Category: Design for Animation, Narrative Structures and Film Language

This week, we learned about how to edit films and what elements should be considered.

Editing: editing is an important thing if the director wants to make the film work. The definition of the editing is: Primary means of building a chain of shots and scenes into a complete film.

I also learned that each edit ends one shot and begins another. In live-action films, this usually takes place after the film has been completed. In an orthodox, narrative animation editors usually work closely with the director and the story supervisor from the point where the storyboards are ostensibly complete.

What editing can achieve:

•To place one shot next to another

•To create a narrative progression

•To end a scene and begin another

•To provide additional detail (e.g. cut to a close-up)

•To indicate narrative effect (e.g. cut to a reaction shot)

•To provide the best possible view of action for the viewer at all times

•The moment of the edit is called the ‘shot transition’

Also, there are 3 golden rules when I try to edit a film:

•Editing should remain invisible to the eye, only the effect is to be experienced – the best cut is the one you do not see

•The storyteller should never let the audience get ahead of them – less is more

•The audience has to be a participant, not just a spectator

What I noticed most is how the Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation.

Squash and Stretch – defining the rigidity and mass of an object by distorting its shape during an action
Timing and Motion – spacing actions to define the weight and size of objects and the personality of characters
Anticipation – the preparation for an action
Staging – presenting an idea so that it is unmistakably clear
Follow Through and Overlapping Action – the termination of an action and establishing its relationship to the next action
Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose Action – The two contrasting approaches to the creation of movement
Slow In and Out – the spacing of the in-between frames to achieve subtlety of timing and movement
Arcs – the visual path of action for natural movement
Exaggeration – Accentuating the essence of an idea via the design and the action
Secondary Action – the action of an object resulting from another action
Appeal – creating a design or an action that the audience enjoys watching
Personality in character animation is the goal of all of the above.

Mise-en-scène, a French term meaning “what is put into a scene” or “frame,” encompasses all the visual elements within a frame that work together to tell a story in animation and film. These components communicate critical information to the audience without the need for dialogue.

Settings & Props: Settings & Locations play an important part in the film and animation. When I decide to create a shot, I should build the settings from the beginning or I can find a place that already exists. I can manipulate the mood of the audience by building certain expectations and then taking a different turn.

Costume, Hair & Make Up: I learned that costume, hair, and makeup are used to convey a character’s personality, social status, or occupation instantly.

Facial Expressions & Body Language: I learned that facial expressions communicate emotions directly, while body language reveals relationships and underlying feelings.

Lighting and color: I learned that lighting and color profoundly affect a scene’s mood.

Positioning of Characters & Objects within the Frame: I learned that the placement of characters or objects in the frame directs the audience’s focus.

Lighting & Colour: I learned that these can be to achieve a variety of effects: To highlight important characters or objects within the frame. To make characters look mysterious by shading sections of the face & body. To reflect a character’s mental state/hidden emotions.

Depth-of-field: I learned that the distance of the lens focus.

Types of Shots: There are 4 types of shots: Long shot, medium shot, close-up, and extreme close-up.

Moving Shots: There are 3 types of moving shots:

1. Pan shot, which is the camera mounted on a non-moving base and films while pivoting on its axis along the line of the horizon from left to right to right to left.
2. Tilt shot, which is the camera can move up or down while fixed on its axis.
3. Traveling shot (dolly shot), which is the camera can move forward or backward while fixed on its axis.
4. Crane shot, which is the camera can move in and out and up and down while mounted on a mechanical crane.

Documentary animation combines factual storytelling and artistic expression, animation’s ability to visualize the unseen—emotions, memories, and abstract ideas—provides a unique way to present truths that traditional live-action documentaries cannot fully capture. documentary animation can address subjectivity and interpretation, enriching narratives that depend on personal or collective memory. Critics, however, question their validity, arguing that animation may distort factual accuracy. Yet, proponents counter that all documentaries involve creative choices, making animation as legitimate as live-action in conveying truth.

One exemplary animated work addressing social injustice is Persepolis (2007), directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. This autobiographical film portrays the life of a young girl during and after the Iranian Revolution, exploring themes of political oppression, identity, and gender inequality. Through stark, monochromatic visuals, it conveys the trauma of war and the resilience of women in patriarchal societies. Persepolis excels in its ability to universalize Satrapi’s deeply personal experiences, making them accessible to audiences worldwide. By using animation to represent complex socio-political issues, the film becomes a powerful tool for promoting empathy and awareness, demonstrating how animation can challenge societal norms and amplify marginalized voices.

In Week 4, we explored the concept of Politique Des Auteurs, widely known as Auteur Theory, which originated from the influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. This theory grew from a belief that American cinema deserved serious academic attention, challenging the idea that only a select group of elite directors could produce cinematic masterpieces. Instead, it emphasized recognizing the work of many filmmakers who had been overlooked in traditional evaluations of film artistry.

Andrew Sarris

One key figure in shaping the Auteur Theory was Andrew Sarris. His 1962 essay, Notes on the Auteur Theory, clarified the concept of auteurship, especially in the face of skepticism from American screenwriters and other film collaborators of the 1950s and 60s.

Pauline Kael

Pauline argued that Auteur Theory often overvalued directors who relied on predictable or uninspired techniques. Kael critiqued the way auteurists, including Sarris, sometimes romanticized directors’ work as cohesive artistic statements, often overlooking the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Her sharp critique highlighted the limitations of viewing cinema solely through the lens of the director’s vision.

Modes of Auteurism

Moving beyond the traditional, romanticized view of the singular “artist,” modern auteurism recognizes the contributions of various creative forces in filmmaking. This broader perspective allows us to identify auteurs not just among directors but also within other roles, including screenwriters, producers, and even corporations or creative collectives. Such a shift modernizes auteur theory, acknowledging the diverse ways cinema is shaped.

Paul Wells

Paul Wells offered unique insights into auteurism within the context of animation. Unlike live-action films, animation presents a paradox: it often involves large-scale production processes similar to Hollywood, but it can also allow creators to work independently. This duality makes animation one of the most auteur-driven art forms. Even in collaborative animation projects, the personal vision and creative style of individual artists shine through, underscoring the medium’s capacity to emphasize the creator’s personal touch.

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.

On week 2 we started a brand new journey to study the animation. Began with how to choose a critical report topic.

I learned that art is made up of various visual components that work together to create meaning and emotion. These components are called the elements of art, and they include colour, form, line, shape, space, texture, and value.

Lines: An element that is created when a point moves through space, it can be two or three dimensional and can serve various purposes, such as being descriptive, implied, or abstract.

Shape: A two-dimensional element, defined by height and width. Shapes can be geometric, like squares and circles, or organic, which are more free-form and natural.

Form: Unlike shape, form is three-dimensional and has depth, width, and height. Forms enclose volume, like cubes, spheres, pyramids, or cylinders, and can also be free-flowing.

Value: Refers to the lightness or darkness of a colour or tone. The extremes are white (lightest) and black (darkest), with middle gray representing the halfway point.

Space: This element deals with the area around and within the artwork. It defines both positive (occupied) and negative (empty) space, helping to create a sense of depth and dimensionality.

Color: Made up of three main properties:

• Hue: The name of the color, such as red, blue, or yellow.
• Value: The lightness or darkness of the color, which changes with the addition of white or black.
• Intensity: The brightness or purity of the color. High intensity colors are vivid and pure, while low intensity colors appear muted or dull.

Texture: Refers to the surface quality or the way an object feels, or appears to feel. Texture can be real (tactile) or visual (suggested by the artist).

The lecturer also mentioned that the principles of art are the methods used to organize and arrange the elements within a work of art. These principles help achieve balance, harmony, and focus within the artwork. There are 8 principles: Balance, emphasis, movement, proportion, rhythm, harmony, gradation, and variety.

Rhythm: A principle that suggests movement through the careful repetition of elements, creating a visual tempo or beat.

Balance: The arrangement of elements in a way that creates a sense of stability or equilibrium. This can be achieved symmetrically (evenly balanced) or asymmetrically (uneven balance).

Emphasis (Contrast): The technique of using different elements to highlight differences and create focal points in an artwork.

Proportion: Refers to the relationship between the size of elements in an artwork, considering their size relative to each other and the whole piece.

Gradation: The gradual change in elements such as size, color, or value. It could involve transitioning from large to small shapes, or from dark hues to light hues.

Harmony: The combination of similar elements in an artwork to emphasize their similarities, often achieved through repetition or subtle changes.

Variety: This principle focuses on introducing diversity or contrast in an artwork. Variety is created by mixing different shapes, sizes, or colors to make the artwork visually interesting.

Movement: The principle used to create a sense of action, directing the viewer’s eye through the composition of the artwork.