Critical Perspectives 4: 16/10/14

Some Thoughts on Theory-Practice Relationships in Animation Studies by Paul Ward

Critical Perspectives 3: 9/10/14

LO-FI SHORT FILM - Dog of the Month: Poodle

After three weeks of storyboarding, puppet making, animating, editing and accidentally shipping microphones to the wrong address, my first short film is finally complete!

The brief was to make it 30 seconds long, keep it lo-fi (deliberately rough around the edges), and to make something that would make people either laugh or learn. Since I'm a bit of a nerd about dog breeds, I made the first in a hypothetical series of educational shorts, which contains a few interesting facts about the Poodle as well as an incredibly cheap and dirty but too-good-to-miss pun at the end.

The thumbnail makes it look very poor quality, but the actual video looks much better. That said, the camera is extremely jerky in places because it was shot on a phone camera with no tripod of any kind, so brace yourself for a motion sickness-like sensation, as well as narration by someone who's very obviously not a professional voice-over artist. But it's all part of the "lo-fi" vibe, so I hope you enjoy it!

Critical Perspectives 2: 2/10/14

Critical Perspectives Session 1: 25/9/2014

After the break is the first post of my notes from the Critical Perspectives module. I've made some minor corrections for spelling and clarity, but the notes are otherwise unedited.

Puppet progress

Today I started work on a stop-motion puppet for a 30-second film I'll be working on for the next three weeks; it's a bit crude and wouldn't stand up to heavy use, but the film is supposed to be simple and lo-fi, so I don't think I need to worry if it doesn't have a full armature and a 3D printed face. I'll call this half a puppet in a day; not bad for someone who was worrying about not being able to get *anything* done yesterday!

Introduction

Hello, I'm Katherine and I'm the author of this "learning log". The above image is a doodle from the cover of my physical sketch/notebook where my lecture notes co-exist with random observational sketches and scribbles of memorable moments from my days at uni - this blog will act as a digital sketchbook, so over the next nine months, I'll be posting some of those doodles and typing up my notes from the Critical Perspective series of lectures and seminars. I hope you enjoy this insight into the life of an animation geek turned animation student!