Critical Perspectives seminar 3: 29/1/15

Critical Perspectives Seminar 2: 15/1/15

Looking a “cultural text” in context

Critical Perspectives Seminar 1: 8/1/15

Critical Perspectives 12: 11/12/14 - The Intersectional Self with Jenny Rintoul

Critical Perspectives 11: 4/12/14 - Considering the “Other”, with Alex Franklin

Prep for Semester 2

Content: Assessed Work:

• Blog → Plays the role of a sketchbook (what are you INTERESTED in?)
• Poster → 2pm Feb 9th
• Essay → 26^th March

Assessed on these three things en masse

After Xmas break:

Seminars – program-specific → uses stuff from the blog

Leading up to poster

No hard-and-fast rules for the blog – just ongoing engagement

Reference EVERYTHING!!! (citations)

Have a critical perspectives folder!

Find a way to manage all this – don't get hung up on the essay

Better to have too much and edit it down

The seminars will help you write it

Use the UWE Harvard reference system – practice using it on your blog

One set title: “Present a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text”

Identify a cultural text you want to know more about

Find one with a representation of an idea you want to explore

The “Anaconda” video is a cultural text! Not just written texts

Critical =/= negative; how and why things work

Resist the urge to boomerang back to familiar territory – you're here to learn NEW things

You can mention other texts (contrast) but don't go into detail

Identify the broader issue

Poster – inherently tied to your essay

Will be discussed in the seminars

All posters will be exhibited in February!

Posters in this context are junior versions of academic presentations

Seminars are at Bower Ashton – NOT Ashton Court

x1 hour session a week (Thurs.) except 22^nd Jan and 12^th Feb

SHOULD be on online timetable

There WILL be prep for seminars – tasks (see Blackboard)

Seminars make university university – STEEL YOURSELF; take part

A kind of luxury item – builds confidence

Office Hours will be posted after Christmas

Talk to a librarian about research

Action analysis: Quadruped Locomotion (secondary research)

I decided to focus mainly on dogs for this part of my action analysis, since I've always been interested in the differences between breeds' physiology and temperaments - and now, their movements.

I've found Vines to be an excellent source of animals in motion (the blog Actual Dog Vines is especially helpful), but I've also spotted a few interesting dogs on YouTube. Let's start with this slow-motion advert for root beer:

Look at the way the dog's flabby, loose skin trails behind him as he runs at 0:31! A perfect example of the animation principle known as drag.

Action analysis: Inorganic Things

Let's kick off this blog's action analysis (the study of How Things Move) section with a bit of fun courtesy of the blog capnskull:

"the drum is filled with hot steam and then sprayed with cold water. the pressure on the outside of the drum is far more than inside. the pressures try to maintain and find balance taking the drum as a casualty."

I really love the suddenness with which the drum "recoils" - it's as if it's alive and reacting slightly belatedly to the water, or as if the drum were an animated character and the animators were chemistry and physics themselves. I'll have to refer back to this drum next time I animate a character reacting suddenly to something.

I didn't have time to research this area in great detail, but I found two artificial lifeforms designed to simulate the movements of living things, and the accuracy (or lacktherof) of that simulation is fascinating. First is this robot, Spot, made by Boston Dynamics - you can see how it got its name, as it simulates a dog's walk fairly accurately. The part I find most interesting is the way it stumbles in response to being kicked at the 0:28 mark of the video - it briefly struggles to regain its footing in much the same way a real quadruped would.

While this isn't quadruped locomotion, it's too fascinating not to at least mention. These are computer programs that taught themselves how to walk - I found this GIF on Imgur and while I looked for more information about the project, unfortunately all I could find out was that Steve Grand, creator of the video game Creatures, is attached to it.

Even so, the learning curve these programs went through is evident in the GIF: Generation 1 obviously only manages half a step; Generation 20 masters taking a few steps but fails to keep its balance for very long; Generation 80 solves that problem by swinging its neck and tail to generate equilibrium; Generation 999 manages to walk without that exaggerated swing.

Generation 80 definitely has the most characterful walk. I feel an incredible urge to animate my character Ikki (see here) walking using it as reference.

Critical Perspectives seminar prep for 29/1/15

Task: Choose a cultural text and find one journal article and one book/book chapter that deals with either that text or its themes; find a key quote from each and source it

Critical Perspectives 10 – 27/11 – Participatory Culture, with Jenny Rintoul

Critical Perspectives 9 – 20/11/14 – “Social Media – Access Denied” with Rachel Evans

Critical Perspectives 8 – 13/11/14 – Making Cultures, with Alex Franklin

Critical Perspectives 7 – 6/11/14 – Making Histories with Clare Johnson

Critical Perspectives 6 – 30/10/14 - Cultural Hierarchies, with Rachel Miles

Critical Perspectives: summary of "Woman as Objects - Feminist Critique" from "A Queer Romance" by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman

This excerpt analyses the concept of the “male gaze” from the perspectives of several writers throughout the 20^th century, concluding with the analogy of Michel Foucault's concept of the panopticon: a prison in which a single watchman may be watching any of the prisoners at any time, requiring them to assume they are always under scrutiny. In a male-dominated society, women are in a similar position to those hypothetical prisoners: Evans and Gamman cite Simone de Beauvoir's descriptions of “learning to appraise her adolescent self through male eyes” and John Berger's observation that in our culture, the spectator is usually assumed to be male (“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”). The authors mention that Berger “has no model of discourse to explain power relations” besides an “implicit” one, and argue for Foucault's panopticon as an “explicit” model for discussing the objectification of women (while also touching on the objectification of men in the gay community), as opposed to looking at the topic through a purely psychoanalytic lens – they admit psychoanalysis has its uses, but state that it “offers an inadequate amount of desire underlying sexualised looking” in the discourse (“ideology is inscribed in discourse... a way of thinking speaking, experiencing”, as Catherine Belsey wrote) that is feminism. Evans and Gamman make it clear that women live in a society in which they are under constant scrutiny while arguing for the importance of analysing that fact using several different methods and perspectives.

Critical Perspectives 5: 23/10/14 -- Creativity and Authorship, with Clare Johnson

[The lectures] will be recorded (on Blackboard) along with slideshow + office hours – check it regularly! Same for UWE email)

Engagement = IMPORTANT → Show up to everything

8 weeks of lectures (with some discussion) until Christmas; after that 7 seminars

3 things:

• Blog (throughout module) → set it up between now + next Thursday; “learning log” - allows tutors to track your growth
• Poster (summary of essay) – due Feb 9th
• 1200 word essay + bibliography – March 26th → “present a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text” (artefact) – same for everyone

Both 2pm – university standard

Semester 1 showreel!

Here it is: three months of hard work condensed into 95 seconds, set to a piece of free music that I almost want to pay for because it's so good! Please excuse the glaring errors in the framing of some of the animations (the bowling ball is an especially bad offender) - I assure you that once I'm making one of these for potential employers instead of tutors, that won't happen! (Not that I think any less of tutors - I just didn't know any better at the time.)

Animation exercises

UWE's animation course is very good at encouraging its students to learn by doing - not that I've been on any other university level animation courses, so I can't compare it to anything, but it's a very good way to learn, I can say that much.

At the time of posting, my showreel for the first semester is currently rendering, and when I post it here you'll be able to view all of these exercises in one artfully arranged 90-second chunk set to music, but it can't hurt to post them all separately so you can scrub through them and pick them apart at your leisure. Click "Read More" to see the stop motion, hand drawn and computer animation exercises I did within my first few weeks on the course!

Life drawing

Here's a compilation of some of my best work from this semester's life drawing module! I really enjoyed this part of the course; I've taken life drawing classes before as part of my Access to HE course and enjoyed those as well, but the nice thing about life drawing is that you can always go to a new class with a different teacher and different models, each with fresh new approaches, and learn something from them that you couldn't from the previous classes - plus it's impossible to study the human figure from life too much.

Click "Read More" to see the drawings!

Sketchbooks, part 3: autobiographical doodle compilation

A recurring theme in both my sketchbooks is little autobiographical drawings of interesting things that happened to me that day. Click "Read More" to see all of them so far.

Sketchbooks, part 2: the big notebook

As promised, here's a selection of doodles from my notebook! Most of these are a lot sloppier and (ironically) smaller than the stuff in my small sketchbook, but for me, that's part of the fun of it.

Click "Read More" to see them!

Sketchbooks! Part 1: the small one

Happy New Year! One of my resolutions is to be a much better student, and while I can't undo how much I've neglected this blog over the past few months, I can stop it from getting any worse. Christmas has been a stressful time for me, as it always is - I don't deal well with routine changes and interacting with 10+ people at once, and I've needed several days to recover from each instance of the latter. That's not an excuse, but hopefully it provides some explanation for why I work the way I do - everyone tackles things differently, after all.

I've kept two sketchbooks over my first semester at UWE: an A6 one for observational and imaginative sketches, and an A4 one for notes, but plenty of doodles (of both kinds) find their way in there too. I'll make at least two posts compiling my sketches, starting with the majority of the small one (I've cropped out some notes that would probably only make sense to me anyway, as well as some of the more personal, self-indulgent doodles) in all its sprawling, disorganised glory, followed by a compilation of doodles from the big one, possibly along one or two themes.

Click "Read More" to see it!