Music Videos

We watched some pretty cool music videos in class the other day. They used some pretty nifty techniques. I can't say that ever watched MTV when I was little, because, like most of my classmates confessed, it wasn't really allowed. I did grow up on music videos though. My dad and I use to sit around and watch CMT all the time. There also used to be a wonderful channel that had Christian music videos - that's how I was introduced to Michael W. Smith and several other artists I now really enjoy. I suppose it's a little hard for me to comment on current music videos - one, because I don't get cable at home, and two - I stopped listening to most secular music a while ago. All this talk about music videos kind of makes me miss them though. In some cases they really put pictures with the songs, and in other cases they were just fun. There were some pretty good ones. The TV isn't really a very reliable source for them though, all the music channels have too many programs on them now.

Art & Fear

We have really just begun to read out of our second textbook, "Art and Fear," and already I like it. The last chapter we read, Chapter 2, actually gave me some insight and some hope. The whole chapter was about the doubts and fears an artist faces while creating art, and that those who succeed are those who choose to except those fears and not quit. Allow me to share some quotes. "Art making is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be." So true. I know this because for a while now I've been trying to write a novel of sorts and I can't help but step back and wonder where on earth this plot idea came from. Next quote: "Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution - and it should be." Whew! What a relief! I'm always imagining the whole story before I've ever written the first word, and it is often hard to put those racing thoughts into words. I also can envision these fabulous ideas for paintings and other things that I'm never able to actually execute because somehow I think it could never match it up to my vision. "The truth is that the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse." This thought is comforting. I just recently started rewriting that novel I'm working on because I didn't like where it was going, though it may very well end up there again. I got a lot from this chapter, I guess more on a writing level than on a digital media level because I'm not far into that yet. I can certainly see where it applies though. I suppose I need to embrace the fact behind the last 2 sentences of Chapter 2 - "Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding."

Dogs and Cats

One of the films we watched today was "The Dog Who was a Cat Inside." It was a really cute story about acceptance. A dog was a cat inside and the two fought at first, until in the end he meets a cat who was a dog inside and everything was great. The reason I chose to blog on this one is I LOVE the different style of animation. It's 3D, but it's flattened. The colors are vibrant and I've read things where people said this style kind of looks like a moving postcard. It's true, it does. I've only seen this style of animation in one other film before: "Olive! The Other Reindeer" - a really adorable Christmas movie. I guess I never realized that "Olive" was really CG animation, but now it makes sense. I guess I like this style because it's so different, and it doesn't try to mimic real life. I think I also like it because somewhere in there I can kind of foresee getting my cows into this kind of format. :) I've wondered before how I might change them to 3 dimensional, but I really don't think their meant to be viewed in 3D - their meant to be viewed as flat. I really like the CG environment though. Overall, this was a really cute film!

This picture is from "Olive! The Other Reindeer."

The Cathedral

Wow. That's all I have to say. The detail of the animation in this film was so stunning! Every move the main character made seemed lifelike, right down to the wind blowing his hood. I will admit though, I agree with the fact that the closer something looks to being real without being real is creepy. There was this huge eerie feeling throughout the entire film. You definitely got the feeling of enchantment the way the "statues" of the "people" on the pillars moved. I wasn't really surprised when the guy became one of the pillars himself, but it was still spooky. There's a line in "The Lion, the Witch, and Wardrobe" where Mr. Beaver says "Whenever you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't; you keep your eyes on it, and you feel for your hatchet." I kind of get that feeling when I see these ultra realistic animated characters. They're just downright creepy, and I'm not sure anyone could ever animate a character that looked AND FELT really human. It kind of goes back to that article C. S. Lewis wrote where he said it's more believable to create a fantasy world for a story than to try to bend the rules of the actual world. I wonder if maybe this one should have been added to the repertoire of "spooky" short films that were shown on Halloween.
:)

Feathers

So last Thursday, we watched this film called "A Feather Tale." In a nut shell, the story starts with a woman crying who then receives a phone call from a man who seemingly orders a chicken. The woman boxes herself up (as a chicken) and is sent to the man's house. The man pulls the chicken out of the box, plays with it, plucks it, and then bites it. The next scene we see is of the woman lying in bed with someone next to her. She gets up and goes to another room and just sits there, completely naked and vulnerable; dignity lost. It was a very powerful story about abuse and rape. We talked a little in class about how animation can deal with some things DV Cinema can't - I think this is one of them. There's so much junk involving sex and abuse in our media I really think we've become desensitized to it. It's no big deal to turn on the TV or watch a movie and see this stuff. But movies and TV never show you the vulnerable and hurt side of the story. This film really expressed the loneliness and the complete loss of dignity of the woman. Sexual violence is a very real thing in our society, but most people have gotten to the point where it gets swept under the rug. This film took a very hard look at the real story.