Introduction:
In this week’s blog, I’ll be going through what we spoke about during this week’s lecture, which was a continuation of last week’s lecture where we were discussing experimental animations and looking at animations that were created over the years. Afterward, I’ll be listing down all the potential research topics that I may conduct research into, outlining the similarities between them all to see what I’m overall interested in and what area of animation I’ll be looking into.
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we continued to look at experimental animations throughout the years. However, this time we mainly focused on conceptual abstraction, whereas last week we focused on formative abstraction. The term “Conceptual Abstraction” relates to the abstraction and juxtaposition of narrative structures or storytelling tools, traditional cannons, and communicative vehicles. These approaches question and build film language, challenge perception and exploit semiotic metaphor and symbolism. Towards the end of the lecture, we went over the thesis structure, briefly touching on each section so we have an idea of what we’ll be doing over the next few weeks. Our lecturer skimmed over each section as we’ll be going through them more in-depth within the upcoming lectures, most likely focusing on two sections per lecture. Our lecturer also advised us to begin thinking about the topics we may want to research and suggested we do some reading this week to have a shortlist of topics.
This Week’s Task:
For this week, even though we weren’t given a specific task to complete by next week, I’m going to browse through online topics relating to animation that I could potentially conduct research into. Creating a list of topics would allow me to outline the similarities they have with each other, helping me to highlight what sort of things I’m interested in. This would give me a brief and vague idea of what area of animation I may actually conduct research into for my thesis proposal.
Potential Research Topics:
- How has the evolution of technology changed cinematic title sequences over the years?
- How title sequences have been used to tell a story throughout movie history.
- The evolution of narratives in Disney animation movies.
- How have real-life historical events been portrayed in Animated films?
- How have real-life historical events affected animation films?
- The portrayal of villain characters in Disney animation movies.
- The portrayal of hero characters in Disney animation movies.
- The representation of death in computer animation movies.
- The evolution of ethnic minority characters in computer animation movies.
- The representation of stereotypical characters in computer animation movies.
- The portrayal of religious beliefs in computer animation movies.
- The portrayal of cultures in animation movies.
- The representation of diversity in Disney animation movies over the years.
- How can the representation of violence be portrayed in animation to educate the audience about real-life circumstances?
- Can the emerg of mature animations further educate the audience about real-life scenarios, whilst staying entertaining.
- Is animation capable of producing true Horror content
- Is there a place a place for animated Horror films