Category: 4_Digital Animation and Visual Culture

TASK
Artists Ryan Trecartin and Emma Calder both make use of social media as the source for their animation and video work. Each ask how cameras, social media, and reality TV have changed the way we engage with the world and with one another. Watch the videos made by both artists as a starting point to reflect on your own experience of social media.

Of all the digital animation that is produced, corporate videos and video games are possibly the most numerous form. The various visual styles of this non-advertisement based graphic content can be a rich source of material for artists.
Explore either video games or corporate video as your focus. Research several kinds of contemporary corporate video online that make use of animated elements or find examples of video games throughout history.
Make notes of the stylistic choices taken in each and the dates that these were made. Look at the composition of frame and narrative arc of the video as well as aesthetic choices of the graphics and animated elements. Using your chosen clips compile a video timeline of visual styles that develop from the 90s to the present.

TASK
Undertake research into absence and representation in moving image and build
up your own argument about whether ‘something is missing’ in digital
representation. For example;
● In what ways can representation be defined by an absence?
● Why is this particular to animation and the digital world?
● What will the future be like?
Your argument can be in written, recorded audio or video form. Remember to
cite your sources.

Is something missing in contemporary visual culture? by filling the world with images are we attempting to hide, erase or obscure something?

question from course text.

“I don’t really know how to make work that doesn’t first deal with loss, or speak of loss. Because I guess I felt that loss, or insufficiency, or
inability and failure and negation generally are the absolute bedrock of making things. Which sounds perverse because obviously you are
generating something; you are creating something out of nothing. But actually…Representation, I feel like it is defined by an absence.”

Ed Atkins, Ed Atkins interview: Something is Missing (2017) Louisiana Channel.

“ Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL, and follows a group of digital
beings—render ghosts, spam bots, holograms—as they search for meaning. Multiple storylines and materials collapse and converge to
raise questions about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release.”

Cecile B Evans, Hyperlinks or it Didn’t Happen (2014) Vdrome.org.

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TASK:
Identify animations that uses good and/or bad image quality in interesting ways. Write a short piece (written, audio or animated) that draws together your research and viewpoints on image quality. Your essay can be presented in written, audio or video form (Approximately 1500 words, 3 minutes audio or 1 minute video).

Reflect on these animations in relation to Steyerl’s quotes above and look up and
read her essay, In Defence of the Poor Image .Illustrate with images if needed.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

. For additional context, you may want to review Alan Warburton’s videos Spectacle, Speculation, Spam and Goodbye Uncanny Valley from the previous exercise.

Compression or data compression is a digital process in which image or moving image information is reduced to make file sizes more manageable. Compression reduces file size by eliminating unused digital elements (lossless) or reducing less important information (lossy), such as subtle tones. Too much lossy compression can negatively affect image quality.

Image quality

“The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak.”
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)

https://vimeo.com/194963450

https://vimeo.com/alanwarburton/goodbyeuncannyvalley

Fairytales of Motion by Alan Warburton | Tate Exchange

TASK:
Do you agree with Peter Jackson that high frame rates allow an audience to see more reality?
If so, do you think this is desirable? If not, what other motivation do film-makers and animators have in pushing for such high frame rates?
Use OCA’s discuss forums to share your thoughts and any animation references.

TASK: To demonstrate that you fully grasp the concept of frame rates, write a short paragraph explaining the difference between slow motion and frames per second in your ongoing glossary of terms. Cite any web or literature references that you use.

“Frame rate is the engine behind the cinematic lie.”
Alice O’Connor

The amount of time each film frame remains on screen before being replaced by the following image needs to be high enough to create the illusion of movement. 

The human brain can perceive between 10 and 12 individual frames every second. Anything faster than this makes our brains blend the frames together into an illusion of movement. This is the basis of animation and is called the ‘Phi Phenomenon’. 

The technology available today for cameras and playback allow for very high frame rates and there has been a trend in recent films (3D, CGI) to shoot and play back on frame rates much higher than those needed for the illusion of movement and those used in conventional cinema.

History of frame rates

In the early days of cinema, silent film frame rates varied widely. Cameras and projectors were often hand-cranked. Film strips were projected with a black shutter between each frame and in order for this black flicker of the screen (going dark every second frame) to be undetectable to audiences, each frame was flashed more than once (effectively played back as twos or threes).

Once sound was introduced, a more stable frame rate was required and the established rate became 24 frames per second (that is, each of the 12 frames needed for the Phi Phenomenon displayed twice, on twos). This set frame rate
came to dominate the way all cinema and moving image looked, and still mostly does.

TV: PAL and NTSC

When electronic frame rates came into being with television, problems with flicker and bandwidth were resolved by ‘interlacing’ frames in a comb-like fashion. Each frame would be refreshed at a rate set to the electrical alternating current (AC) of the country. 25fps (PAL) for countries operating on 50 hz AC – Africa, Europe, most of Asia and 30fps for countries operating on 60 hz AC (NTSC) the Americas and Japan.

Digital and CGI

With the introduction of digital media there were less structural reasons to limit what frame rates could be. Filmmakers have tried to push the ‘temporal resolution’ to increase ‘realism’ and decrease motion blur. Tests done on high frame rates such as 60fps were interpreted to produce stronger emotional responses in test audiences and frames as high as 120 fps have been developed (4K) and used in video games and sports broadcasts. Peter Jackson’s CGI
animated and live action hybrid blockbuster The Hobbit (2012) was screened at 48 fps (frames per second), twice that of normal 24 fps speed. Jackson argued that this high frame rate made for a clearer, more ‘real’ film.

Questions

It’s a moot point amongst audiences and critics what ‘more real’ means, particularly in the context of CGI. Audience members of The Hobbit complained of headaches and others complained that the ‘high realism’ of the film gave it the look of a ‘made for TV movie’. 

It is arguable that the incursion of animated CGI into almost every aspect of commercial narrative film and moving image is beginning to deconstruct the nature of cinema; drawing cinema away from its historically close relationship with literature and pulling it towards the world of computer games both in visual content and structural make up. 

Most moving image and cinema are still recorded for playback at 24 fps; a cadence that remains for the time being, something that audiences are more comfortable with.

TASK:
Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.
Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

TASK:
Academics, like Norman M Klein and Vivian Sobchack argue that there is an important difference between analogue morphing and digital morphing. They suggest that digital morphing programmes tend to smooth out glitches and hesitations more than analogue morphing.
Klein argues that the effects of seamless computer morphing; “displays less of the mercurial, the lighting hand and traced memories.”
Klein and Sobchack also argue that analogue morphing can be used to express a ‘poetics of loss’ and anxiety about the organic disappearing into the industrial. An audience of analogue morphing is asked to think in terms of allegories of entropy and ruin, whereas digital morphing turns this sense of decay into a sense of fantasy.
● Consider the difference between analogue and digital examples of morphing.
● Do you agree with Klein and Sobchak’s view? Can you find examples of animations to substantiate your view?
● What, if any, are the differences between an analogue approach to morphing and a digital approach?
Document your research and reflections on analogue and digital morphing with images and clips to illustrate your point and upload this to your learning log.

Analogue stop motion svankmeier dialogue

Look at the work of animators who use compositing techniques. Reference some of the names mentioned in the preceding text and below are some examples of artists who work with compositing.

TASK: Find some analogue and digital animations to compare and contrast their visual qualities. You could look at early cartoons and their later digital remakes or compare CGI animations with claymation.
Look at their visual qualities and consider what is lost or gained. Can you
obviously tell that one is digital and the other hand crafted and what visual clues give this away? What does each offer in terms of the image they present.
Add your research notes and reflections to your learning log.

• Analogue (from the Greek ana-logos meaning “proportion” or “ratio”). The continuous physical relationship between the original message and its reproduction. Speech and writing are represented by print in a book; light bounces off an object and is focused by a camera lens, changing the colours of chemicals on film. These are one-to-one correspondences between a signal and its translation into a physical medium.
• Digital (from the Latin digitus -finger or toe) implies the medium of binary digits (bits) that computers use to process information. Two states, ‘On’ and ‘Off’ are represented by 0 and 1 to code all types of digital information. Digital is not a continuous stream, as with analogue signals but a set of information.

Analog media can no longer mean what it did in the pre-digital era, but now stands in relation to the dominant digital animation culture.

Allan Warburton argues that:

in mainstream media, as in art production, analogue practice is often fetishized, with the traditional idea of craft being amplified into spectacle. 

Tonya Jameson:

“Creating something with our hands gives us a false sense of control at a time when we have little”

Fiona Hackney:
the popularity of craft in media production

“may be read as a means of addressing the problems and anxieties surrounding the acceleration of modern life (unemployment, the strain of new work processes and their effects on physical and mental life)”

“This is a file, which was unintentionally downloaded from my brain, 14355 days after my birth, around twenty minutes past four in the afternoon, and was forgotten to delete.”

Alex Heim on 14355_16_23_05.rts (2015)
See vimeo page 

Motion Capture

In the 1880s, Etienne-Jules Marey attempted to record pure movement. He invented a ‘geometric chronophotographic’ system to isolate graphic
representations of movement that were discrete from the original subject. In one example (pictured above) he attached a multiple cross section of white sticks to his subject’s back and photographed the subject walking. The subject was dressed completely in black and placed before a black background. In the
resulting images the person would ‘disappear’ leaving only the denoting white lines. These lines were then composited onto a single photographic plate, which Marey took to represent ‘pure movement’.

Current motion- capture software and technology uses essentially the same approach either magnetic or optically based. Both systems rely on placing points
on an actor or subject, then reading the motion by a series of sensors or cameras. This technology was used in James Cameron’s animated feature film
Avatar (2009).

Other types of motion capture (mocap systems) ‘directly measure joint angles of rods and potentiometers’ which provide a recording of movement abstracted from the original form. A similar process referred to as video-based motion capture, allows one to extract pure movement information from already existing film or video footage. Motion capturing has found its way into everyday appliances from video games systems to mobile devices. Each of these motion capture systems represents a significant shift in the recording of ‘pure motion’ and an effective method by which to consider movement abstracted from form

https://youtu.be/7OON424H1vU

https://youtu.be/qoaJleGZ6_Q

https://youtu.be/FSnWHppN7x8