Month: September 2021

 Animating Adulthood: Emotional Resonance, Affective Quality, and the Human Condition in Adult Animated Television:  An Examination in Theory, Viewership, and Practice, Andrea Marek

• Author makes a point of noting that it is hard to define what animation is, and the term animation in itself is a catchall because (similar to what Mitchell said), it isn’t a genre but an artistic style so it’s hard to use it to define any specific thing.
• “Animation can be described as any media material which uses an animation technique, regardless of the narrative content, but this explanation is endless, encompassing all techniques, all media of any genre using animation techniques such as animated comedy, animated documentary, animated horror, and animated science fiction. “[A]nimation is an imprecise, fuzzy catchall that heaps an enormous and historically far-reaching, artistically diverse body of work into one pot” (Buchan, “Animation, in Theory” 113). A great deal of effort is made by scholars who write about animation to achieve a conclusive definition, but the results remain inconclusive. There is no all-encompassing framework in which to examine animation simply because of its scope and diversity.” [p.1]
• Author is arguing that although much of adult animation features crude and immature storylines and humor it is actually secretly progressive. I’m ready to disagree but willing to listen
• “The three programs which popularized the genre both for audiences and academics alike are The Simpsons (1990-present), Family Guy (1999-present) and South Park (1997-present). These three programs are often seen as archetypes for adult animation, not only due to their longstanding success but also because they contain many of the presumptions that have become associated with adult animation: misogynistic content intended for a young male (often white) audience, reliance on crude humor including sex, bathroom humor, violence and alcohol as central elements—highlighting certain tropes those unfamiliar with the genre might expect. However, these initial iterations of the genre have also been progressive, featuring family-driven and dysfunctional-family storylines, social and political commentary, and subsequently laying the groundwork for emotionally-driven storylines.” [p. 2]
• “Animation provides a unique means of escapism unparalleled in other film mediums precisely because there are not only no limits to the realm of possibilities within the genre, but also because the lack of real world referent emphasises the break between the real-world and an animated-world” [p. 8]
• “As a child, animation serves multiple purposes: a babysitter, a distraction, a form of entertainment, a friend or companion, all of which serve to take the viewer ‘away’ in that moment of watching. As an adult, animation continues to serve many of the same purposes: as with other film or television genres it offers narratives which allow the viewer to enter the world of the story and temporarily relinquish their lived reality.” [p. 9]
• “The success of adult animated television encompasses childhood nostalgia for animation, the element of surprise or the unexpected from the juxtaposition between the contrasting visuals and storylines, escapism from one’s own lived experience, limitless visual possibilities, as well as what Goodall refers to as “spectatorship as surrogate participation” (164). Therapeutic in a sense, adult animation opens a space for self-reflection, and confronts the individual with the reality of their own emotional state, however decayed it may be.”
• (it’s worth mentioning that this author comes off as like suuuuuper nihilistic so a lot of her statements are like that)
• (here’s another one! “This desire for unwavering happiness remains a societal fallacy” [p. 21] Girl???)
• Author mentions the value of adult animation having the ability to comment on television itself and the state of the medium. While I agree this is valuable and common in adult animation, I would argue that it is not a trait that is absent in children’s animated comedies.
• “As adult animation continues to show, animation is no longer simply about bringing the imaginary to life but rather bringing life to the everyday issues that viewers are faced with, reversing the narrative of animation portraying the fantastical and impossible, instead providing a very real account of everyday adult reality.” [p. 35]

An Examination of Why Animation Should Target a Broader Demographic by Bobby J Osborne

• Why is animation labeled as a genre rather than an artistic style? Black and white is not a genre of movie. Action, romance, horror, should all be genres within animation, not alongside.
• “As a storytelling medium, animation is capable of telling any type of story for any age, yet animation is used by Hollywood as a means to fill an empty niche in an entertainment market that primarily caters to older audiences.” [p. 2]
• Discussion of propaganda in the wartime Popeye short You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap, which delt with WWII tensions with the Japanese and portrays racist stereotypes. It is not a child-friendly cartoon as it discusses real-life violence and politics, yet is passed off as being all-ages entertainment, thus enforcing the belief that political propaganda is the exception; even a child can “recognize the enemy”
• How can animation target a wider audience?
• three key reasons why it SHOULD:
• 1. technology has changed the marketplace
• 2. children of the 80s have retained their love of cartoons, unlike baby boomers, thus opening the industry up to adults- market shift.
• 3. lines are blurring between live action and animation anyway with vfx dominating popular movies (example: marvel incorporating mostly cgi and also utilizing characters that are pretty much entirely animated- like The Hulk- this is essentially a cartoon character without viewers realizing it)
• video games have already shed the stigma of being for children

All kids out of the pool!: Brand Identity, Television Animations, and Adult Audience of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, Hye Jin Lee, University of Iowa

-what is the meaning of “adult” in Adult Swim, and how does the show as well as its audience define what it means to be an adult/what constitutes adult content?

-“Adult Swim enabled Cartoon Network to recontextualize classic cartoons and challenge the assumption that cartoons and animation are children-only entertainment” [p.3]

-what is the relationship between media and brand/lifestyle content and how can this be used to profit off the viewer? in what ways does this take advantage of the consumer or water down product?

-“Through the use of various multimedia technologies, Adult Swim encourages viewers to not only intensify their relationship with the programming, but also to further extend and normalize the Adult Swim brand culture. And by marketing Adult Swim as a lifestyle rather than simple a television programming, it had been able to become a successful multiplatform brand today” [p. 12]

• “Being designed as an outlet in ‘edgy’, ‘subversive’ cartoons that specifically appeal to young adults, Adult Swim has been able to collect adult cartoon fans who not only enjoy watching cartoons but do not consider watching cartoons to be an ‘abnormal’ or ‘weird’ adult activity as members of the Adult Swim brand community.” [p. 15]
• convergence culture: giving the viewers the illusion (or potentially, reality) of being part of producing their own content by both viewing and using, aka viewsing, which adult swim did by allowing discussion boards and question & answer segments with creators of the network + featuring certain comments on the network, as well as selling adult swim marketed lifestyle products
• “infantile adulthood”
• “According to Barber (2007), consumer capitalism has encouraged adults to hold onto, if not follow, the tastes and habits of children so more consumer goods and services can be sold globally” [p. 21]
• the author argues that when people worry over men consuming childrens content, but not women, they reveal that they do not view women as real intelligent adults but rather children or subhuman themselves
• author also argues that the boundary between kid and adult culture and content is not natural and instead has been socially and culturally constructed
• Adult Swim markets itself only to men and recruits only male promoters, as well as relying on sexist jokes, yet that does not dissaude female audiences
• “Heather Hendershot points out how this industry logic that encourages girls to be receptive of the boy-centric shows is evocative of Laura Mulvey’s (1988) problemization of the patriarchal society that encourages women (from childhood onwards) to adopt trans-sex identification as a habit to the point of it becoming second nature….it is imperative for contemporary women to embody simultaneously both genders if they want to make it in the patriarchal society full of male-dominated activities.” [p. 66]
• “The long-held establishment and understanding of cartoons as children’s-only genre, or inappropriate/illegitimate adult entertainment form, have created tensions for many of the Adult Swim adult viewers who happen to be cartoon fans, especially those who became attracted to Adult Swim because of its cartoon and anime lineup. As demonstrated in chapter 7, many adult fans of Adult Swim actively defy the notion that cartoons are not for adults and that adults who enjoy watching cartoons are ‘abnormal’ or ‘un-adult’. Even those who acknowledge Adult Swim to be juvenile and immature resist the connection between their consumption and pleasure in cartoons and Adult Swim shows and their identity as ‘immature’ and ‘irresponsible’ adults to fail to fulfill adult responsibilities.” [p. 264]

I’m currently 3,000 words into my thesis. After delving into my introduction and analysis of statistics collected in previous studies, I’m faced with the decision of how to go about conducting my actual surveys regarding the work I’m doing for my FMP. This morning I finally settled on my research methodology.

As you know, the goal of this study and work, besides adding to my showreel, is to determine whether audiences, particularly in relation to their age demographic, respond more positively to different animation styles- realistic or more cartoonish, and for this reason I’m animating two different versions of the same lip sync performance / style of shot that feature different artistic styles.

Now the key to conducting my research correctly is making sure that I have responses from different age demographics. My original, unformed idea was to just conduct an instagram survey, but the problem with this is that A) all of the correspondents are my own age and B) know me as a person.

So here’s an outline for my research methodology.

Younger Age Demographic (Children):

For this group, my interview will involve less analytical questions. I’ll simply ask them which animation they like better and why. As far as finding participants for the survey, at my internship we often bring in children to give feedback on the video game we’re creating; I can pull these visitors aside to ask them questions with the permission of their parents and my boss. I can at least collect data from one or two children under the age of ten and one or two teenagers this way.

EDIT: it has occurred to me that because I am leaving my job in the middle of October and returning to the US, I will not have time to finish all of the animation that I plan to have for my research (3 separate shots) and have all of this available to use in my studies conducted at work. It would skew my data if I only show the children one of the shots (Dana/Carla) as opposed to all three, and show the other groups all three. Therefore I may have to rely on in-person interviews with younger children that I know as family members of friends. This may significantly decrease the pool of participants in this survey group.

Adult Audience (Gen Z and Young Millennials)

This group will be split into two parts: animators/artists and non-animators. For the group of animators, I can survey and interview my coworkers and classmates. The downside to this is that all of the above know who I am, and may be tempted to be kinder or skew their answers towards what they think I want to hear, although personally, I know them well enough to believe they will most likely be brutally honest anyway. Another resource for animators is Reddit, where I can ask on r/animation. Now, this may hurt my feelings a little bit, as people on Reddit tend to be a little bit mean, but it’s a good resource. And besides, if they want to roast my work I can report that result and mention that perhaps it is this or that technical issue that skewed data. So, for the animator group, that’s how I’ll collect data from people who know me and people who don’t. The group of people who don’t know me will encapsulate a wider age range, although will most likely still be young people, as Reddit users are often between 18 and 30 years old.

For the non-animators, I can still use an Instagram poll to collect responses from my friends. This does face the same problem of them knowing me, but with Instagram’s polling feature it is more likely that a wide swathe of people will respond, as it takes mere seconds to report an answer. I can also easily collect an answer in regards to why they prefer their selected animation in the questions box that Instagram features. Obviously I must still collect answers from people who don’t know me, and so for this reason I will ask several friends to feature my work on their stories and report back to me the results that they got. It will be interesting to see whether they are vastly different from my own, which could indicate whether people who know me will answer less honestly out of emotional obligation. It’s funny how I’m afraid of people on Reddit being too mean and hurting my feelings while people on Instagram may be too nice and skew my results, lol.

Not everyone will be willing to participate in the interview segment, some may only answer the poll. But if they are willing to respond, the questions may involve: Which animation do you like better? Why? What kind of media do you think you’d see this in (TV, movie, video game?) Which do you think is more professional? Which one is more interesting?

note: I may choose not to interview my classmates as they share too much knowledge of the background to my work and our studies to give accurate results.

If I can I will ask friends with roots internationally to share this, and compare results from my friends in the UK vs US vs South America vs Australia.

Friends who may be a good choice (thinking out loud) Catrin Harrison, of Ross, England: 1500 followers. Cole Irwin, of Chicago, USA: 1000 followers. Vanessa Vilchez of Lima, Peru: 450 followers.

The Late 50s+ Crowd (Baby Boomers)

For a moment I was baffled as to how I’ll collect data from this audience. Adults born before 1964 don’t tend to broadly use niche spaces of the internet or check social media often. But then it hit me: I will ask my grandparents, who are in their late 70s, to share the animations on Facebook without stating that it is the work of their grandchild and report back to me the results. It is also likely that I’ll be visiting my grandparents in Tennessee towards the end of October and into early November, and in that time I can ask older adults in person what their response is and conduct interviews.

For seniors, my plan, like with the younger children, is to ask less analytical questions. I’ll simply ask them which one they like better and why, although I will also ask whether they enjoy watching animated movies and whether they are less likely to watch them than a live-action movie- and why.

Participants to Conduct: Betty Jane and Charles Campbell of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Will collect information regarding followers and participants when I get to it.

Thoughts on the first Clara test render.

Well, it’s no Dana. It’s not the big show-off piece, but that said, it’s still very good. It’s a close second for some of my stronger work. The track itself is tight but I think the scene setup needs a second look, there’s some jumpiness. Also, those chairs on the left are huge. They need resizing.

The contrast between Clara and Dana is very nice. It’s a long-awaited glimpse of what this is gonna look like when it comes together.

After around three days of day-and-night attempting to figure out why the ground plane and geo were not moving as expected with the camera, I was growing frustrated. I’d even resorted to moving the scene around with the camera, effectively messily counter-animating, but after two render attempts I had to accept that this was not only a waste of time, but also would never achieve the desired results.

I’d attempted to parent the scene to the camera, and I’d looked into some of my old tracked shots to figure out what I’d done wrong, but could find no answers. Growing weary of searching for a solution, I forced myself to make a concrete list brainstorming possibilities.

I decided, overtired and unmotivated, that the easiest thing to do for the time being would be to look into 3DE’s orientation view and see if there was a mismatch in how the camera interacted with the scene in Maya vs 3DE, although I strongly doubted that the issue I was experiencing was related to the track and suspected more that it was due to the way I’d set up the scene or my hierarchy, though I couldn’t figure out the exact root of the issue. Nevertheless, I took a break from fruitless counteranimating to delve back into 3DE.

As far as I could tell, it looked completely fine. The camera was moving towards the stationary points as I’d expect it to, as I wished it would, in the Maya scene. Interacting with the points as it should with the geo.

That’s when I had a big moment of realization.

When I set up my scene, I had begun building my ground plane without snapping it to a point. I must have forgotten to do this, or else I’d assumed that if it looks correct in the camera view the camera will still orient correctly around it, but it suddenly made sense to me that although the scene geo looked right in the first frame, it could still be an incorrect distance to interact like the points were- for example, I could’ve placed it much too far away and simply made it large enough to look correct without actually being correct, thus when the camera moves closer, it is barely noticeable because the geo is much further away than the points.

On a hunch I hid my animation, deleted my ground plane and building geo and reconstructed it, snapped to a point in the scene this time.

When I hit play, it was a miracle: the camera moved around the scene correctly, the ground plane stayed kissing the edge of that building perfectly.

I reconstructed my building geo, making sure to extrude the edges of my ground plane this time to build the background set and reduce the mesh to as little faces as possible, my logic being that if I know the ground plane works there’s no point giving myself a second problem with complex geo elsewhere/ interacting on top of it.

And, blessedly, the geo and ground plane both moved correctly- that is to say, the camera moved around them correctly- in the scene.

The night had stretched on into the early morning hours, but I resolved to set my scene back up and put a test render into the farm to see if my plan had worked in the morning.

I resized my scene and moved Dana back into place.

She’s now surrounded by points. As I had mentioned in my notes, I’d been experiencing some crashing in Arnold Renderview, so I wasn’t sure whether it looked how I wanted. No matter, I’d put the render through and if it worked, I could re-adjust one last time before my final render.

The Next Day

And, after several days of frustration, it had worked. The scene was finally set up as it should be.

The excitement and relief I felt was immeasurable, and I liked the lighting setup even more than I did originally. Tasting an end to this leg of the project, and ready to move on to the next, I took just a couple notes for tweaking the scene to its final glory:

It took me all of thirty minutes to make these changes. Ready to embrace the product of my hard work, I changed the file name to Final_PinkDana render (or something of the sort) and chucked it into the farm.

However, so close to the end I could taste it, fortune did not smile on me, as I encountered an error with the farm: Deadline was marking jobs as complete, yet not saving the files to their output destination, despite the paths being correct and identical to the setup from last night. After several trial-and-error attempts to see if there was anything I could do on my end, I reached out to Luke for help.

Expect a glorious final render in a separate post later today.

In the span of a night, stretching into the early morning, I was able to track the footage I’d spent days carefully choosing (I had originally chosen a different shot, actually, but it involved a stationary camera, and this presented a problem with determining the depth of the scene; not only did I not want to involve a nodal camera but it also fails to display my tracking skills well in a showreel). Fortunately, this shot, which I’m referring to as Pink_Wall, tracked smoothly and easily.

The shot itself is a one-of-a-kind on Pexels, with camera motion and a ground plane in the frame while still depicting no actual humans. I’d spent days perusing Youtube and alternate stock footage sites, frustrated with the utter lack of stock footage that appropriately depicted a usable background without actors in the frame.

After tracking the footage, I glided through setting up the Nuke composition and snapping the 3DE scene to the ground plane. I was ready in no time to build the set, which is one of my absolute favorite things to do.

This is the composition I created, and I’m almost as proud of it as I am of my Term 1 set from December. [Artist Moment] That one was great work because of the light setup framing the character and highlighting the blood splatter dramatically, but this one is good work because of the way the color patterns bounce the eye around the scene. I’ve chosen green and yellow leaves to draw the eye to the bus stop at the right of the screen as well as the yellow of Dana’s shirt, and the funky festival posters bring attention back the the retro-neon pattern on Dana’s trousers, though shrouded in shadow they don’t steal the stage. The color of the arm in the street art on the left draws the eye to the tan of the tree bark on the right, framing Dana and her action. I’ve tried to include props that place the scene in a time period relatable to the viewer without giving the city a specific location and posters that keep the atmosphere vibrant and cheerful.

I chose to give Dana a bright and stunning outfit to match the personality I will pair her with as well as to help her stand out in a high-contrast scene. It was a good choice as well to give her bright gold earrings, as it adds that extra touch to her face and personality.

After setting up the scene, this was how my shot looked:

All set for a first test render.

However, deep into 3 AM, I discovered that my scene setup still needed a lot of work.

The ground plane, applied with a shadowmatte, is moving incorrectly, and appears to be rendering incorrectly as well, which will present a problem as I fix it in the way her feet interact with ground.

The work I have to do before this is done mainly involves fixing the shadowmatte groundplane. I also intend to animate gentle wind through the leaves overhead.

This is the test render of Clara, which I created for the same reasons as the Dana test render from yesterday. With hyper-realism it’s harder for me to tell whether it’s perfect, but I can no longer spot glaring mistakes.

I watched this split-screen with the Dana render and the effect is really, really cool. It’s really exciting to finally begin to visualize what this project will look like when it’s completed! I’m starting to already get a sense of pride in this work and it’s amazing.