What is animation?
As
I was sitting in my room I started to play Spotify and the song “Thunderclouds”
by LSD came on and I decided I wanted to watch the music video. When watching
the video, I noticed there was a lot going on and there was a mix of “real”
people on screen then a crazy bright pink sky with a bus soaring through. Along
with this, a small thundercloud was following them. I actually love this music
video and I’m not even quite sure why. It’s a bit corny but, I do like the aesthetic
of it in an odd way, it kind of reminds me of the board game Candyland. I
watched the video again and started to think about our discussion in the last
class.
My
group, along with other groups were struggling to figure out whether or not we
considered certain films animation. I think we unanimously agreed at the end
that all of the films we viewed were animation in their own different ways. The
literal definition of animation is, the technique of photographing successive drawings or
positions of puppets or models to create an illusion of movement when the movie
is shown as a sequence. Just because something doesn’t “look” like its
animation doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t. For instance, Planet Earth, looked
like normal, “real” images; however, there was a specific shot of a flower
literally blooming right before our eyes. Now clearly this isn’t possible when
we see an actual flower, it takes time. Animation could be considered
manipulating time with these art forms. So, back to my video and how it relates
to animation. I was thinking, maybe this video is just CGI and/or special
effects. There are some parts that are definitely just that but, a part of the music
video stuck out to me was about 3 minutes into the film. A tear falls from the
girls face but, it’s a tear that looks like it’s drawn on, not a real teardrop.
Then the tear moves down her face as if she’s crying. I thought this was
animation due to the way this teardrop was moving within the shot.
Here’s the link: https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/287987985
I think that it is very interesting how you decided to connect this music video to our in class discussion. I agree with you that some of the films that we watched in class were almost difficult to figure out what made them animation/if we can even consider them animation. The films, as you said, are all animation in their own way, although we may not immediately put them into the category of animation.
ReplyDelete