homage to previous content were received much better. Unlike the Lion King, which essentially copied it's original trailer, other films respected, but didn't copy them.

GROUP PRESENTATION - RANDOM WORDS

GROUP PRESENTATION

Creating a presentation as a group showed me multiple ways to approach a topic. As my group all set out individually to find different meaning to the way one might interpret the topic: 'Random words', I was able to see the topic from a range of different perspectives. The way I approached the topic was interesting and furthers this idea because it involved searching for entirely random words in a dictionary. With this method, I could see how in doing this, you may discover an approach to a topic which you may not have thought of off the top of your head. From my peers, I saw other ways random words can be used in the creative process such as Shiritori's technique of getting the last letter from every word you use and carrying it on with the first letter of the next word. This was a playful but effective way of thinking outside the box because it goes past the limitations of an individuals mind and explores a wider range of methods.

In presenting the topic, it became clear that practice of it is essential to ensure that the presentation flows and fills the timeframe in which the presentation should be done. As the presentation was a little short, performing it with a timer prior to the day we presented would have made us see that we needed more content. However we approached the topic from many angles which were all informative on how to use it.

From the other presentations, I could see how using different ways of thinking can seriously assist in the creative process. For example, the coloured hats technique showed me that as a group, if everyone adopts a roll and inputs a set perspective, a group could take into account things like timeframe and budget, while having creative inputs from each member. This would essentially ensure an organised and efficient production pipeline in which everyone has an important role.

Study Task 9&10 - ANIMATIC

ANIMATIC

This animatic represents an accurate representation of my storyboard by depicting the movement of each scene both with camera and character. This will be useful for finalising my scenes because I have a rough idea of the in-betweens and extremes I am going to use. This is also something I could have improved on because I could have made more extreme movement with dynamic poses. If these had been more dramatic, it would translate well when animated.