Sunday, April 22, 2012

Thoughts of the Project


I feel like for this project I didn’t have as much trouble that I thought I’d have. The only thing that I felt like might have been restricting my work on it was the fact that I’m juggling other projects in other classes but the same can be said for other people as well. Whenever there was a problem it could have been solved through more recording or clarification of Final Cut.

Another quick run through of photoshop would have been nice for anyone that would have wanted to use it in their projects or photos if they wanted to do something special with them. Another thing that would have been helpful is teaching about other solutions in cases where students have bad audio. People always don’t have chances to re-record their subjects so it’s nice if there were ways for people to work on th audio through final cut or other programs they would have access to in the labs.

It may also just be me, but in regards to this project I just didn’t like the whole interviewing process. Using this project to allow the students to get familiar with equipment, programs and techniques is a good way to teach. But I would much rather have liked to choose my own subject, because suddenly you are given a person to interview and build a narrative around it from the content that you’re given. I just think that it is better to have someone choose their own subject and let it be something that peaks their own interest, because then it becomes something that they have their own investment in and they want to look deeper into it rather than it just be another assignment where everyone has the same constraints.

Canemaker Q and A

“The Moon and the Son” was a very well developed animation for what it was trying to do. Canemaker tries to depict an interview of him and his father before his dad passed away. It isn’t like most animations in several ways. For one, the relationship between Canemaker and his Father is extremely tense making this not an animation for kids. Another is the fact that while the piece itself feels old, it was actually made a few years ago. Canemaker still retains a very classical style of animation by still using older forms of media. Unlike the other animations that we see on a regular basis he isn’t literal narrative with his animations. Canemaker is much more abstract and by being abstract with his form it’s seems a lot easier to convey emotions to the audience.

He also manages to find ways to blend these different media in his animation. Throughout his pieces he alternates between crayon, colored pencil, marker, etc. and I was surprised to see that it didn’t make the piece sloppy. While I’d like to believe that he did this for artistic reasons, in the FAQ he basically says that he was just using whatever was available to him.

In his other earlier work, Confessions of a Stardreamer, you can see that his style is pretty apparent. He uses the interview with the actress in a different way than he did with “the Moon and the Son”, for one there is only one person piece as opposed to two. Which means that there is only one set of emotions and thoughts that he’s trying to convey rather than try to have two entities bouncing off of each other within the piece. I think would be interesting to think that he’s found a way to balance the father and the son off of each other for the sake of the piece and I think in a way he did. Canemaker used himself as a way to unravel his father and in a deeper way than how he would have earlier on in Canemaker’s life. The interview gets to the Big Picture which is his father.