503 Interim Crit

Here are the notes I took of the feedback I was given during the presentation of my work. I had not thought of a few things that were mentioned and found this type of crit to be a better way of evaluating eachothers work than the usual standing at the front presenting to everyone method. The smaller more focused group gave more of an opportuity to get more personalised feedback. 

The feedback I was given that I think was most helpful was the point that I could do more technical drawings in my planning stage, I could even use maya or some sort of modelling software to block out my environment before I actually paint it. I was reminded also to write back stories about the character designs that I will be creating which is another good point that I need to remember to do, I may even write the plot and script of the short story before I paint the animated frames that will be used in the animatic I will be creating.

Below are some of the images I presented of what I want my work to be like, I want good quality concept images that portray scale and depth and a professional standard of painting as well as the characters described beforehand. 

Above and below: Kekai Kotakis artwork.

I have made a few initial designs of knights and armour styles that I may elaborate upon soon, this is a knight that has some of the same qualities of the work I have done, which I will be uploading soon. I think I need to be a little more original when it comes to creating the random aspects of a set of armour that make it unique, Kekai does an excellent job of adding lighting and pulling out the parts of a composition that he wants the viewer to see, I want to get better at the techniques that make a piece of concept art really great.

Lecture 11 Censorship and 'Truth'

Lecture 10 Community Theory

Lecture 9 Identity

Lecture 8 Creative Rhetorics

Lecture 6 Critical Positions on Popular Culture

Lecture 4 Cities and Film

CoP Task 3 - Panopticism

To oversimplify the meaning of Panopticism it is the act of being watched so as to stop anyone from disobeying the law, it is more commonly known in its building structures, the panopticon building. A panopticon is a circular building with a watchtower where a person of authority keeps an eye on all that he is put there to survey, this structure most commonly known to be used in prisons as it has been successful in keeping inmates under control by making them feel they are being constantly watched with nowhere to hide and no other interaction to take their attention away from that fact that they are being watched.

The panopticon does not stop at prison security though it can be found in almost every populated area in modern society, especially in town centres where security is needed the most, a person can not travel through a town centre at any time of day without being caught on at least multipe cameras. This is said to be for everyones security but there are some conspiracy people out there who think that every thing we ever do is actually recorded and stored on a database somewhere and that there is no privacy in the world anymore, while this is partly true the idea that every single thing we ever do will be recored for people to look at to make sure we are behaving is obsurd, there are not enough hours or people in existance to survey and make sure every person is obeying all the rules at all time, while the system is clearly working (maybe a little too well on some people) it clearly does not stop everyone from disobeying the rules, crime is as frequent as it has ever been and the prescence of security cameras in an area will simply not detter some poeple from generally violating the law.

Overall the panoptic system does have a clear effect especially in places like schools where the feeling of being watched is stronger then ever, especially known to the students who played games in the computer room and had an administrator come in and tell them to stop what they were doing, the feeling of being watched would be strongest if the person has already been caught once and embarrassed. So although it does work, the panoptic system is far from perfect but with no other alternative to try and keep people in check the government will just have to try and solve the ever rising issues that increased security raises whilst trying to explain to a stupid nation that it is all for their own good.

Finished Media Artefact

Since I have done my media artefact on the panopticon theory I will be writing this first paragraph in the first person as to more easily articulate on my understanding of the panopticon and to more easily describe why I have done it and also what I have done. I have decided to kind of round of a little bit of work from the last project that I felt needed finishing, I did a very quick speed painting of what I imagine the world that my 504 project would have been set in, it would have been in a bladerunner/Judge Dredd kind of world where the law is the only thing left between peace and total chaos. I also used the Martix movies as reference because I think they have a very panoptic feel to them as there is a feeling of always being watched and controlled and being told how and what to do. I even used the robot sentinels as reference when creating a few distant characters in my composition because I feel they give a very good impression of what the faceless authority the government tries to give of about them, they have no emotion no feeling and they just do what they are programmed to do, this gives a very eerie feeling to them as there is no room to argue, it is either comply or there will be severe consiqeences. I also played around in after effects with the layers movments, this has been something that I have been wanting to do since I got my hands on after effects and now finally I have had a go at it and think it turned out rather well. The feeling of depths and the composition of the looming characters getting bigger while the faceless citizens are getting smaller I think gives a good impression of people figures being dominated by the robots. I have uploaded it anyway, it is a short 12 second clip as I think it stresses the point I was trying to make in that amount of time and there doesnt need to be any more than that in my opinion, anyway enjoy.

CoP Task 2 - Cities and Film

From what is written in both James Donalds and Frederick Stouts essay writings I can make a basic assumption about what they have both written about and the context that both of the texts were written in, Stout writes about how the city effects the people and lives of the people who live in it, he talks about how the people lived and worked and tries to get a realistic view of what the lower classes compared to the upper classes live like. Whereas Donald looks at the theory of the city as a more dominating presence, he talks about how the city effects the people living in it and what it does in respect to the human identity.

Cinema is a media topic that gets look at in particular by Donald, he looks and evaluates how it blurs the line between the class divisions and upsets the balance between what is supposed to be socially accepted and what is not. The actual act of going to the cinema is something again the blurs the line between the classes, it bunched everyone and forced them to have to go and sit together to be able to experience that that is the cinema, because of the constant fashion chase during this period of time, it was desirable for the lower classes to constantly strive to be like the upper classes, this involved trying to look like, talk like, act like and do everything that the upper classes seemed to do and since they were  going to the cinema, this is what they were going to do too. This may be part of what the writings are generally talking about as the city can be seen to be this sort of place that makes people want to be better than their neighbours and to try and clamber above each other to be able to stand out in a overpopulated shallow world. In a way, what is assessed and evaluated in these writing can be applied to todays world because nothing has changed, technology has just gotten better and created a cyber space to be able to do this in than the actual physical act of going in to a town centre to try to be better than everyone else.

In conclusion both theorists seem to have a very negative view on the city as a concept, especially Donald who does not view the actual act of photography to be as much of an important form of creating artwork that Stout does. Stout, though seems to think that photography is an art form and does not see the city as as much of a drain on humanity as Donald does, does seem to think that photography is indeed a necessary truth that needs to be told especially to be able to see how the lower and middle classes live and the divide that is so apparent to people that experience it.

CoP Task 1 - The Gaze in the Media

To compare the two pieces of writing 'Mulvey - Visual pleasure' and 'Cowards - The Look' it would be accurate to say that the two have different but also many similar ways of looking at the gaze in social media, they do not exactly talk about and discuss all the same things in their writings but they do look alot about at how women look at themselves in society and how they seem to be controlled by men in a way that could lead anyone reading these writings to think that the writers think that women find the way men treat women is unfair.
Especially looking at cowards writings where she writes 'it sometimes appears to women that the whole possibility of being loved and comforted hangs on how their appearance will be received' - this view makes Coward sound like she is a little feministic in her views to some people but on the other hand a lot of people may agree with how she sees the world, as it sounds like a lot of her views are based on personal experience.
The view expressed by Mulvey when she writes that 'Jacques Lacan has described how the movment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crutial for the constitution of the ego' shows how she has looked at other theorists and also that she has a more formal tone and approach to writing than Coward. This does not make either one more true than the other, however it may lead some to believe that Coward has a more socially acceptable tone to her writings than Mulvey and this may be the deciding factor on whether someone might agree or disagree with the wrightings.Coward also talks about children when she writes 'The adult woman near totally abandons the love that the little girl had for her own image in the period of narsassistic glory' this is a little more specific to maybe a woman in western society/culture than to when Mulvey is talking about a child looking at their own reflection in the mirror which is on a more psychiological level in early childhood and brain development.
Overall though the themes of each of the writings can be seen to be percieved as follows, Mulvey started off talking about the child and the way the peeping tomis brought out in people for phychological reasons, also why people want to look desirable and why people desire to look. Whereas Coward starts off with how the woman is oppressed in society, in particular western society from what seems to be a personalised viewpoint, she then goes on to talk about how women seem to look at themselves in the media, the media includes magazines, internet pictures, films and not mentioned in these writings but it will include games, everything that goes on in the social media can be carried across to the gaming world and the platforms it includes. There is not much of a difference anymore between a game and a film as both of them use a lot of the same techniques and even some stories cross medias between the two.
Mulveys and Cowards views are similar when it comes to the gaze in the media, the cinema in particular coward states that 'western culture has become obsessed with looking and recording images of what is seen' this may be more of a reference to home made video recordings and pictures of people looking at themselves for the sake of vanity, Mulvey says 'The conventions of main stream film focuses attention on the human form' this can be seen as more of a view of mainstream cinema than of homemade recordings and pictures, the theme though is the same, people are obsessed with the human form and from what both theorists have been writing it seems that the female figure in particular is what people are being obsessed with.
In conclusion it would seem that both writings can be more compared than contrasted and this may be because of that fact that they have both been written by female theorists, they both write that males are the ones who do the looking while the women care (maybe too much) about what their image represents. The main contrast in these writings though seems to be the perspective at which they have both been written at, Coward seems to have written her text based on a personalized western viewpoint of modern society while Mulvey has written her more theoretical viewpoints based academic research and on how the human brain develops.

Un Chien Andalou Review

Un chien andalou in english An Andalusian Dog is one of the more surreal classic films I have seen, others like vertigo and Psycho are not so surreal and actually have a plot as opposed to this one which seems to make no sense in any of its many seemingly changing plots.

So anyway onto evaluating this mess of a film, I have only seen it once but have heard a lot about it in the past, it was revered as one of the great films of its time in filmmaking and breaking the rules and delving into new areas of film that have not been explored previously. An example of this would be when the womans eyeball gets cut in half with a knife, this was a relatively new thing at the time, to shock the audience, which I think at this point the film does rather well. The rest of the film however tries to shock the audience in less obvious ways and it doesnt really seem to do a good job of it, this is probably why the main part of this films fame is at the very start.

The director Luis Bunuel was said to have taken dreams he had and used them for inspiration for the film, which would explain a little as to why it is so unorganised and makes next to no sense, dream state films have a very unusual feel to them and completely explains why this film is so strange and jumps around in time alot.

With the fact that it is also Luis's first film the viewer can give the film a little leeway in saying that a filmmaker almost never makes the film that is going to make them famous in their first go, but in this case this is not true, so it can be said instead that in the personal opinion of the viewers of a film it may not always be the case that a filmmakers first film is always a 'good' one.

As for the rest of the film and the relevance of the name of the film, it may just be the ignorance of modern culture and people or it may be the fact that the film is so poorly made and overrated that it is just impossible to comprehend but from the views that have been expressed by normal viewers of it as opposed to the reviews of the professionals that seem to think they uinderstand it there is a large margin, therefore it is simply at the viewers discression to either choose to try and understand and like the film or to just accept it as what it is or even just enjoy it for what it is and not try at all to anylise and comprehend it.