Author: Hanze Liu

This week we explored the significance of experimental animation and how early pioneers and their innovative works established a foundation for modern practical and theoretical animation studies. The ability of artists to manipulate multiple images revolutionized the way they conveyed ideas through motion, often challenging conventional art styles.

Abstraction:

1. It does not relate to concrete objects but expresses something that can only be appreciated intellectually.

2. It does not aim to depict an object but is composed with a focus on internal structure and form.

3. Emotionally detached or distanced from something.

4. A concept or term that does not refer to a concrete object but that denotes a quality, an emotion, or an idea.

5. To develop a line of thought from a concrete reality to a general principle or an intellectual idea

We examined two forms of abstraction: formative and conceptual.

• Formative abstraction highlights visual elements such as shapes, colors, and movement. This type of abstraction emphasizes core visual components, such as color, form, space, light, texture, and dynamic qualities like rhythm and movement. These elements are treated as the primary focus of the artwork.
• Conceptual abstraction emphasizes the underlying ideas and themes of the artwork. This term relates to the abstraction and juxtaposition of narrative structures or storytelling tools, traditional cannons, and communicative vehicles. These approaches question and build film language, challenge perception and exploit semiotics metaphor and symbolism.

In addition; we learned what elements we should consider when analyzing and implementing an experimental animation.

Categorisation; Genre & Sub-genre What is the work’s background/setting, mood/tone, theme, or topic?

Form and Function; interpreting meaning and relating it to the format, or presentational mode:

Process; The techniques, materials, and technologies applied within the work and the relationships between message and medium, (Does process, technique,e or tool become the message?)

Formal Elements; Use of space/composition, Light & color, movement, rhythm, timing, pacing, transition, and audio relationships.

When engaging with formal experimental animation, it is crucial to consider these elements for a deeper analysis and implementation.

Non-dialogued film:

we learned about non-dialogued film, which includes a lot of categories of films and animation, like Hollywood’s silent films, surrealist films, children’s narratives, and expressionism, these directors started to use gesture and performance, filmic language, special effects, and alternative audio components to replace the dialogue. Also, we learned that Paul Well mentioned a number of devices that enable animation to acceptably deviate from the traditional narrative structure in his book Understanding Animation(1998).

1. Metamorphosis: is the ability for an image to literally change into another completely different image.
2. Condensation: Animation predominantly occurs in the short form, and manages to compress a high degree of narrational information into a limited period of time through processes of condensation.
3. Sound: The soundtrack of any film, whether animated or live-action, tends to condition an audience’s response to it. Sound principally creates the mood and atmosphere of a film, and also its pace and emphasis, but, most importantly, also creates a vocabulary by which the visual codes of the film are understood.
4. Symbolism and metaphor: Symbolism, in any aesthetic system, complicates narrative structure because a symbol may be consciously used as part of the image vocabulary to suggest specific meanings, but equally, a symbol may be unconsciously deployed, and, therefore, may be recognized as a bearer of meaning over and beyond the artist’s overt intention.
5. Synecdoche: literally a device by which the depiction of part of a figure or object represents the whole of the figure or object. (In some respects this is also similar to the use of metonymy, which is the substitution of an image for its action, e. g. a symbol of a bottle instead of the act of drinking.) This can be used in two specific ways. First, to signify the specificity of a narrative event (Le. the close-up of a hand opening a safe), and second, to operate as a metaphor within a narrative (i.e. the hand becomes a cipher for the idea of a character or a specific associative meaning).
6. Fabrication: Three-dimensional animation is directly concerned with the expression of materiality, and, as such, the creation of a certain meta-reality that has the same physical properties as the real world. This fabrication essentially plays out an alternative version of material existence, recalling narrative out of constructed objects
7. and environments, natural forms and substances, and the taken-for-granted constituent elements of the everyday world.
8. Associative relations: Associative relations are principally based on models of suggestion and allusion which bring together previously unconnected or disconnected images to logical and informed rather than surreal effect.
9. Acting and performance: ‘Acting’ in the animated film is an intriguing concept in the sense that it properly represents the relationship between the animator and the figure, object, or environment he/she is animating.
10. Choreography: Hundreds of animated films can provide evidence of good ‘acting’, but even more can illustrate the prominence of the dynamics of the movement itself as a narrative principle.
11. Penetration: One of the outstanding advantages of the animated film is its power of penetration. The internal workings of an organism can easily be shown in this medium.

This is an experimental music animation film, and the genre of this animation is a conceptual abstraction. It was made by Max Hattler in 2005, the director used the camera to catch light and objects in the night city and arranged them together in a graphic sequence. There are some shots in between, which are of irregular motion, and the shutter time is extended to make the light trails. In other shots, two or more images are overlapped. The visual style of this work is matched with jazz music let the audience produce some bizarre hallucinations when they watch it.