Creative Challenges in the Production of Documentary Animation

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-234
Author(s):  
Sheila M. Sofian

In this chapter, Sheila M. Sofian examines animated documentary from a filmmaker’s perspective. This chapter explores the appropriateness of animation’s use within nonfiction film. This chapter also asks how and when animation’s use might enhance audience understanding of a given documentary topic, and how and when it might distract from the same. The chapter also examines whether animation’s use in documentary reveals the filmmaking process in a more overt fashion than witnessed within live action documentary, and what controversies arise as a result. This chapter discusses these and other issues through reflective accounts of the production and exhibition of Sofian’s own animated documentary films. In discussing these works, this chapter examines the creative process of animated documentary production and the unique challenges faced when producing non-fiction animated films. The relationship between sound and image, choice of animation technique, and the effectiveness of literal versus abstract imagery are all topics explored.

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Hunter

In this article, Victoria Hunter explores the concept of the ‘here and now’ in the creation of site-specific dance performance, in response to Doreen Massey's questioning of the fixity of the concept of the ‘here and now’ during the recent RESCEN seminar on ‘Making Space’, in which she challenged the concept of a singular fixed ‘present’, suggesting instead that we exist in a constant production of ‘here and nows’ akin to ‘being in the moment’. Here the concept is applied to an analysis of the author's recent performance work created as part of a PhD investigation into the relationship between the site and the creative process in site-specific dance performance. In this context the notion of the ‘here and now’ is discussed in relation to the concept of dance embodiment informed by the site and the genius loci, or ‘spirit of place’. Victoria Hunter is a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Leeds, who is currently researching a PhD in site-specific dance performance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-27
Author(s):  
Wouter Egelmeers ◽  
Joris Vandendriessche

IMPORTING TEXTS FROM ABROAD Editors’ reuse of foreign historical texts in Dutch periodicals, 1780-1860 This article explores the ways in which the editors of five Dutch history journals and three magazines for general circulation copied historical texts from abroad, between 1780 and 1860. By comparing original texts with reprinted versions, we show that the editors’ work involved not only ‘passive’ duplication (reprinting in full), but also more active forms of intervention, from the selection of text fragments to their translation, modification or critical review. These varied editorial practices point to a broader creative process through which historical knowledge was tailored to an emerging and nationally-oriented academic audience. Editors here assumed the role of mediators, gatekeepers even in the sense that their judgment determined the very choice of texts. At a time when the study of history was evolving at both the national and international level, and when the relationship between actors making up the disciplinary field was also in flux, editors thus became influential figures.


Author(s):  
Antonio Cvetkovski ◽  
Sofija Sidorenko

As a fundamental science of forms and their order, geometry contributes to the process of composing and designing of products. Geometry is able to make a contribution to these processes by dealing with the geometric figures and forms as design elements as well as the relations between them. Finding the general principles of successfully combining those elements was a research aim of many designers, such as those in the modernist era. Influencing the industrial design in a revolutionary way, the Modernism became significant artistic movement of the 20th century, thus giving us the most iconic and timeless product designs. In this scientific paper, the relationship between geometry and design in the Modernism is described and explored through examples, with emphasis placed on De Stijl and Bauhaus products. Direct comparison is applied, focusing on the similarities and differences in the products’ geometry. Learning about the geometry and how it relates to the designs is not to be used as a substitute for the creative process, but rather as a means of obtaining a deeper understanding of it. 


Author(s):  
Koji Yamamura

Seven short animated films are examined by the auteur-animator as he self-reflects on their creations. Making animation is not only an extension of the pictorial and comic-like expression, but also the act of mystically creating movement to be perceived in the real. The artist shares his personal experiences during the animation making process including the unconscious imaginative realm that creeps into his creative thoughts. Technology may play an important part of the animation production but the author maintains that there is a deeper spiritual world where he is somehow drawn into when he is making animation. Spiritually, he feels the transcendence of the dualism of mind and matter during the creative process, and is able to unite the subconscious with reality. Citing motifs including natural, inorganic, or imaginative entities, the author demonstrates the influence of the psyche in his artistic expressions. To the artist, the spiritual assimilation aspects of his work are profound, complex, and illuminating.


Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45306
Author(s):  
Marcele Aires Franceschini

The idyllic approach of this article deals with the dialogue between two distinct artworks: poems from the book Africa (Taylor, 2000), emphasizing the poem ‘Waikiki’, by the Australian poet, journalist and filmmaker Ken Taylor; and the movie Boy (Curtis, Gardiner, & Michael, 2010), directed by the New Zealander film-director, actor and writer Taika Waititi. The poems and the movie are connected by synesthetic perceptions, mostly related to painting, colorizing and shaping that are displayed in the described scenarios. Hereby, these aspects were theoretically reviewed by the following authors: Rimbaud (1966), Kandinsky (1977), Ostrower (1977), Bachelard (1986, 2011), Cytowic (1993), Berger (2008), Lambert (2010), among others. The method of analysis includes the concepts in which the art producers uncovers the relationship between nature and the self, considering the fact that beyond poet and director, respectively Taylor and Waititi are also painters. Nature is widely open before their meditative eyes, therefore rather than outreaching the natural world with motionless expectations; both portray idyllic wonders related to individual/cultural scopes. As a result, from its amorphous state, words transmute themselves into landscapes, sensations, and forms. The aim was to follow the paths that image evocates in the description of each author, since they share contemplativeness, surrounded by consciousness, perceptions and freedom, all demanded during the creative process.


Author(s):  
Omar Eduardo Omar Sánchez Estrada

Developing useful objects for a functional reeducation of senior citizens persons about the basic activities of daily living must be conceptualized considering theories, techniques, and approaches in methodology, based on ecologically bearable structures, economically viable, and socially equitable. Consequently, the present chapter has the objective to state the criteria and strategies of a sustainable design, from a detailed study of applicability of 1) user-product interaction, observation, understanding, dimensional relationship, and evaluation; 2) creative process, identification, ideation, definition, prototypes, evaluation, and structuration; 3) technical specifications, structure, sustainability, ergonomics, aesthetics, and evaluation; 4) manufacture method, sustainability, production method, life cycle, capital assets, official norms, and optimization. A contextual and conceptual analysis is proposed for the beginning, development, and conclusion of the projects so as to reestablish the relationship between natural processes and human activity.


Author(s):  
Vlad Petre Glăveanu ◽  
Maciej Karwowski ◽  
Dorota M. Jankowska ◽  
Constance de Saint-Laurent

This chapter focuses on the relationship between imagination and creativity as reflected in the study of creative imagination. It is argued that, in order to appreciate today’s close association between imagination and creativity, we need first to consider the intellectual trajectory of these concepts before and after the advent of “scientific” psychology. Using sociocultural perspectives in psychology, the authors challenge the easy assumption that creative imagination is all about generating new, original, or vivid images and, following the legacy of Vygotsky, they conceive of creative imagination as both grounded in and constructive of experience. They use three simple illustrations of children making drawings of Victory to introduce and discuss, comparatively, three sociocultural approaches to (creative) imagination: the gap-filling, the loop, and the perspectival models. The authors conclude by raising new questions about imagination as a cultural, developmental, and creative process.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 3841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wengang Zhang ◽  
Feng Xu ◽  
Xuefeng Wang

Focusing on China’s steel industry, the effect of green transformational leadership on employee green creativity, its underlying mechanisms, and the conditions that govern the situation are examined. The sample analysis of 298 employees working with 46 supervisors from 23 companies indicates that green transformational leadership positively affects employee green creativity, and creative process engagement plays a mediating role in the relationship of green transformational leadership to employee green creativity. Moreover, the mediated role is moderated by green innovation strategy, which is used as a boundary spanner to affect the whole path linked by creative process engagement, so that this effect is strengthened when the level of green innovation strategy is high, rather than low. The results verify the hierarchical linear hypothesized model, which is helpful to sketch a more complete view of the relationship between green transformational leadership, creative process engagement, green innovation strategy, and green creativity, and to provide beneficial insights for innovative practice and the green management of steel enterprises.


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