Improvement of technology but constant art?

So in the lecture we talked about how the technology improves, but art continues to stay the same. I personally don't believe that. Lets talk about this graph:

Ok so why is this true? Is art an constant which doesn't change? Are we only following the traditional methods without bringing anything new to it? I don't think that's true and moreover let's add some more factors and examine the next graph.

Technology is being improved every single second, but this unlocks more possibilities for artists and boosts art along with it. But the effort put into the making of the final product has definitely decreased. Over the years technology used in movies has never been so common. It's cheaper than physical effects, it is broader of possibilities, it can create thing that you can never create physically and the lights that you can use to light 3D scenes have abilities which every movie director will kill to have in physical state. With the development of technology, the visual side of movies has never been so beautiful and believable. Blockbusters such as "Inception (2010)", "Alice in wonderland (2010)", "Avatar (2010)" show us what modern CGI can produce, and I think it is quite AMAZING. But there is no doubt that the meaningful side of movies has decreased. What happened to the stories, the mysteries, the shock after realizing the real murderer... I haven't experienced any satisfaction from seeing new high-budget-movies ( there are some exceptions though ). But film giants like Disney and Pixar ( now together ) kept their creativity. It seems like only CGI movies now can actually show some professional storyboarding and unique screenplay. But let'd dig into the past first.

Pixar:



The adventures of Andre and Wally B. (1984)

This animation shows the great improvement of the 3D software that Pixar used, which are:
-motion blur
-particle systems (for the creation of the forest)
-Bending the model (the first type of rigging)

Pixar are and will always be the best animation company in the world. They are the company which shows what 3D can do now, but in stylized way and synthetic style of nature.

"Ideology is the false obviousness of everyday life" Louis Althusser
This quote is so, so true. People set ideals so they can look up to something they can never be. The main factor of development is competition. If we have something to fight for, and believe that reaching it will give us eternal happiness, we will be twice more productive. But something can never be ideal, there will always be imperfection, which makes it believable. But we need ideals so we can always fight for perfection, and know that by following the example set by something perfect, everything will be OK. Human's mind is always curious and hungry for the unknown, which will leads us to too many solutions to a problem, if we don't have the pre set ideal of the goal. These ideals are easily shown by animation. The best example is soviet propaganda art:

Cartoon dominants such as Disney are mentors of modern youth. A lot of kids are brought up following the rules set by Disney animations.

Bambi (1942)

One of the most touching movies I've ever seen...This movie shows to children various of important things. For example the forest is shown in such a beautiful way, synthetic style as a combination of what it is as physical objects and it's beauty as a pure element, not harming anybody and living in peace and joy (well, until humans invade it...). On the technical side, its the first animation that uses anatomy for Bambi's movement, it looks like there is a real deer skeleton inside the main character's body. They had biological specialists in the studio to whom they can refer to at any point. They also used an chinese style for making the elements from the forest to fade in a certain point, so they can fill the point of interest with curiosity. There are places where your imagination can inhabit. Also, this is one of the first cartoons to use multiplaning:

 The 2D way to fake 3D. I have to say that my favourite part of the lecture came with this sentence : "First they become stiff, then they vibrate, and then they melt and become soft...". Bill definitely killed us all with that lol :D . The lecture ended with the expected anime talk. Studio Ghibli is I have to say, the best studio there is. Movies like Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbour Totoro and Princess Mononoke have to be seen by everyone. A true piece of art. The interesting part was when the lecturer analysed the scene from My Neighbour Totoro when they planted the seeds and the tree went into bursting metamorphosis. I never knew that this was actually a reference to atomic bombs, or being more exact - in 1945, USA dropped an uranium bomb called "Little Boy" on Hiroshima and 3 days later they dropped an plutonium bomb called "Fat Man" on Nagasaki.

And finally, a quote worth mentioning -
"We are subjects to a result of our experience" by Malcolm Armstrong

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members. By members I mean exactly people like the Quay Brothers (or Brothers Quay). Every artist has a different way to express what he needs to say. Some surrealists had different ideas in mind before the final product, but this is due to limitations set by the government. Most of the countries now-a-days don't have restrictions as they once had. It wasn't that easy to show everything you felt, I believe. Surrealism as way of expressing is unique. Followers of the revolutionary movement, like the Quay Brothers, have no meaningful spoken dialogue in their movies, with a very few exceptions. Surrealists transform their message in a way that only few can understand. Their creations are something far more different than the "normal" movies created for the masses. Surrealists use both organic and inorganic elements combined with music (mostly composed by Leszek Jankowski). Jan Švankmajer, for whom they named one of their films (The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer), is also frequently cited as a major influence, but they actually discovered his work relatively late, in 1983, by which time their characteristic style had been fully formed. Art comes in all shapes and sizes, but this is art itself. The first time I saw their masterpieces was during the lecture, but I've been enjoying surrealism long before that. OK, that's enough for the introduction, let's analyse some examples.





This is one of their most famous shorts - Street of Crocodiles (1987).
"In that city of cheap human material, no insticts can flourish, no dark and unusal passions ca be aroused THE STREET OF CROCODILES was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption.The misfortune of that area is that nothing ever succeeds there, nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a cardboard imitation, a photo montage cut out from last year's mouldering newspapers"
They clearly say what their goal was with that short. The whole movie has a dark environment and mechanisms connecting everything. It is one of the most incredible stop-motions that I've ever seen. They bring to life every object in the artificial city. Only the elements in the scene are lit which makes the viewer's eye curious of what is beyond the scene, what lives in the dark corners and the streets of the unknown. It is clear that most of the people who have seen Tim Burton's work will notice the similarity. The camera angles and the pans are amazing, one of the best designs I've ever seen. Let's analyse the environment:
-dark corners
-crisp macro focus
-blurry surroundings
-foggy background
-cold colours
-unreal inhabitants
-unknown mechanics
-freaky dolls
-adoreness of the piece of meat
The message which they bring with that is that the future of the humanity will be like that. The EXACT opposite of NATURE. 1987 is an after war period. Period of government changes and numerous reforms in order to control the mass of people.

Dimensions Of Dialogue and Passionate Dialogue (1982)

Another example of what can be said through unreal motions.Created by Jan Švankmajer (born 4 September 1934 in Prague) is a Czech surrealist artist. His work spans several media. He is known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Quay and many others. When looking at something like this you have to consider when it was made and where. Svankmajer created this, and many other animations, during the communist rule in Czechoslovakia to comment on the political unrest while trying to stay under the radar by not blatantly coming out and saying his opinions. The technique and subject matter are very deliberate and while it may mean nothing to someone today, it was very clear what this means when this was made. Not all art is good, but this IS. The meaning of the first part - Passionate Dialogue is clearly the intimate love between a woman and a man (sex), and how they abbandon what they found - love. Both of them don't want it, so they start to fight over it and eventually they destroy each other. The second part is about the control set by communism. Work together and you will succeed, don't follow the rules, everything is out of order and you fail. Well, I'm glad I was born after 1989 :D

Meat Love (1989)

Short and simple, the opposite of "The American Dream". We don't care who you are and what you have, you are who you are, a piece of steak, jump in the frying pan. I find this humorous because it is what fairy tales aren't. Realism or pessimism, I don't know but it definitely doesn't say that you are free to do what you want.

Genre

The term genre is used a lot around the movie industry to break down the type of film into categories. It's difficult to place a lot of films in a single category. For this reason a lot of films have multiple genres. New movies are created daily and there is always reference to other script, author, director or a book. Made recognisable intentionally as intertextuality or due to inspiration from the reference's creator. This is why a movie can never be "categorised" enough. There will always be something that doesn't match the genre. But based on the main elements, movies are categorised accordingly so they can suit the needs of search engines and movie databases. I think this is due to the fact that movie's storyboards now-a-days are a reflection of the audience's desires. With easy access to media everywhere (internet, television, adverts, etc.) , the viewer's knowledge has increased drastically, leading to increased interest in detail. The audience will always search for some hidden joke signified by another interesting tabloid title or for similarity with another movie. This is mostly seen in teenage series like "Family Guy", "South Park", "The Simpsons" and etc. On the other hand, in full-lenght movies, the audience will look for realism in horror and thrillers, or for logic in sci-fi. Let's analyse these two genres. 

HORROR and THRILLER (not the Michael Jackson one)

Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

Director: 

Wes Craven

Writer: 

Wes Craven

Stars:

 Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp and Robert Englund

Now that's what I'm talking about. When I say horror and realistic, I mean that. Modern CGI effects are good, but still not good enough so they can full the human's curious eye. 3D objects are too noticeable and the reactions are too predictable. Old school effects is what should have been enhanced. Every modern eye can see this movie and say "oh my God, this was scary".  These original effects combined with lighting, depressing music, narrow halls and tiny rooms, this is what the magic was.

Analysing the introductory scene from Pixar’s Up using C.Veli-Strauss’ and Barthes’ structuralist and semiotic ideas of binary opposition, connotation, denotation and myth.

Signs take the form of words, meanings, memories, sounds, flavours or objects, but without investing any meaning, such things can not become signs. With the evolution of CGI in movies, more and more emotions can be evoked by scenes. In contrast of pictures, where everything is still and more open to observation, films are motion graphics which show us numerous elements without letting the viewers’ brain rest. Therefore everything needs to be expressed in a quick, symbolic way. In order for a family movie (such as Pixar’s Up) to be successful, it needs to appeal to a wider sphere of viewers, or to be more specific - the young and the adult audience. What makes the movie understandable to both sides? One can look to the studies of structuralism and semiotics which describes how the human brain works and explains what triggers the audience’s emotions when shown a set of organized coloured pixels.

Denotation tends to be described as the ‘common sense’ meaning of a sign, when connotation is the deeper meaning behind it, controlled by cultural differences, feelings, mental states and even memories. The younger audience will be mostly unable to understand everything that the director had in mind, but will be able to understand the main concept of the story, and more importantly, the humoristic and dramatic emotions provoked by different situations. This process coincides with Panofsky’s claim that the denotation of an image or a piece of art will be seen as the same by people of different cultures and mind sets, excluding the really young and the mentally unstable, (Panofsky 1970: 51-53). A child’s mind will recognize the literal meaning of the CGI objects within a given frame. On the other hand, the more developed consciousness of adults will perceive deeper meaning and have a greater understanding of the story line and the themes developed throughout the motion picture. In semiotics, this is referred to as connotation. Fiske attempts to define it by arguing that 'denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how it is photographed' (Fiske 1982:91). ‘Connotation’ refers to the personal associations from the receiver’s point of view and how one interprets the signifier. Factors such as culture, religion, ideologies, upbringing and experience all affect the understanding gained by the viewer. Having this in mind, this essay will consider these structuralist and semiotic ideas to analyse the scene form Pixar’s Up (the scene starts at 00:07:29  and finishes at 00:11:23).

FIGURE 01 (00:07:29, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

At the beginning of the scene (fig.01), Mister Fredricksen –the main character of Up- is starting a new life with his wife, Ellie. He is depicted carrying her up to their new house, portrayed in a clichéd style, a quaint wooden house in a country environment. By analysing the connotation in the image, we can come to a conclusion that the house represents the starting of a new life, as it is the first step of commitment. This imagery is powerful as it represents the stereotypes about married couples and the younger audience will acknowledge it by its denotation.

FIGURE 02 (00:07:32, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

Following this, the couple is seen restoring and repairing the old house in which they are about to live, so impatient to start their new lives that they are still in their wedding outfits (fig.02). The older audience will understand and relate to the imagery in this scene by empathising with its connotation as they know how exciting the first days of marriage are. Judging by the denotation, children will understand this scene because they notice the lack of furniture as a symbol of beginning. The wedding outfits represent the impatience in a way for the younger audience to comprehend.

FIGURE 03                                               FIGURE 04

(00:07:42, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)            (00:07:46, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

Mr. Fredricksen and Ellie are then seen signing the mailbox in paint. By accident he leaves a hand mark of paint on the mail box, Ellie finds this funny and does the same. Children will understand that the couple’s relationship involves love and unity, which is symbolized by the touching hands in paint, hand painting being an activity that they used to perform at an early age. Figures 1, 2 and 3 show how the progress of the scene works together to create this image, of unity and working together in marriage, by its direct meaning. The house’s colours are bright and mostly from the warm part of the colour wheel, emphasising the happy mood and positive vibe of the scene.

FIGURE 05 (00:08:29, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

The following example represents the couple’s next step- planning to start a family. Lying next to each other, they are seen looking into the sky, which represents their thought process. The fact that this process is shown through clouds is due to the fact that clouds are mostly used as iconic symbols, such as in comics and cartoons, as bubbles that represent thought rather than speech.

FIGURE 06 (00:08:35, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

As seen in (fig.06), the theme of pregnancy is approached with innocent imagery. The connotation of the image reveals that the bright colours represent happiness. The ladder and the finishing in progress represent that the room is brand new and it is being prepared for a new arrival, referring to the baby. The third signified from the image is the stork on the wall. Kids know the stereotype, in fairy tales, of babies being brought by storks instead of the actual biological process. This third signified is referred to as the third order of signification (Fiske & Hartley 1978, 43; O'Sullivan et al. 1994, 287) also known as myth.

 

FIGURE 07                                              FIGURE 08

(00:09:34, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)        (00:09:45, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

The sequential scenes shown here in (fig.07) and (fig.08) are made to follow one and the other to illustrate and emphasise the contrast between the young Carl and elderly Mr Frederiksen. This is achieved by the changing in age of the protagonist by the style of the outfit that changes over time. In the first scene (fig.07), the connotation meaning of the tie is that it has bright colours and represents youth and desire to achieve and maintain a good look. In the latter (fig.08) it represents less caring about self-image and a neutral response to the judgement of others. This is shown by the grey top and the simple bow tie replacing the stylish tie.

FIGURE 09 (00:11:12, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

As they grew older, Ellie unfortunately dies due to natural causes. Because of the change in the mood, the colour theme changes to cold colour associated with a depressing soundtrack. The connotation associated with the dark red colour is love and grief, the church setting helping the imagery of the funeral ceremony and the passing away of Mr. Fredricksen’s love. The long shadows and the lower light value of the image represent staying until late afternoon, this is also increased by the character being alone.

Glaze (1994) explains binary oppositions as the following: These occur in nature and naturally in the human mind. They are such things as night and day, left and right or nature and culture. Nature and culture often functions as a binary opposition in tales. However, depending on the tale or myth the binary opposition changes. For example, the binary opposition life and death is a useful one to explicate the scene. Ferdinand De Saussure - “the means by which units of language have value or meaning; each unit is defined against what it is not.” (Fogarty, 2005).

                          FIGURE 10                                                                        FIGURE 11
   (00:07:46, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)         (00:11:23, Up, Pixar Animation Studios) Having the above mentioned in mind, it can be seen clearly that fig.10 is a total opposite of fig.11. In the first picture we can see bright and warm colours with highly saturated theme and environment lighting. Having these details, fig.10 can be categorised as ‘Happiness’. The picture on the right (fig.11) reveals the same colours of the house, but with darker environment, low saturated colours. Therefore it can be categorised as ‘Sadness’. Using the structuralist ideas for binary opposites, the formula for expressing feelings through pictures can be made. The happier the first scene is, the sadder the following change of mood will be.

                          FIGURE 12                                                                     FIGURE 13
 (00:10:35, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)         (00:07:51, Up, Pixar Animation Studios)

Another example of binary opposition can be seen in the attached figures.

In conclusion, analysing this scene has distinguished the methods throughout which the developers of Up used the structuralist and semiotic ides of binary opposition, combined with connotation, denotation and myth in order to tell a story in a way that will be acknowledged easily by the modern audience. By understanding the way that the human brain processes the information, it is possible to use simple things like pictures on walls, correct colour themes and the fading in and out of various sound effects, to transform a series of digital images into a perfect play with a perfect script.

 Ivaylo Danev,

University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield

25 November 2010

Bibliography

World Wide Web References:

Blackwell Reference Online. Binary Opposition and Myth. Available at: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631207535_chunk_g97806312075355_ss1-14 [Accessed 23 November 2010]

Chandler, D (1995) Semiotics for Beginners. Available at: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem06.html [Accessed 23 November 2010]

Fogarty, Sorcha (2005) Binary Oppositions, The Literary Encyclopedia. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=122 [Accessed 24 November 2010]

Glazer, Mark. (1994) Structuralism. Available at: http://www.panam.edu/faculty/mglazer/Theory/structuralism.htm [Accessed 21 November 2010]

Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia (2010) Denotation (Semiotics). Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denotation_(semiotics) [Accessed 23 November 2010]

Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia (2010) Connotation (Semiotics). Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connotation_(semiotics) [Accessed 23 November 2010]

Books:

Badcock, C.R. (1975) “Levi-Strauss Structuralism and Sociological Theory”, London, Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd, The Anchor Press Ltd.

Fiske, John (1982) “Introduction to communication studies”, London, The Guernsey Press Co Ltd.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1963) “Structural anthropology 1”, USA, The Penguin Group, Clays Ltd.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1966) “The Savage Mind”, Great Britain, Made and printed by The Garden City Press Ltd

O'Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., Fiske, J. (1994) Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, London, Routledge

Panofsky, Erwin (1970) Meaning in the Visual Arts, Harmondsworth, Penguin

DVDs:

Up (2009) Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment (DVD)

Realism photo

A picture I draw for realism, I thought this was an iMap... it is my first time doing something like that.

BINARY OPOSITIONS

Structuralism aims to…

• ‘uncover the conceptual structures by which various cultures organize their perception and understanding of the world’ 

•  ‘Structuralism’s enterprise is to discover how people make sense of the world, not what the world is…’

Binary opposition In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language. In the community of philosophers and scholars, most believe that "unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn't really a distinction. Binary opposition divides the understanding of the world in two :

The most common biblical example of the binary division: 

And this division makes the two groups reassuring, helpful, convenient…

 The other obvious binary opposition is in every heroic comic book:

It is helpful for a good super hero to refer to a bad super hero, because it implies that he is good.

Another good example for that is also recognized in some video games:

‘Ideologies like to draw rigid boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not, between self and non-self, truth and falsity, sense and nonsense, reason and madness, central and marginal, surface and depth.’

Terry Eagleton

The game creates your character as a normal person in real life, just in fast forward mode. Based on your every decision you become good or evil.

My personal opinion is that most of the time in media, binary opposition is used to show the audience which is bad or wrong to do and which is right. I understand it as some kind of a lesson.

Structuralism is an intellectual movement that developed in France in the 1950s and 1960s, in which human culture is analyzed semiotically (i.e., as a system of signs). Today structuralism is less popular than approaches such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for being historical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to act.

Post-structuralism : The author's intended meaning, such as it is (for the author's identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible "intent" is also a fictional construct), is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. Nowadays with the development of film visual effects, the image of what we are supposed to bake in our brains is already created for us, ready in front of us. This limits the different understandings to minimum. The disadvantage is that our imagination is not being developed, but on the other hand we receive tons of information in an hour and a half. 

INTERTEXTUALITY

Definition. As the word ‘text’ suggests, originally related to literary culture (novels, poetry, etc.), but has since developed application to cultural artefacts in general - to films, fashion, product design, games, etc.

Two kinds of intertextuality:

 

•  unconscious - true intertextuality: beyond author’s control

 

•  (self-)conscious - what Kristeva calls ‘the banal sense of “the study of sources”’ (Kristeva Reader, p.111)

Quentin Tarantino movies usually have a lot of intertextuality. He is clearly influenced by old spaghetti westerns and kung fu movies. He doesn't spoof them put rather reimagines them for the modern era.

 Also...I would say spoofs like Airplane, Scary Movie, etc. are intertextual in that they would not exist without other movies created before them.

Also...Down With Love is a modern take on a classic Doris Day/Rock Hudson romance, but told tongue in cheek for the 21st century. In that same vein is Brick, a modern movie about high school that is told in a film noir style with lots of old-timey sounding dialogue.

Intertextuality in Film.

According to Bazin, a French film theorist, there is no doubt at all that films were, in principle, works of authors who at certain time and with certain technical and aesthetic means had managed to create certain distinctive cinematic artwork(Paech 2000:1). Most of Shakespeare′s books such as Romeo and Juliete, Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice among others have been reproduced as films, as well as. . Gulliver′s Travel by Jonathan Swift, and Chinau Achebe′s Things fall apart. Christian Metz, a German semiologist, purported that films are not only an artwork, but, rather, a textual system that constitutes its own original, singular totality, in which the author, if involved at all, is only a constituent of this system. Today, it seems to be more appropriate to speak of film as one medium among others which interacts as multimedia, or is connected to one another intermedially. The same film can be seen on cinema, on TV, on video, and DVD. According to Metz, Film, picture, color, sound, motion, adaptation from literature-whether technological or mechanical medium makes film a sort of technical Gesamtkunstwerk(Paech 2000:5).




Intertextuality in newspapers.

Most news papers or magazines contain pictures, or cartoons. The degree of
the intertextuality is different. Some are more verbal than visual and vice versa,
e,g in most editions of the Rheinischer Merkur news paper(see Rheinischer Merkur
newspaper).

Intertextuality on Computer screens

Texts on the computer monitors are said to be completely hyper textual links, i.e. connections of combination that arrange texts as part of a simultaneous virtual network to constantly changing current textual formation which allow the processing of pictures, graphics, even moving pictures and film on the same textual level(Paech 2000:5). www.facebook.com could be a good example of this explanation because the system affords us opportunity to read texts, watch videos, listen to all kinds of music, and even chat online.

 

Semiotics

signification = the process of signs-being-made-noticed-and-understood

 

The signifier are the 3 signs saying : No ice cream allowed, no skates allowed and no dogs allowed.                                                                                                 The signified is that he is not allowed because all of the 3 things, so basically his day is ruined. 

sign = signifier (physical form) + signified (mental concept)

iconic: how close a sign is to ‘the real thing’, how constrained it is by the thing it represents, e.g. a photographic portrait is typically iconic, a doodled caricature less so

This painting is trying to represent the cat in real life, like the one in the photo.

arbitrary (aka symbolic): how far away a sign is from ‘the real thing’, how unconstrained it is by the thing it represents, e.g. a person’s name bears little physical resemblance to them, but is less arbitrary than an employee number.

This cat doodling is also trying to represent the cat as the furry animal from real life, but in a more basic and cartoon way. 

denotation: what the sign is, at the most basic level of understanding – what it denotes literally

connotation: what it suggests, a more subtle culturally determined reading – what it connotes

myth: the ‘world-view’ it contains or implies – the ideological or political meaning of the thing – not ‘myth’ as in not true, fictitious, misleading (although it may be all three of these things)