Overall, these first few weeks of the module have been very interesting and honestly a lot of fun. I found that I gained even more skills, not only regarding the analysis aspect, but my group skills too, especially when it was time to assign the roles to each group member. I also found that my confidence when presenting has improved as I was working with people I didn´t know that well.
At the start of the assignment, I was quite confident regarding the methods in which you analyze given material, but soon discovered that it would be a bit more tricky as I had never really analyzed a piece of film before. To keep it short, I had never analyzed an animation or film, so I was quite excited to start learning. Thankfully, me and my team were a good fit, and I found myself comfortable enough in the group to be able to speak out and ask whatever question and queries needed to advance through the few weeks. My group consisted of Adam McCreery, Alexander Massey, Joe McCloy and Dean McArdle, but unfortunately Dean left the group, leaving just the four of us. Initially, I thought this would end up having a negative impact, but soon after, I found that as we were a smaller group, it was still the same atmosphere and attitude. We were assigned the animation called “Creature from the Lake” by ISART DIGITAL, a very well-made animation that I personally loved out of all of them. With my group, we watched it several times throughout to really get to grips with different moments of the animation, and as we did this together, I found having different people´s perspectives was the most important bit out of everything. This gave me insight on scenes I had never noticed or thought much of. Within our group, we agreed that our given animation had lots of filming techniques we could use in our presentation. From the colour to the editing there was a broad range of topics we were able to cover, finding ourselves with many different areas to mention and talk about.
We used the initial starting week to get to know each other and make a group chat so we could discuss our notes further outside of class. This was a great step, as seeing each other´s points of views and thoughts helped everybody tremendously. Along with sharing ideas and notes, we each completed some personal analysis and developments. Each week we had a lecture discussing different areas of film analysis, which I found very useful and over all a key part of our research. I used this as an opportunity, making my own personal notes on each different lecture as the weeks went by. I found that many of the themes and topics explained were ones I had seen before-hand, but some such as: mise-en-scene and film art were quite new to me.
When it came to planning the presentation, since there were only four of us, we picked the key themes to mention that would give abroad analysis of the animation. We split it into; cinematography, editing, mise-en-scene and mentioned some points on sound as there wasn´t much to analyze regarding that. I picked editing, which at the beginning I found a bit tricky to analyze. I´ll admit that I wasn´t so sure what to talk about, but after some research using the reading list given to us and some outside research, I found that I really got into the analyzing the editing used and I was able to produce detailed and informative few slides. Although I´m happy with how mine turned out, I definitely could´ve added in some quotes from the reading list to back my points up.
Researching:
Throughout the weeks, I found researching extremely useful for my points, and even though I was able to come up with a lot of observations by simply watching the animation, using this research pushed my content that extra mile.
Our lecturer presented some very handy slides on editing, where I gathered some useful points. “Classical continuity”, “Soviet montage” and “Temporal logic” were three of the points I found easy to explain on my presentation, especially classical continuity. With these, I could explain the flow of the storyline and the pace it went at using these slides. For example, continuity is an editing system to maintain consistency in both time and space, which I found made the animation a leisurely watch and quite easy to follow.
Apart from the slides, I was grateful that they gave us such a clear reading list. The required section had 3 very useful books, the first one coming in the useful; Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin, and Smith, Jeff (2020) Film art: an introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill Education – “You notice when the cutting is very fast, during a chase scene or a fight” This summed up what I got from the book, as it mentioned a lot of quick cuts when it came to more action-packed scenes.
Some other ones such as Cottrell, S The study skills handbook, Denison R Princess Mononoke (2018), Furniss, M Animation: The global History, and the Process & Production journal were the most useful reading I got from the list, and although there were other good ones, I found these ones the most interesting.
In general, I found that our presentation ran smoothly. I personally wasn´t as nervous as I thought I would be compared to the first week, and believe that I presented in a rather confident tone. I think some of my team members were a bit nervous, but I think we all did tremendously well. One thing I would fix for the future is our timing, as even though we all spoke, my last team member could only present 2 / 4 of his slides. Overall, it was a very good exercise that we executed well and with care, and I´m looking forward to the next assignment.
