Week 4

Ideology is the subject in hisory and theory we looked at this week. So what is ideology? "It is a system of ideas and ideals forming the basis of an economic or political theory. The set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or individual." concise oxford dictionary. The meaning of ideology over the years has changed, first meaning 'the science of ideas' and in today's world it generally refers to the value system and beliefs of an idividual or a culture. To me the most interesting part of this lecture was asking the question, how and who create ideologies? Well, everything we can see and hear around us, like reading the newspaper or watching television, even talking to friends, can create ideologies through a very continual process of reinforcement and refinement by these various sources. We then moved on to discuss the different effects ideology has, for example our position as an audience when watching a film, and voyeurisms, which is the act of watching another from a hidden or unseen position which was brought into common usage by Freud.

Now for our animation studio work this week, we ran through all the principles we've studied so far: timing, squash and strectch, anticipation and overlap. With everything we've learnt we were given the task to create an animation of two characters interacting with each other; a big cubeman (who has the domination) and a small cubeman.

There is a good sense of timing in this animation peice however i think there could have been more interaction between the two characters to make it more of a performance animation. Also there's good squash and stretch with the ball that starts off the motion. After this, the afternoon session in maya was spent doing last weeks 2-D animation in 3-D.

Looking at it the playblast now, it looks a very rigid piece of animation. The timing is right but could have done with less arm exaggeration and more of an arc with the arms as he hits the ground and struggles for balance. There is also a lack of the principle squash and stretch, which would have benefited this animation well, as the cube character moves in anticipation there could have been slightly more squash and a bit more stretch as he starts to leave the ground. As he hits the floor there is hardly any squash, and this animation would be greatly improved with more a squash on impact.

In life drawing this week, we moved onto capturing poses quickly from an animation perspective: the subject moved slightly for each 5 minute capture. This would give us the basics in a human form animation sequence.