Animation - A Brief History

This was quite interesting to see how animation has evolved beyond sequential images on walls to what it is today.  Each technique and device invented was more advanced than the last, and were really big steps towards later being able to be projected onto film. Of course Animation hadn't really fully developed until the 20th century when, in early times, it became a medium used for story-telling. Before animations with narratives were invented, the medium seemed to mainly be a novelty; being that these drawings are able to move. Looking back, we have gone a long way since those illustrations in Egyptian chambers and pottery, and even since the late 20s when animation was seen as a profitable and commercialised medium (which it still is today). Today, it is a medium that is a bit more accessible, having there been many indie animations on the internet today, and since the invention of youtube, it has stretched beyond people making simple flash animations but there are now artists using other more advanced methods, such as stop-motion, CGI animation, etc.

Chronologies Print

Printing is an interesting form of Illustration, that generally varies in style depending what method is used. It's interesting to see how many devices and materials are used to take advantage of this concept, like sculpting graphite into letters or pictures then printing them onto a canvas. It's interesting because these devices and other methods of print are purely experimental, so there's a chance that the chosen method of print could turn out to be a failure. Today's techniques are normally used for poster art and graphic design used mainly for advertising, with popular examples being the Andre The Giant posters, and the Obama Hope campaigns. I think printing is a great form of illustration, and the varying styles can be applied to very well to animation, if you consider the illustrations and animated title sequences by Saul Bass.

Pictures At Work

This image (taken straight from the presentation) really does fully explain illustration in the simplest way. Illustration is an important aspect of animation, perhaps even the most important one, because it gives the audience a unique interpretation of whatever story is being told, and how the world and the characters are illustrated can have an effect on how the audiences relate to the characters. The examples of good illustration in the presentation were all fantastic and inspiring. They are not always visually pleasing but it depends on the illustrators' interpretations on the message they are trying to convey. When Image is placed alongside Concept and Context, then it doesn't matter if it looks pretty, it just has to work with whatever message the illustrator is trying to convey.

Type Production, and Distribution

This lecture was about different types of font and how they have evolved over the years, and what is considered the main font of whatever era they are from. It went over the differences between "Type" and "Typography", Type meaning human language conveyed in a visual form, and Typography a stylised version of Type. What fascinated me most about this lecture was the section that talked about how the human mind reads words as a whole, so the letters in a word, first and last letters notwithstanding, can be rearranged and we as humans will still understand them. This is something that can be applied to surrealism, I think. It just shows how far we have developed and how accustomed to the English language we are since type was invented. It makes me wonder if this applies to other cultures, that don't use our type of lettering. It was fascinating how much of a historical impact something as seemingly insignificant as type has had on the world.