major post

Pixilation is a style of animation that is very similar to stop motion. It using people instead of puppets. Actors gradually make different actions, and they can not follow the normal physical rules when making, showing many more interesting ideas.

Neighbours(1952 film) shown in class are an example. It is a story about two men live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a flower blooms between their houses, they fight each other to the death over the ownership of the single small flower. In the movie, white fences are used as weapons to hurt each other. Eventually, they were surrounded the two men’s graves and even turned into crosses laid flat on the graves.

The movie only uses these very simple props, but through different placement and use methods, it has produced different effects. I think it’s very successful.

When making Pixilation animation, I think we should also think about whether ordinary props, which are very common at ordinary times, can show different feelings under narrative and shooting techniques.

Painting and music have distinct similarities. They also have melody and rhythm, expressing rich inner feelings. What music can reflect, art works can also reflect, and even more intense color can be used to guide the audience. Visual music artists use the method of creating music to pursue the appeal of music in painting, thus completing the creation of visual music.

The main elements of visual music, such as points, lines, planes and colors, should have special aesthetic meanings, including unique appeal and plot. This is an abstract visual experience beyond the literary language.

In a visual music video presented in class, the professor joked that the white lines on the picture dancing with the rhythm were like dancing cigarettes, which impressed me deeply.

I think that simple and pleasant lines can well interpret the music with a pleasant rhythm. If I were to do a visual music work, I would be happy to use a lot of lines to complete it. Because this is a very smart and effective method, but also can create a successful visual effect.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had also watched another Mickey Mouse short, The Mad Doctor. It was in a horror tone (is Halloween month HAHAHAHAHA Trick or Treat!!!!), about a mad scientist who kidnapped Pluto and Mickey came to save him.

The story was quite simple, but the animators still illustrated it really well. It is in black and white, but still having fantastic shading and lighting effects, helping at times to give some depth to Mickey’s design as he enters the Mad Doctor’s castle. The door lock scene is the same as another horror short, The Haunted House, which the door locked by itself after Mickey entered the House.

I loved the skeleton tricking Mickey the most, reminding me of the Skeleton dance watched in class. The Skeletons are playful and I laughed when watching it (Although it was a horror :D).

It was terrifying when I saw Mickey was also get caught and nearly been killed by a large saw. But at last it ended in a heartwarming way that I enjoyed to see.

We watched a lot of Disney movies in class. Before that, I didn’t know much about the popular characters in the early black and white animation. Now I know more of Disney’s classic characters and how they created.

Disney was founded by Walt Disney in 1926, when they created a character, hoping that he would become the protagonist of animation, and that he would bring good luck to the company. This character is not Mickey Mouse, but Oswald the lucky rabbit. But the character was stripped of copyright by Universal studios in 1928, and Walt Disney lost a lot of good animators.

After Walt Disney understood the importance of copyright, Walt Disney once again created a new animated character, which appeared in the movie Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928. This character is Mickey Mouse, which we are familiar with.

From 1928 to 1947, Mickey Mouse was voiced by Walt Disney himself, and Mickey Mouse became the first cartoon character to have an exclusive location on Hollywood Star Avenue.

Anyone who has seen Disney Mickey Mouse animation will find that the characters have only four fingers, and according to Disney’s official explanation, they think that a mouse has five fingers is a little too many and looks strange.

On the other hand, because of budgetary considerations, if it took 45,000 compositions to make a half-and-a-half animation, it would save the company a lot of time and budget if it spent less than one finger, so Mickey had only four fingers left.

In this weekend, I had watched two Mickey Mouse short, The Mad Doctor and The Karnival Kid. Both of the shorts are black and white but I enjoyed watching them.
In the Karnival Kid, I am impressed by listening the first Mickey Mouse line ‘Hot Dogs! Hot Dogs’ voiced by Walt Disney. I felt a little familiar in the start of the film when a cow walks away from the camera, similiar strategy has been applied in the animated short, Plane Crazy.

It is impressing to watch this short, including how the hot dog was given a personality and two cats singing in the last scene. I can see the Mickey Mouse in this short was slightly different and the atmosphere of the whole animation was not really consistent with the style and personality of Mickey and Disney later output. This can show the graduating improvement and optimisation of the character Mickey Mouse.