LECTURE 02

Although I hadn't given much thought to animation previously, after the lecture my understanding of animation is that it is the impression of movement on each frame and between each frame, therefore encompassing a greater scope to include what the mind/eye processes when viewing animation.

I found the channel 4 videos used to illustrate the concept of interstitual animation effective (despite the voiceover). One of the things that stood out to me was that as a viewer, you only grasp the image of the '4' towards the end of the video, and when you do see a complete 4, the camera only remains on the image for several frames. I felt that the ocean/island video was obvious and that the effect was too obvious, however the sound/stage video had a far more seemless effect with the artificial beams and speakers which added to the realism of the effect.

Although morphology seems very theory driven i find that it does have practical uses in defining ideas as you could use space, form and time as a structure / outline in the development process. I thought the video for memisis was an interesting concept, representing the 1984/big brother approach to surveilance cameras and the potential evolution of security and the devolution of privacy, the motion graphics used were simple and easily achieved using the motion tracking function in AE. I also enjoyed the motion sequence / representation of time in the train video. I particularly liked the distortion of time where even though the background/ foreground remained linear the train's animations were non-linear.

The montage video that stood out for me most was the black and white/ new york cityscape video for its simplicity (a vertical pan) and it's engaging content. I felt that the composition with the grayscale buildings which sometimes contained a white shape cutout resembling a city in the negative space was also effective. The music choice was at a medium/slow tempo and the pace seemed to sync with the vertical pan and the content transition-ins.