Animusic

I watched each of the seven animations and liked 5 or 6 of them very much. Most of them were good for the same reasons, but a few of them did not incorporate those techniques that the others did, which is the reason I think they failed.

I had seen The Piano before, and absolutely loved it. It was not the most intricate animation in the world, but the emotional music and the storytelling in the video while allowing the emotional piano music speak, rather than dialogue, the piece was extremely good in any language. The music was diegetic, meaning, it was playing within the actual scene, rather than just overlaying a scene that does not actually have music in its “real” world. The old man was playing the piano and thinking about his past; perhaps the song was written while he was thinking about his past. In this animation, it was obvious that the animators intentionally matched the music with the footsteps, turns, and looks, or vice versa.

My other favorite animation was I Lived on the Moon. It took a little while to get into it, but at least the music and corresponding visuals set the mood, at a slow pace, making the audience surprised when it really got into it and the tree and stump sprung out of the ground, going for a walk over the seas and mountains. In this animation, the music followed the motion of the characters and their actions very well, changing tone and tempo with the actions. The Long Walk also did a good job of this.

Walking in the Air was a very slowly paced song with very slowly paced visuals. There were few shots, but they were long sweeping shots, corresponding with the sweeping music. The characters would move, but the camera would move with them, then turn a bit at the end of a shot. When the subject in the shot was not moving, the camera would move around it, continuing the moving pace/tempo of the music.

The two animations that I did not think worked were the Gravedigger one and the Funny Bear. I enjoyed the Funny Bear, I thought it was funny, but I did not think it really connected with these other animations; it was a music video, with the character singing to the lyrics, and sort of dancing. The music did not tell a story, nor did the visuals. The Gravedigger animation just didn’t seem to connect the music with the actions much. The storytelling was unclear, the visuals did all of the storytelling. I felt as if an almost random song was just slapped in to play over this scene and they did not work together. The two animations did not include any of the successful pieces of the 5 other animations we watched, therefore, despite a level of entertainment, I think these two animations failed.

Module 4 Poems

I honestly did not like many of these animated poems. I thought the poems were extremely random, the animations could have used music, and the typography, especially, could have been more visually artistic. For example “Shiver and You Have Weather” looked good, so I watched it, and the typography was just thrown in there. Although, it was not typography, it was text on the screen, sometimes in different spots. The words did not animate, nor were they graphic whatsoever. I was expecting these to be the words of the poem visually expressing the poem, rather than just having text there to read, next to a picture/animation.

Most of the poems were just like this and so I was uninspired. The only poem I thought was okay was “This is a Letter”. Some of the typography actually moved; it was the key player in the animation, in fact, for many of the scenes, it was the only player. In this poem, the text actually transformed a bit to express the poem, although I felt like it could have done a better job by making the graphic elements of it more obvious. It was visually appealing and, that, and not only that, is what the animator should be going for.