For this assignment, I tried my hand and making a “cut-out” style of animation via programs like Photoshop and after effects. The inspiration for my attempt at the “cut-out” style of animation came from both Felix Colgrave (local Melbourne animator who I interviewed for assessment task three) and Terry Gilliam’s work as well as his ideals and mantras on animation. In this reflective essay, I will be reviewing the process of creating the animation its self, the decisions I made and while making it and evaluating both my process and the end product. The ideas I will be focusing on In the essay will be about the level of engagement I felt I had while working on the project and how creative/ original I feel the animation ended up being.

My initial ideas and line of thinking for the project was that I wanted to mix the old methods of cut out animation and transfer them into a digital space to look at what I might gain and lose in the process. Originally I was going to source old magazines from op-shops and use parts of those as the assists for my animation. After going to a few shops, buying a lot of older magazines and flipping through them for hours at a time, cutting people and backgrounds out I had only found 5 or 6 pieces that I would work in my animation. Ultimately, due to the amount of time it took me to source and prepare these assets, I decided to use a mixture of images sourced on the internet with a couple of photos I had taken myself. This lead me to question the overall originality of the animations aesthetic look. Now, I understand that cut out animation (or at least the style I attempted) is based on the idea of remixing and reusing other assets to make the animation its self, but if most of the assets I sourced were found from easily searchable words and phrases on Google compared to images that haven’t been seen or used for over 60-70 years does it mean that the aesthetic look of my animation will lack originality for it?

First of all, I looked at what defines a work as wholly original as well as the value of creativity in a creative work. Runco & Jaeger (2012) explore the standard definition of creativity by artists and scholars throughout recorded history, he found that most definitions or creativity or creating usually included two things, Originality and effectiveness ( effectiveness also being described as ‘usefulness’ or ‘appropriateness’) and that something that is just original isn’t necessarily creative if it lacks purpose or deeper meaning. Vermazen (1991) Goes more in depth with the idea of valuing originality in creative works stating that from an aesthetic standpoint originality isn’t always the most valuable part of a work since other aspects of a creative work can be held in higher value if they are better executed or more striking. While both writers talk about the value of originality in creative works they both fail to explain in greater detail what they mean by originality.

After worrying about the originality of my animation I came back to to the old adage that nothing is original and that the way people create is by stealing other peoples work and remixing it to be theirs. This is the idea that the basic essence of the remix (copy, transform, combine) is actually just the essence of creativity its self and that all ideas at their core derivative (Ferguson 2012). Since the style of my animation is at its core a remix of images to express an idea I felt that It didn’t matter what I used to express that idea and that the originality lied in the way I presented it and not the assets that I chose to used to present my ideas overall.

The actual process of the animation had my attention for hours on end in what is known as a flow state. Flow is a sate of mind that people can achieve when engaging with an activity in which the person puts all their attention onto something thus blocking out unwanted thoughts and making time seem as it is passing faster (The pursuit of happiness, 2016). To engage flow with an activity the perimeters of the activity need to be simple enough to understand but also challenging enough to keep you engaged throughout the process. The way that this is visualised is that flow lies between arousal and control(Csikszentmihalyi 2014) If the challenge becomes too high the arousal becomes anxiety or if the challenge is lacking control becomes relaxation (Figure 1). 

I believe that I was able to achieve a flow state for two reasons. The first being that I was able to visualise the task of animation in literal parts due to the nature of the medium. This made the task seem more achievable since I was focusing from point to point which helped to keep me engaged. the second reason was due to the amount of experimentation I had to do when making the animation. I have a bit of experience in after effects and I had studied animation in my spare time a few years ago so the core concepts made sense to me but putting them into practice was another story. I would have to go back and tweak animations and sometimes even fully re-do them to make it look right. I believe that this trial and error was the challenge that stopped me from becoming bored and kept me engaged with the project. I am hoping to try and find adapt the idea of flow into other aspects of my life now that I have a better understanding of what is required to induce it. 

I feel that this method of cut out animation saved a lot of time but at points was frustrating due to the complexity of the programs I was using. I feel that the analogue method of cut out animation would be a lot less complex in its execution but more time consuming overall. I also believe that animating in a digital space allowed me to have a level of trial and error in which I was able to develop my skills better as well as allowing me to stay more engaged with the project. Overall, I’m happy with how my animation turned out, In the end, it wasn’t the smoothest animation ever but I believe that it relayed the message I was trying to get across quite well regardless of the quality of the animation and that was my goal.

References

Pursuit of happiness 2016, History of happiness-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Pursuit of happiness 2016, viewed 27 May 2017 <http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/>

Runco, M, Jaeger, G. (2012) The Standard Definition of Creativity, Creativity Research Journal 24:1, pages 92-96.

TED 2012, Kirby Ferguson: embrace the remix, streaming video, TED conferences LLC, Viewed 31 May 2017 <https://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix#t-55658>

TED 2014 ,Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness, streaming video, TED conferences LLC, Viewed 27 May 2017

<https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow#t-1118678>

VERMAZEN, B. (1991), The Aesthetic Value of Originality, Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 16: 266–279

Since the last time I posted, I have been working on and off on my cut out inspired animation. I went out and sourced some old magazines from a few op-shops and began scouring them, looking for inspiration and possible character and background assets for my animation. I found it quite difficult to find assets that were going to work within my animation let alone ascetically match up with each other. At the end of the process of flicking through page after page of old magazines, I managed only to find and cut out a small amount assets that would be appropriate for the animation that I want to make.

In that moment two things dawned on me, the first being that I would have to abandon the use of old magazines since the sourcing, cutting and scanning process would ultimately take to long for me to do. This was a bit upsetting to me since I really thought that in using older magazine’s I would end up with a unique look to the animation I was making. The second thing that I realised was that I was basically just trying to copy Terry Gilliam’s style of cut out animation rather than take inspiration from his work.

With this in mind, I decided that it would be better/ more convenient for me to try and source the assets I would use online rather than go out and physically find them, cut them out and scan them. At the end of the day, I have a deadline to meet and I don’t have the time or money to find more suitable physical assets to use.

The nature of the animation its self has forced me to do a lot of experimentation. Most of my time is spent in Photoshop making the assets and figuring out what parts of the image need to be able to move and in turn, figuring out what parts I need to cut of the original image, parts I need to copy and parts that I need to visually alter for them to work within the animation.

The actual animation process has also required me to do a lot of experimenting. Making an estimate of how an asset will look and move on screen is quite different to how it actually looks once I begin to animate it. Even though the style of “tween” animation I am utilising for this project is relatively simple in its look and is meant to a degree look somewhat shoddy, I still am having to go back and re-design assets and backgrounds so that the assets will animate properly.

I am looking forward to getting further into the animation its self and being able to experiment more with the programs I am using to make it, as well as thinking about what affordances and constraints will come of utilising a digital medium to make something (cut out animation) that was historically very physical, hands-on and time-consuming in nature.