Weekly Summaries - Character research: Week one

Weekly Summaries- Character Research

Week 1:

What I learnt:

In the weekly session of character research, we covered: the importance of characters and research, essay tips and a little history of characters with in animation. We were told that our essays must consist focused but interesting to read, to take inspiration with an open mind. We should understand our influences, able to word the point ourselves and further develop and grow ideas.

Characters are highly important; characters are story and story is character. A character has particular combinations of distinctive qualities of a person or place, represented in a film or story. Characters whom are protagonists are given human qualities, because we the audience are humans, hence the use of anthropomorphism. Stories have the power to manipulate information to be more memorable, potential to make us see from different perceptive, they tend to have meanings that adapt us to have more empathetic qualities. Stories communicate teachings of the ‘human condition’, enabling us to connect with each other with the use of pathos. In the early 1900, animations tended to be focused ‘personality animation’, giving personal to characters to further create the illusion of life. Example of these animations:

-       ‘Gertie the dinosaur’- 1914- Dir Winsor Mccay

-       ‘Felix the cat’- 1922- the stone age

-       ‘Steam Boat Willie’

Animated Feature films were desired by Hollywood in the 30’s as animated shorts lost popularity.  Animations began to advance to more realism, characters needed to be more believable.

Progress this week:

This week, I decided to create a potential character list, which contained the characters; ‘Elsa’ from Frozen, ‘lapis Lazuli’- Steven Universe, Emily- Corpse Bride, Rapunzel –Tangled and lastly, Raven from Teen Titians. I evaluated the reasoning as to why they would be of interest to research about.