After a lot of back and forth on which article we would like to work on, especially in which category we would rather focus on to limit our selection, we settled for this article “how does time work in The Simpsons” by Davis, A. M., Gilboy, J., & Zborowski, J.
We started of by tasking ourselves to each read the article and take notes. I read through the paper and took notes to summarize what I had understood and at times added a few notes on parts I agreed with or found interesting and if I didn’t understand something or if it stood out the wrong way to me.
After communicating our understanding of the article and its relevance to our assignment, which unfortunately in the end we didn’t fully manage to reach based on the feedback from our presentation, I believe it was a good learning experience. We each worked on a part we seem to be interested in and have a critical opinion of, whether it was agreeing with the author and learning of a different way to classify time in the animation discipline and its effect on the longevity of the series or disagreeing and finding flaws in the articles structure for example.
Unfortunately, I’m slightly disappointed I did not involve more of my research into the presentation. Some interesting points were made, with an external example of adventure time to apply the idea of tropes that classify animations into different timeline classes. As well as fully agreeing with the author on their third option of a possible answer as to how time works, being that it Is a fictional world and applying our logic on how time works isn’t so reasonable, it is a paradox but the writers have creative freedom and no rules that tie them down as to how time should function within their universe.
I do believe I learned not only from an animation point of view on how I could personally view time in my own work in the future or even animations I’ve watched in the past and will later. But we learned how to analyse an article and think critically of what the author has written, use the universities resources and take notes, taking feedback from our lectures on our presentation as important advice and utilising it, as well as keeping in mind the other feedback people have received if they felt relevant and useful. For our next assignment I have in mind what we should be looking out for in our essays and feel ready to investigate the subject I have in mind.
For our next assignment, I have an idea on which subject I’d like to work on, and if so, the knowledge I gained from this experienced shouldn’t be neglected but used as a potential point of view which will refer to passage of time and change. Be it a possibility, it is still interesting to at least try and integrate the information and knowledge I’ve gathered working on this assignment and using it to my advantage in the next, like an anchor point to my research.
Overall, the subject the article is on, is not something I am familiar with at all compared to my team. Although that may be the case, even if the language in the article was quite complex, it still managed to convey its ideas with examples of episodes that were definitely supporting the argument. Not only did I learn from the article itself and doing my project on critical thinking and reflecting on what I’ve read but watching my peer’s presentation was even more helpful. Although I wished I could have a second try at going more into detail about my analysis during the presentation and link my thinking to the quotes I liked, I believe this mistake was a necessary learning experience.
