Wells

The comparison in Well's article between orthodox or developmental animation and experimental animation opened up my eyes to a topic I never really thought of before. As Americans the entertainment we are subjected to is ultimately massed produced, Hollywood style productions. Movies, cartoons, television shows are all, as Wells puts it, "highly industrialized." In a sense, they lack the artistic qualities that you would find in experimental animation. Cartoons that we watched as children were basically all the same. They all had a plot line about a conflict that the main character was facing. All cartoons we watched as children seemed to have a set of guidelines that they followed that hindered creativity for the sake of mass production. 

As children, I'm sure we wouldn't have appreciated the types of experimental animation that we are exposed to in 6X1. The majority of America would rather turn on the TV and watch these orthodox animations rather than experimental animation because most watch media on the television to be entertained, and the narrative style and plots of orthodox animations provide that for the viewer. Orthodox animation provides mindless entertainment that doesn't involve the need for interpretation that might be involved in viewing experimental animations. 

Experimental animation is without a doubt more artistic than any orthodox animation in the sense that it is "concerned with rhythm and movement in their own right as opposed to the rhythm and movement of a particular character. It uses rhythm and movement of the happenings of the whole frame to provide meanings, representations, and even evoke emotions through assimilation. It doesn't need dialogue to progress the film as a narrative, orthodox film would. Experimental films also a better representation of true artwork because unlike orthodox films, experimental films are not mass produced, so more time, effort, and artistic details are provided in experimental animations, as well as a lack of limitations. Unlike the Hollywood mass produced animations that we are mainly subjected to, experimentals are not as alike as orthodox animations, which are all bound by narrative plot lines, but unique do to the fact that they have been produced by artists who may have very different styles. Experimentals are not held back by their visual image like orthodox animations. Orthodox animations' images, for the most part, must be distinguishable characters in order not to disrupt the narrative flow of the animation. The visual image of an experimental is only limited by the creativity of the artist.   

Questions

The film we watched in our first class left me with many more questions than it did answers. Most people would have watched film and asked, "What the heck did I just watch?" but instead, it left me questioning how the filmmakers created the images I was viewing. I enjoy viewing different artistic styles and genres of film because it opens my mind to knew ideas, and it helps to better appreciate film as an art form and not solely a form of entertainment. 

In one of my intro classes Andre introduced us to the art of film scratching. While watching the film I used my small amount of experience in film scratching to figure out how the artists achieved different images and patterns, but I was completely perplexed as to how the created most. Another thing my experience did was it helped me to appreciate the amount of effort the artists put in to make this film. Images would be visible for a few seconds at a time. This means the artists had to duplicate that same image on a butt ton of frames to make it visible for that long. The image of the overlapping of a man with bright colors and circles was most memorable to me because it eft me questioning if it was possible to overlap an image on celluloid film with images on clear film (I bet when i look at this post later as the class progresses I will laugh at how stupid that question just was). 

All in all, I'm glad that Andre showed us that film because it got it left my mind filled with questions, and it made me very excited for all the cool techniques I will learn and images I'll create.