Animation or Cartoons: An American Dilemma

This project attempts to elucidate the connection between animation and preconceptions about appropriate age demographics in the United States. It endeavors to demonstrate that animation has primarily remained a children’s medium because of contingent contextual factors, rather than elements inherent to the medium, and that its evolution over time is proof of its merits as a medium. Through an exploration of the Golden Age of animation between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, as well as an exploration of animation between 1988 and the present, it uses various examples within film, television, and theatrical shorts to show limitations placed on the medium. These limitations caused the medium to be marketed towards children and to be perceived as being only for children, creating a paradigm in which more mature explorations were infrequent. Both the preconceptions and the consequences of the contextual factors that caused this remain to this day, but American animation’s history has provided evidence that these strictures are not inescapable

Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts

PREPARE TO BOARD! Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts is a textbook for animators and storytellers working in time-based media. It discusses the creation of an animated conceptthe heart and soul of an animated motion picture that has not been covered in previously published storyboarding books and then describes techniques used to develop characters and storyboards simultaneously in accordance with industry practice. Exercises are included to allow readers who are not familiar with animation to progress from simple to increasingly complex projects. The text supports the visuals much in the same way that dialogue supports visuals in an animated film. Over 300 illustrations by student and professional artists are included. Three interviews with animation professionals and an extensive glossary of professional terms utilized in the text appear in separate appendixes. A website featuring illustrations from the book and a \u27commercial\u27 parodying the old Bouncing Ball cartoons is online at http://www.nancybeiman.com The site links to amazon.com\u27s order page for the book

Someday: making an animated short film

This work consists of the creation of a 2D animated short film, Someday, with the help of 3D elements, including all the previous process for its production. This short will be based on the real world with an aesthetic that mixes anime and cartoon styles and will be published on social media. The project will focus mostly on the process that is carried out to produce an animated short film; An idea that begins a creative process where a story and aesthetic will be chosen based on artistic and narrative references, with the help of 3D elements to determine the perspective of buildings and lighting. It will also be based on the creation of characters and backgrounds, as well as giving some importance to lighting, perspective and music. At the end, the final work will be shown; a 2D animated short film made from digital illustrations and frame by frame animation. In order to achieve a good result, an animation study will be made, especially about animated short films, from large companies such as Disney, Pixar or Studio Ghibli and companies and/or people who have shared their creations online, and achieved a big audience out of them. There will also be a study made about character design and the importance of storytelling in characters. The creative process will be carried out with different programs dedicated to digital art depending on the tools that are needed. For illustration and design the software used will be Clip Studio Paint, a drawing software geared towards comic drawing and illustration. For the animation, Clip Studio Paint will be used for 2D drawing and Maya for the creation of spaces and 3D assets that will be used as reference and guide. This project is intended for people who love storytelling, animation and cinema. The following pages will show not only the process of creating a final animation, but also how dreams from everyday life can be used to create a relatable and exciting story

Procedural animation: towards studio solutions for believability

This thesis sets out to investigate the understanding of the relationship between key-frame movement performances and procedural animation. It is geared towards building a theory of practice that would help develop a succinct method for generating believable character animation using procedural animation. This research places an emphasis on a practical aproach to the theory of animation and movement, and investigates the historical development of character animation and the notion of believability. It uses Laban Movement Analysis as a method in the application of procedural animation. The study seeks to address the following objectives: (1) To examine what areas of procedural animation may enhance the believability of a key-framed movement performance; (2) To identify the areas of procedural animation that are or could be used within professional studio practice; (3) To examine the potential of procedural animation to help develop convincing and life-like character movements; (4) To identify where and how a keyframed character movement can be enhanced procedurally; (5) To carry out empirical studies in order to analyse the effects and possible benefits of procedural enhancements on a key-framed movement

Audio-Visual Sentiment Analysis for Learning Emotional Arcs in Movies

Stories can have tremendous power -- not only useful for entertainment, they can activate our interests and mobilize our actions. The degree to which a story resonates with its audience may be in part reflected in the emotional journey it takes the audience upon. In this paper, we use machine learning methods to construct emotional arcs in movies, calculate families of arcs, and demonstrate the ability for certain arcs to predict audience engagement. The system is applied to Hollywood films and high quality shorts found on the web. We begin by using deep convolutional neural networks for audio and visual sentiment analysis. These models are trained on both new and existing large-scale datasets, after which they can be used to compute separate audio and visual emotional arcs. We then crowdsource annotations for 30-second video clips extracted from highs and lows in the arcs in order to assess the micro-level precision of the system, with precision measured in terms of agreement in polarity between the system's predictions and annotators' ratings. These annotations are also used to combine the audio and visual predictions. Next, we look at macro-level characterizations of movies by investigating whether there exist `universal shapes' of emotional arcs. In particular, we develop a clustering approach to discover distinct classes of emotional arcs. Finally, we show on a sample corpus of short web videos that certain emotional arcs are statistically significant predictors of the number of comments a video receives. These results suggest that the emotional arcs learned by our approach successfully represent macroscopic aspects of a video story that drive audience engagement. Such machine understanding could be used to predict audience reactions to video stories, ultimately improving our ability as storytellers to communicate with each other.Comment: Data Mining (ICDM), 2017 IEEE 17th International Conference o

Conflicting relationships between two non-antagonistic animated characters

The purpose of this dissertation is to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between two non-antagonistic characters in Animation, and the impact it can have in the unfolding of the narrative and the transformation of the two characters. Its purpose is also to invite scientists, artists, and the reader, to further consider this subject as part of the creative process of storytelling, similar to the case of an individual character. This dissertation will explore historical-technological and scientific studies, as well as films and television series, which will serve as examples of conflict between two non-antagonistic characters. This research will allow the author to gather signs of what this particular kind of conflict and group of characters adds to movies and series—namely animated ones, in order to complement the focus of the course taken by the author. At the end of this dissertation, a case study is made with the final project produced during this course, A Helping Hoot. This short film, which contains a narrative driven significantly by the conflict caused by the interactions between the two main characters, serves as a platform to apply the gathered information whenever relevant to the theme. The intended result is to help raise more awareness of the particular possibilities for storytelling brought by narratives driven by the conflict between two non-antagonistic characters

Ouroboros: The Evolution From Industrialized Mass Production to Auteurism in American Animation

The evolution of animation in the United States and its resulting classification varies significantly from its global counterparts. Through a convergence of complex cultural, regulatory, and entrepreneurial influences, the medium\u27s experimental artistic principals have remained firmly rooted in the mass-production style studio pipeline codified by Hollywood. Through the advent of academically centered animation education, the development of the internet, self-distribution, and the growing affordability of industry level hardware and software, the industry has expanded beyond the traditional narrow scope. This re-globalization of entertainment in the United States encourages an auteur approach to animated filmmaking that is challenging the strict association of animation as a children\u27s medium

The Animator: The 26th Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference Toronto June 16 to 19, 2014

The 2014 Society for Animation Studies conference hosted by Sheridan College was from June 16 - 19, 2014. As Animation Studies continues to develop as a discipline, the dialogue that has opened up between more traditional academic research into the field and what we might call ‘industry-facing’ or applied research has become more important. The critical study of animation from within higher education institutions like Sheridan represents one of the many areas in which the industry can grow. Every SAS conference has its own distinct tone and flavour because we are truly international in our membership and we devolve conference organization annually to the host institution. This means that this year’s conference is strongly allied to Sheridan’s industry focus – not least with Corus warmly welcoming conference goers to their HQ for parts of the conference. SAS provides such a welcoming environment for new members, and a terrific forum to discuss animation from a multitude of perspectives. It is within this fertile and nurturing atmosphere that we decided to focus our conference on the animation artist. As a tribute to all artists whose efforts fuel our work, and in the spirit of the centenary of celebrated National Film Board of Canada animator, Norman McLaren, the 2014 SAS Conference is named “The Animator”. Keynote speakers included Scott Dyer, Executive Vice President, Strategic Planning and Chief Technology Officer, Corus Entertainment Charile Bonifacio, Animator, Arc Productions Ltd, Canada Professor Paul Wells, Director of the Animation Academy Loughborough University, UK Michael Fukushima, Executive Producer of NFB’s English Animation Studio National Film Board of Canada Panel Discussions McLaren Legacy Panel: The Centenary Year - Nichola Dobson, Terence Dobson, Kaj Pindal Stop Motion, From Local Community Members - Chris Walsh, Bret Long, Nora Keely, Mark Mayerson Conference Twitter account: @AnimatorSAS2014https://source.sheridancollege.ca/conferences_anim/1000/thumbnail.jp

Eine Annäherung an den Avantgardismus? Amateur-animation und das Ringen mit der Technik

The chapter examines the status of animation within the emerging British amateur cine movement of the interwar decades, and introduces a case study of the work of the British animator, Alan Cleave