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A General Aesthetics of American Animation Sound Design
Get PDFFrom the inception of sync sound in the late 1920s to the modern day, sound in animation has assumed a variety of forms. This article proposes four principal modes that have developed in the commercial realm of American animation according to changing contingencies of convention, technology and funding. The various modes are termed syncretic, zip-crash, functional and poetic authentication. Each one is utilized to different aesthetic effect, with changing relationships to the image. The use of voice, music, sound effects and atmos are considered as well as the ways in which they are recorded, manipulated and mixed. Additionally, the ways in which conventions bleed from one period to the next are also illustrated. Collectively, these proposed categories aid in understanding the history and creative range of options available to animators beyond the visual realm
Screenwriting animation in the essay film: The challenges presented by silenced history
Get PDFThis article explores the use of animation in the essay film and analyses how screenwriting animation becomes a complex process of translation of the message the film wishes to address. With a focus on issues encountered in the development of two short essay films, Lunch with Family (2016) and San Sabba (2016), the article maps the process that in both cases guided the scripting of animated sequences, and analyses why in the editing room the director chose to use stills from the animations, instead. An example of the narrative techniques applied to mediate silenced history and postmemory in film, this contribution intends to add to the larger discussion on the current state of the art in screenwriting non-fiction
Ways Through the Wood: The Rogue Cartographies of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle as a Cognitive Map for Creative Process in Fiction
Get PDFIn this article I would like to discuss Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle – Mythago Wood (1984); Lavondyss (1988); The Bone Forest (1991); The Hollowing (1993); Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory (1998); and Avilion (2009) – in the context of creative writing praxis. I will argue that Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle offers a powerfully resonant metaphor for the creative process: how stories are created and written (informed by the oral tradition), and how we, as readers and listeners, interact with them. As a novelist, scholar of folklore and folk tales, and professional storyteller it is something I am familiar with and fascinated by, and it dove-tails with my current Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester: a dramatization of the creative process in novel form, and so this is a reflection on my ongoing investigation into creative writing research through practice
Zaha Hadid Architects Evolution
No full text‘Evolution’ was a curated exhibition that presented a critical examination of the agency of the tools, media, and processes of architectural design through a case study of the evolution of process at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA). The extensive exhibition, and supporting catalogue, traced the practice’s journey from analogue to digital methods over the past forty years.
Working collaboratively with both ZHA and the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the exhibition drew from their extensive collection of archived models, drawings, and paintings to offer a critique of how the changing tools of the architect have influenced the designs process, materiality and outcomes. McLening worked with fellow researcher David Lund and Woody Yeo from ZHA to create a series of interviews with architects and modelmakers at the practice so as to enrich the lines of enquiry.
Employing the relational perspective of actor-network theory, the exhibition viewed tools and media as active agents in the design process; reframing the contribution of design tools such as models, drawings, and computers from being seen purely in terms of Giovanni’s ‘instruments of vision’ to being acknowledged as active partners in the architectural design process.
The research was disseminated through two galleries– one dedicated to the complete design archive of an early, pre-digital building project; the other to the practice’s contemporary digital design methodologies. A 15,000 word publication provided deeper contextualisation about the evolution of process illustrated by the artefacts on display. Through its original focus on the evolution of the design tools used at ZHA rather than its built outputs, the exhibition charted the architects’ changing relationship with the non-human participants of the design process from drawing, painting, and modelmaking, to the use of computer-aided design, generative coding, virtual reality and big data; revealing the active agency of design tools as collaborators in the creation of architectural designs
Lessons in perception : The Avant-Garde filmmaker as Practical Psychologist
Get PDFNarrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator’s range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema
"Kick Out the jams”: Creative strategies to kick start the illustrator’s imagination
No full textoai:research.aub.ac.uk:1The accident has long been acknowledgedas a catalyst fororiginal thought and can offer new insights to the practitioner wishing to develop thingswhich have never been contemplated or seen before. If we accept Virilio’s (2007) description of the accident as “profane miracle”, how can we instigate such mishaps, or even recognise their potential in the increasingly homogeneous digital landscape in which Illustrators find themselves?Is it even possible to override the restrictive mental parameters we are preconditioned to accept?This paper will aim to locate ways in which students of illustration can thrive by instigating accidents or disrupting the inhibitive characteristics of the technologies that surround us. I intend to seek out contemporary illustrators and investigate how they jump starttheir own creative process in order to develop a repertoire of strategies that reveal, or disclose,ways in which eurekamoments can occur. It will investigate whether the D.I.Y mind-set (forever associated with punkattitudes and tastes) that encouraged experiments, riskand feedback, is still relevant to current illustration practices. It will point towards ways in which art educators can incite innovativevisual thinking and nurture image makersthat stand in opposition to algorithmical mediocrity; Illustrators match-fit for the 21stCentury
Naturally Curious: A triptych on the fossils of the Jurassic Coast
No full textThis research concluded in an exhibition at Dorset County Museum in 2018. The research explored how scenographic design processes can be used in the creation of visual art, with a purpose of reconceptualizing the complex ideas of deep time and the Anthropocene. Howard (2009) states that ‘Scenographic story telling brings an individual angle to a well-known work so it can be presented to a fresh audience’. I claim that by approaching this art work from a scenographic view point I have developed an exhibition that unpacks the complexity of Earth’s story in a playful and engaging way. Deep time is a notion of geological time determined by the long and dense history of Earth’s development over 4.5 billion years. In this exhibition I used a Longcase Clock, together with other interactive artefacts, to consider emerging theories about time. The Anthropocene is currently an informal term to signify a contemporary time interval in which surface geographical processes are dominated by human activities (Zalasiewicz, Crutzen, Steffen, 2012). By using the construct of the Anthropocene in the artwork I encouraged the audience to think about the world and to be naturally curious about its future. This artwork is the outcome of research which engaged with museum collections, earth scientists and natural forms as well as the development of materials. I collaborated with a theatre director to create dramaturgy in these static artefacts ‘using metaphor[s] to draw [people] into a world plausible for tackling obscure and abstract ideas’ (Braund, 2015)
Marginalia: graffiti, urban coding and the semiotics of the street.
Get PDFThe Hidden Stories app delves deep into the untold history of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, bringing the area to life through poetry, plays and narrative non-fiction.
The app operates via locative technology that triggers fragments of writing at specific locations; the texts are effectively connected with the location and history they are exploring, with content being unlocked as the user moves around the area.
Each text is displayed differently within the app, taking advantage of the framework to emphasise the ideas being presented by the writers and reflecting the concept of hidden stories.
Hidden Stories was commissioned by Phoenix and developed by Cuttlefish Multimedia as part of Affective Digital Histories, a research project investigating how communities change with urban decline and regeneration. The five pieces of creative writing used in the app were commissioned and edited by Corinne Fowler, director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing. To find out more visit affectivedigitalhistories.org.uk
Performative authorship in zine, self and micro-publishing
Get PDFZine, self and micro-publishing has seen a spectacular resurgence in the
last decade, with individuals within tight communities pushing the boundaries of the practice in terms of form, content and process.
This paper will examine ways in which this reinvestment of illustrative authorship
has been stimulated by the iterative and performative aspects of zines, self and
micro-publishing, through the discussion of varied publications’ genesis with their
illustrators – including my own self-published book The House.
This paper will consider how performance underpins both the motivation and
creative process of such publications so as to highlight potential contributions of
the scene to wider illustrative authoring practices
Shifting Identities Within Internet Memes
No full textThe notion of the meme began with Richard Dawkins’ media-gene metaphor before a further propagation and refinement by psychologist Susan Blackmore. Removed from this original contextualisation, within today’s colloquial understanding of ‘Internet memes,’ one important aspect relating to Dawkins’ original metaphor is still relevant. The Internet meme as a unit of cultural exchange, in order to survive, has to reproduce. With this in mind I will explore examples of memes that function and spread primarily through a process of image-media led reproduction and
subsequent mutation. This is a contemporary, intuitively anxious process that has drawn association with Soviet Film-maker Dziga Vertov’s ‘visual bond’ concept of media led social bondin