Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

Today we looked at examples of two more from the list of ‘dominant models of narrative’. Firstly, Multiple perspectives on a single incident was represented by the Slovenian film ‘Four’. (Which I can’t find of the web). There’s a core incident - the climax, and we see developments towards this climax four times, each through the point of view of a different character. The characters are related to each other in some way, and to the climax. Variations on this structure can be seen in live action films such as Beautiful People, and Thirteen Conversations About One Thing.

We then paired off (me with Christopher Huizar) to devise a narrative based on 1 core event, with three characters for whom the event is meaningful. While also considering what animation could bring to the story the live action filming could not. Christopher and I got going with a truck/bicycle crash. Trick driver, cyclist, and witness who inadvertently causes the distraction that causes the crash.

We also looked at the narrative model of the list-led set of relationships to a core topic. For example, Portland animator Bill Plympton’s 25 Ways To Quit Smoking. We also watched a great piece by Nikki Braine called Procrastinating Gus. Our paired-up response to this one was ‘How to Fake Technical Proficiency’. But early on we concluded that the list we were coming up with was more about language, and would be challenging to express with images. Unlike Plympton’s ‘Smoking’, which is one sight gag after another. So when were were given the choice of which of the two exercises to pursue over the final two days, Christopher and I decided to go with the 1-story 3-POV one.

Then we talked at length about moral dilemmas. Starting with the chestnut example in which one imagines various numbers and types (friends, strangers, drunks, surgeons) of people lying on train tracks, and the train is coming and you can not stop it but you can flip the switch to run over the folks on track A or track B…you know the kind of thing. Comes up in ethics 101 and other places. Anyhow, characters’ agency is the key point, and that you can build a story on a moral dilemma, and have it play out based on the characters and their levels of agency. So the next exercise was to construct a set-up of a situation that presents a moral dilemma, then develop two tracks of problematizing from the one dilemma. I.e. answering ‘yes’ leads you down one track, which gets progressively more complex to answer ‘yes’ to, and same with answering ‘no’. Bag of money found at a bus stop was our starting point. It got more interesting when we gave the money-finder some significant backstory. Anyhow, moving on…

One interesting point that came out, as we were discussing ambivalent reactions (e.g. “I’d keep some of the money but hand the rest back…”) is that drama is driven by specific responses. You go one way or another, when faced with a dramatic choice. So muddying the response is not a great way to create drama. Comedic drives, however, often hinge on complications. If you were creating a dark comedy around the finding of cash by a sympathetic protagonist, introducing ambivalent responses would work. A lot of contemporary storytelling plays with ambivalence.

Then we looked at some major themes, such as desire for justice, fear of the unknown, self-discovery, etc. And tomorrow we continue our work on our multiple-perspective stories.

The late afternoon session was a lecture by Larry Sherman, a neuroscientist at OHSU. How the Brain Sees Motion: From the Static to the Animated Image.

Dr. Sherman did a good job of presenting the material to us lay people in a way that removed the jargon but presented the fascinating aspects of the latest findings in neuroscience. There was a compeling list of agnosias, the specificity of which point to neuroanatomical specificity is handling different type of information. A person with Drawing Agnosia, for instance, can recognize objects just fine, but cannot recognize the same object in a drawing. Achromatopsia robs a person of the ability to distinguish hues, even thought they can see perfectly well otherwise. There are distinct areas in the brain the light up in fMRI studies when the subject views or thinks about faces. And another area for bodies. And another area for houses, would you believe! There is a ‘house’ slot in the brain.

Dr. Sherman also talked about the limbic system, and in detail about how visual perception works, and how much data is processed in the eye before is gets to the occipital lobe, and the what goes on with it once it’s there.

The area of the brain that processes motion is called hMT+ . It’s very small. Damage to this area prevents you from seeing things in motion. Kind of the opposite to those reptiles that can only see something if it’s moving. The speaker cited a case where a woman woke up one day (presumably after a stroke) and found she could not see the coffee pot in her hand. She could feel it, but because it was in motion it was invisible to her. Then she was pouring coffee on herself and she couldn’t see it. She’d see a car in the distance, then step out onto the road, and suddenly the car was right there. So moving things she saw as still objects, a few seconds apart, with no ‘frames’ in between. I can’t imagine how you’d adapt to this. You wouldn’t be able to see your own body unless you kept still.

Then Dr. Sherman showed us some MEAs, motion after effects. Like how you stare at a red spot for 30 seconds, then at a white wall and you see a green ghostly shape, but this was with motion. He showed us a spiralling black and white animation, after which we looked at the back of our hand. The flesh was crawling of its own accord. Visually, of course - not really, but the effect was stong enough to creep me out and make me hind may hand. A motion after effect.

Today the workshop started to feel harder. Paul Wells, such an entertaining and buoyant (one of his favorite words) teacher, is speaking less now, and getting us to work more. Plus it’s an intense course: 8 hours a day for 5 days. For the record, The faculty at the Animation Institute are Rose Bond, Suzanne Buchan, Paul Vester, and Paul Wells.

More tomorrow…

Another great session with Paul and the class today. We began by finishing off yesterday’s exercise in storytelling without dialogue or text. Most stories are driven by language, but what if you drive the process through visuals? Based on the Aristotelian structure, the project was to come up with a story told visually in 6 frames. This following would make more sense with visual examples, which I don’t have. But I can outline one of the examples that was given us.

1.    Set the scene containing a character, with maximum suggestion using minimum of imagery. (Drawing skills were not important: stick figures would do.)
Sad man sits alone in empty room with tiny scrawny Christmas Tree.

2.    Second character enters and establishes a relationship with the first character. The second character must have what Paul Wells calls ‘animation quality’ - i.e. it must have or do something that could not be achieved if you were shooting this story as live action.
Santa Clause flies in through the door. The sad man is startled out of his chair.

3.    Something happens between the two characters. An exchange takes place that develops the narrative.
Santa gives the sad man a wrapped gift.

4.    One or both characters has an emotional reaction to what just happened.
As Santa leaves, the sad man is so happy and grateful he is kneeling on the floor, praying, with tears of gratitude.

5.    Preparation for the conclusion. Something happens that looks back on the foreshadowing that occurred earlier. This frame may be used for suspense/postponement. Or it may extend the nature of the exchange or emotional reaction.
Formerly sad, but now excited man starts unwrapping the gift.

6.    Conclusion of the implied relationship that was set up through the exchange. Revelation of that which was foreshadowed.
Sad man is in back in his chair, and back to being sad. He holds a badminton racquet in his hand. He’s assembled the gift: A badminton set with racquets, net, shuttlecock. But he has no one to play with.

Sounds simple, right? IT IS NOT SIMPLE. It was amazingly hard to come up with a story in 6 frames, using no dialogue, based on an exchange between two characters, in which what happens at the end is set up and foreshadowed earlier. And that isn’t just plain stupid. After 9 attempts I came up with a story that involved a confident seed, and a malevolent mower.

Some other points from yesterday:
Philip Parker’s Creative Matrix of a screenplay contains 6 free-floating components:
theme, story, form, genre, style, and plot
At any time any two can be linked for emphasis. E.g. genre (western) gets redetermined by style (comedy) in Blazing Saddles. And gets redetermined by theme (gay love) in Brokeback Mountain.

But Paul Wells thinks the matrix of an animation is different, because the mechanisms are different, because the whole economy of a film is embedded in early choices. Unlike live action filming, with animation you can’t make a whole bunch of material and edit it down. It’s just too labor intensive. You have to plan major choices ahead. The choice of technique, to begin with, will have a huge effect on subsequent choices. 2D stop motion using collage? Claymation? Flash?

Animation’s inherent ability to pass on metaphor and symbol invites people in. We are more inclined to watch a short piece about an anthropomorphized lamp playing with a ball, than we are to watch a similar piece involving a child playing with a ball. The audience immediately asks questions in a way that makes the work accessible.

The language of animation includes:
-  Metamorphosis - The ability to facilitate the change from one form to the next without edit. This generates a different model of storytelling.

-  Condensation - the maximum degree of suggestion with the minimum of imagery. E.g. focused gestures suggest particular things, and drive narrative precision.

-  Anthropomorphism - the imposition of human traits on animals, objects, and environments. Such characters often take on dominant traits. E.g Goofy is the empathetic amateur at sports. This gives a very direct way of understanding human behavior, by abstracting it into the non-human.

-  Fabrication - the physical and material creation of imagery, figures, and spaces. Built worlds create their own limits and currencies. These limits make for a clarity of impact of the story.

-  Penetration (term from John Hallis in the 1940s) - the visualization of psychological, physical, and technical ‘interiors’. E.g. animation can clarify something extremely complicated and mysterious, such as the workings of the human body. It can also easily represent dream, memory, and imagination. Can represent primal dynamics.

-  Symbolic association - the use of abstract visual signs and their related meanings. E.g. Felix the Cat pulls off his tail and it becomes a banjo that he plays. Or he pulls down two castle turrets, scoops up clods in them, and gives on to a lady he is wooing.

-  Sound - the illusionist stimulus and catalyst. Unlike film, where sound is driven by the primacy of dialogue and/or music, with animation you start with no diagetic sound. Whatever choices you make about sound will support the telling of the story.

Okay, we also talked about sources (prompts) modes of association, and the ‘6 panel theater’ exercise was begun. But if I write all that out it will take me all night.

TODAY we talked about satisfaction. And about the 3-act structure (related to the 6-frame theater). Also Jacques Rancière’s “ideaism” and “matterism”. “Regimes of visibility” and “Planes of intelligibility”. But that was only briefly, and pretty soon we were back on the ground in Paul Wells’ more straightforward analysis or what’s what. Then we discussed the 5 dominant models of narrative and looked at examples of a couple of them.
1. multiple perspectives of a single incident
2. list-led related events to a core topic
3. transitional narratives based on metamorphoses and associations
4. Single Scenario (e.g. John and Karen by Matthew Walker)
5. Character-led vignettes (e.g. Harvie Krumpet by Adam Elliot)

(John and Karen was wonderful. The clip on Walker’s site is not the whole piece, unfortunately. Harvie Krumpet was overambitious and required more empathy than it delivered. Was it’s Oscar win a pity vote, because it’s about marginalized people?)

Scene from John and Karen, by Matthew Walker

THEN in a separate session, we discussed the very term animation, what it meant, what it includes. And that it is used to describe such a huge range of cultural production that maybe it has become meaningless. We also discussed its relationship to the term ‘cartoon’. And its relationship with art. I knew there was some contention in these areas, but I had no idea how much.

I suggested we revisit the root of the word, ‘anima’ - the soul, suggesting that to be animated is to be ‘ensouled’. Live action figures move under their own volition. Sure they’re following a script, but they are propelling themselves. They have cognition, sentience, and so on. When a figure (whether human or not) is animated, it is given qualities that make it seem to come alive. But it is not moving under its own volition. So animation is creating the illusion of aliveness, of ensoulment (Not meant in the Catholic sense, of course).

And we discussed that cartoons are not opposed to animation, as some fine-art animators think. Cartoons are rather a subset of animation. What defines that subset, though? The jury is still out on that. We got to a point where we were considering whether animation as an umbrella term could even include live action. Huh. Interesting idea.

Also, at what point does one draw the line? Is a CGI’d explosion in a live-action film animation? Do we still want to make a distinction between hand-crafted animation and that done digitally? And if my definition is correct, that animation is the illusion of ‘ensouling’ something to make it move and seem alive, then should I include the life-size animatronic Santa Clause I saw outside a thrift store on my way home? He was heavily dressed in the brilliant evening sun, waving his stiff mechanical arm back and forth. Next to him was a female mannequin sprawled in a pose that was probably supposed to be sexy. Together they were a splash of red velvet and white fake fur, doing their repetitive unseasonal dance for passers by. The mannequin stared at me through the bus window, and for a creepy moment they seemed to be really alive.

First of all, Paul Wells is incredible. More so than that web page is letting on. He’s creative, smart, articulate, multi-talented, has a has a hybridizing mind, and is a terrific facilitator. If you ever have a chance to take a class with him or hear him speak, DO. Okay, got that over with!

The faculty at the Animation Institute are Rose Bond, Suzanne Buchan, Paul Vester, and Paul Wells. I’m in Paul Wells’ ’stream’, but the streams come together at lunchtime and for a late afternoon session.

I’m taking this class to open up possibilities for different types of work to come together. I’ve been a visual artist since forever. Well, officially since 1986 when I graduated from art school and started showing. Then I got into the digital realm in about 1999, starting very slowly, and gradually building skills to the point where I now run my own web design company. Then a few years ago I suddenly and unexpectedly started writing fiction. (Yeah those are adverbs. Whatcha gonna do about it?) A novel sort of fell out of me and I’ve been cleaning it up ever since. I hope to have it presentable enough by the end of this year that I can start exploring ways to send it out into the world.

Event Horizon, Julia Stoops, 2007

But these things I do: 1. visual art (mostly painting), 2. website design (with a little bit of client-commissioned animation) and 3. fiction writing (mostly a novel) have not come together. They have informed each other, definitely. Each discipline enriches the others. But I still pursue the disciplines separately. The formal and technical concerns of each discipline  are demanding enough that once I’m engaged in one, it’s all I think about. Shifting gears into another discipline is hard, and is a cause for anxiety. My ‘painting brain’ does not want to think about usability and information architecture. My ‘website brain’ isn’t clued in to character development. My ‘writing brain’ never considers revealing mysterious shapes within layers of translucent color.

And why not? As soon as I wrote this, I thought, wow, that’s interesting. But when I’m in the middle of the making, the medium-specific questions I ask are already so requiring, that others get crowded out.

Why? Several reasons. Firstly because the digital and fiction writing practices are relatively new to me. I’m still looking for a level of facility that lets me step back from worrying about ‘getting it right’, into a place where I can truly play. Craft is still an issue with fiction writing and digital work, in a way that it’s not with painting. Not that I’m the world’s most facile painter, but compared with the other two disciplines, I started younger and I’ve been doing it longer. There’s a level of comfort and familiarity in painting that isn’t there yet in the other disciplines. Not to imply all my paintings come easily: they don’t. But when they don’t it’s okay. Painting does not generate the kind of anxieties I experience with fiction and digital.

Secondly, for the last few years I have also been preoccupied with a fourth thing: running a business. With no background in business, and no role models among family or friends, learning how to create and manage a business is a steep learning curve. One that’s charged with the excitement of charting ones own course, (Yeah, a cliche. Whatcha gonna do about it?) but is also labor intensive.

And my ‘business brain’ claims to be far too busy dealing with demanding practicalities to spend quality time playing with color, character, and other things that it says will have to wait. The books have to be balanced. The seminars have to be listened to. The client follow-up is intense. The options have to be weighed. The business plan must be reviewed. The router needs rebooting. The subcontractors must receive explicit instructions. And so on.

So it’s in this context, during this week-long space that I was able to carve out of my daily web design studio routine, that I am exceedingly grateful to be taking ‘Devising Narrative Structures: Script and Storyboard’ with Paul Wells, during Boundary Crossings: An Institute in Animated Arts at PNCA.