Category: Design for Animation, Narrative Structures and Film Language

This session focuses on the final report and introduces the essay format, as well as advice on content. There are three sample reports for reference.

My topic is Research on 3D Animation Technology for Cultural Heritage Conservation and Delivery

This lesson focuses on the referencing section of an essay, specifically on the Harvard referencing format

Attributing Ideas

Since all the authors you cite will be listed in your bibliography, brief references by surname, publication date and page number are all you need when you mention their ideas in your text.

Egs:

Corrigan (2001, pp.132-6) emphasises the importance of writing coherent paragraphs.

Narration refers to the means by which narrative information is relayed to the audience of a film (Buckland, 1998, p.34)

Using Quotations

• Short prose quotations (up to three lines long) should be incorporated into your own sentence, using double quotation marks.  Always check that your sentence grammar has remained intact.

For example: In Battleship Potemkin, “The three shots of the lions create a montage unit” (Buckland, 1998, p.23).

• Longer prose quotations should be indented and single-spaced (remembering that you are using double or line and a half spacing elsewhere in your text).  They should be preceded and followed by a line space.  No quotation marks are used where a quotation is indented in this way.

Other information of bibliography in the Harvard Style are useful for me, including: Book, Exhibition Catalogue, Journal article, Website without author, Website with author, Television Broadcast, Film / Movie, Video / films on YouTube, Exhibitions , Visual Material.

This lesson focuses on the introduction and conclusion of the article

In the completion of all academic writing three essential components must be achieved.

• A clear understanding of the research topic undertaken and why.
• What information, data, learning informed the research and findings.
• A conclusion restating objective and connecting findings.

Introductions & Conclusions

Introductions and conclusions are important components of any essay. They work to book-end the argument made in the body paragraphs by first explaining what points will be made (in the introduction) and then summarizing what points were made (in the conclusion).

About Introductions:

1. Attract the Reader’s Attention
2. State Your Focused Topic
3. State your Thesis

About Conclusions:

• Begin with your rephrased thesis statement to remind your reader of the point of your paper.
• Summarize the points you made in your paper and show how they support your argument; tie all the pieces of your paper together.
• Tell your reader what the significance of your argument might be. Why is the discussion important? Do you want your reader to think differently, question something, or perform some action? Make a recommendation of what your reader should “do” with the information you just gave them, or share the importance of the topic.

These are all very useful methods when writing about critical topics and I found them very productive 🙂

In this session we were divided into 5 groups for group discussions.

The VFX students and I discussed topics of interest to each other, mainly including the application and innovation of virtual technology in design, the application of 3D animation technology in medical previews, and the art style of Disney animation.

Horns R. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. in Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

The hand is an animated work from the Czech Republic. The animation tells the story of the struggle between a potter and a “hand”. At the beginning of the film, the gardener originally lived a peaceful and stable life. Later, the “hand” appeared in his room and entered the gardener’s room in various ways, such as entering directly from the door, pretending to be a packaging box, or going into the room through the window… This hand grabbed the gardener and put him in a cage, ordered and forced the gardener to make a heroic sculpture of a hand. Later, the gardener escaped from the cage and went home. This hand still kept chasing the gardener all the way. The gardener who came home with his beloved flowers died at home due to excessive fatigue. The master still found the gardener and held a grand funeral for him.

【 The Hand 】（1965）

Categorisation：
This work is from Jir í Trnka, the Czech animation pioneer, and this is his last animation work. The film is an animated short film with the theme of anti dictatorship. At the end of the tragedy, the creator did not get rid of the control and torture of his hands, just like the creative career of director Jir í Trnka. Jir í Trnka has inherited the Czech doll production technology for five centuries and carried it forward in animation. In the early 1960s, the Czech Republic was in a state of turbulence and chaos. The country’s economy and politics were at an impasse. The authoritarian and dark government made people’s lives miserable. Jir í Trnka combines films and puppet shows that have been used for decades to express the theme of anti dictatorship. There is no more appropriate art form than this. As a result, this deeply touching short film made the authorities angry. After the work “Hand”, he stopped creating.

Form and Function：
In this film, hands are everywhere. Through gift giving, telephone, TV, newspaper and other forms, the target is forced to become his own slave step by step. The author described the palm in detail, such as the hand of the goddess symbolizing freedom, the hand of dragging the libra symbolizing science, the dangerous hand holding the gun to show a friendly handshake, and the hand of the woman who finally dressed in lace to tempt the gardener. The film highlights the changefulness and hypocrisy of the palm of the hand, gives vent to the creator’s protest and criticism of the dictator, and shows the servile relationship between the gardener and the hand. Under the force of the hand, the film becomes a tool man and loses its independence and autonomy as a human being.

Process:
The most special feature of Jir í Trnka’s works is that the carrier of animation is puppet. The puppets he made are lovely and meticulous, and the scenes and costumes are just as delicate and beautiful. And he began to notice the difference between puppet animation and puppet theater. Instead of allowing puppets in the film to have eyes and mouth that can move, he used the lens and light to change the atmosphere.

Formal Elements：
In the film of Palm, the puppet is always the same face. Jir í Trnka uses different lighting and music atmosphere to make the puppet have different emotions. For example, at the beginning of the film, the picture is bright, the music is lively, the puppet is happily making flower pot sculpture, and the audience can feel the happy atmosphere. With the advance of the plot and the emergence of the palm, the lighting gradually fades, and the same expression of the characters appears dull and numb.

Abstract：” Ralph Breaks the Internet” is a comedy animated film directed by Phil Johnston and Ricky Moore. It is a sequel to the 2012 animated film “Wreck-it Ralph”. It mainly tells us that from the world of video games to the vast, unknown and exciting virtual network world, and whether the Internet world can withstand the destruction. Video games destroy Ralph and the naughty girl Winelop, who venture into the unknown online world to find stories that can repair the components of the Sweet Sprint game.

Stages

Act I: Introduce the beginning of the story from the game screen in the game room day after day. Here the supporting role bought a new wifi router, which foreshadowed the development of the story.

Act 2: At this stage, Winelop lost control in the game competition and damaged the steering wheel of the car. Because the game version is very old, it is difficult to buy the original game controller, so the owner of the game hall decided to sell the game console. The characters in the sweetheart racing game are in danger of being eliminated, which creates problems and contradictions for the protagonist.

Act 3: Ralph and Winelop have different ideas about the world outside the game. This is also the main contradiction of the story. Ralph hopes to stay in the game hall and live happily with Winelop, but Winelop wants to explore the outside world more. Therefore, the protagonist’s worldview conflicts and friendship crises. And in solving the problem of the game controller, new troubles have appeared again and again. It leads to the invasion of Internet viruses,

Act 4: With the help of their friend Miss Shine, they earn enough money to buy back the game controller to repair the game, and with their cooperation, they solve the virus crisis. The misunderstanding was cleared.

Act 5: This is the end of the story. The other Disney characters also came to help Winelop and Ralph. After the crisis was lifted, they understood the real friendship and respected each other’s choice. One returned to the game room, and the other continued to explore the vast world.

Role archetypes

1. Ralph

The hero, Ralph Wong, lives in a 1980s video game Fix-It Felix. His identity is everyday in the game of good people apartment destroyed, reckless, but kind-hearted, is the heroine Winelop’s good friend, in his heart friendship is the most important.

Ralph’s image is represented by two big fists, which shows his great destructive power. He has thick eyebrows and round nose, which makes the whole character look silly. His clothes are checked with belt trousers, which makes him very casual. His hair is straight and he feels very impetuous, which echoes his own rash personality characteristics.

2. Winelop

The heroine of this film is the racing driver of Sweet Sprint, full of vitality and ghosts and horses. Because it is a bug, the quality of the picture is unstable, and it is excluded by other characters. Her game broke down due to the loss of a component. In order to find the lost component, she and Ralph embarked on an adventure in the Internet world, and were attracted by the racing game rage in the Internet world, hoping to stay in the Internet world.

Winnie Lope has big eyes, her bathrobe and skirt are full of vitality and loveliness. She wears a high ponytail and a red bow rope. These are all signs of her outgoing and cheerful personality. Her head is decorated with candy, which shows her identity from the game of sweet sprint.

3.Miss Shine

Mentor. Racer in the Internet world. Although seemingly unsmiling, they quickly became good friends after competing with Winnie Lope, a racing driver. After knowing the purpose of winelop and Ralph coming to the Internet, she recommended Miss yesss  to winelop.

Keywords：Disney animation；Color Performance；The role of color；The relationship between color and emotion；Color Style

The course in the first week introduces what is a critical topic, how to choose a critical topic, and how to modify the topic in depth.

And introduced suggestions on researching topic：

a) Primary or original sources. These could be a mediaeval manuscript, a poem, a photograph, the records of an institution, a dress, an interview…

b) Secondary or interpretative sources i.e. papers/articles/books written about a subject.

It also describes several ways to find literature, books and materials：

LCC Library & Finding E-Books Guide Helped me a lot in finding information！

Next are a few topics that interest me：

1. Virtual reality based 3D animation space design
2. A research on the transformation of ethnic styles in Chinese animation
3. Research on 3D Animation Technology for Cultural Heritage Conservation and Delivery