Communication in Animation

For everyone who doesn't know, my education is in Rhetoric and Communications. I'm a Creative Communications grad, with a major in Media Production, and my diploma is joined with a four year Communications degree from the University of Winnipeg.

Since my University courses foolishly pertain nothing to animation, I have to find sneaky ways to inject animation into the way I procure my degree.

For two of my final courses, I had such "opportunities" to cram a square animation peg into a very round rhetorical hole- or a sphere if you will (rhetoricians like spheres)- so if we put them both of the same plane of dimension, one could say that I crammed a cube, or perhaps a rectangular prism, into a sphere of equal volume...

This series of spacial mathematical fails is why I studied Rhetoric and not Geometry.

Anyway, the sneakiness breaks down as follows:

Rhetoric in the Public Sphere Class

Assignment: Write a 10 page essay of sorts about something in the public sphere.

Conflict in Communication Class

Assignment: Do a creative project/presentation about how communication occurs in basically anything.

For the former, I wrote a lengthly essay on Disney as Epideictic Performance in the Public sphere- a long winded analysis featuring mostly Hauser (a rhetorical theorist) and Hiroux (a guy who writes numerous books and papers about how Disney is evil.)

Now don't get me wrong- I very much enjoy Disney-, pretty much all of their animations are musicals, voiced by celebrities, and super gorgeous- there's a lot to like. I do however, believe that its massive influence allows it to shape the identities and desires of children,  allows it to build consumerism into the list of ideals they teach to children, and even allows it to sell the concept of childhood innocence as a product in the form of the children reared by other Disney products. (Hopefully this makes more sense in my essay than it does here, or I'm looking at a pretty steep fail)

How much of this was intentional and how much was an accident- we'll never know.

Maybe I'll do another blog post about the topic and include my lengthly and boring essay.

The latter class project however, resulted in a fun little video. I admit it's not my best work, since most of the clips are artifacty rippings from YouTube, boomed over by my too-close-to-the-mic dronings, but  I had very limited time, I still got an A, and it was fun to make. Another awesome thing about the animation, was that after I wrote a ten page Disney-diss, I still wasn't above using Disney's Fantasia, as the backbone for this video project.

So although I'm not putting it in my demo reel, I will leave it here for a little blog exclusive.
By the way- I forgot to mention this to my class, but some parts might be considered graphic.

This video also features a stolen clip from one of my all time favourite animations:
Who I am and What I Want- an awesome film by Chris Shepherd and David Shrigley.
I first encountered it taking Fine Art at the University of Manitoba.

Now keep in mind, this video is actually pretty graphic- for how super minimalist the style is, and it gets quite a bit of negative feedback from people that don't understand it. But damn is it awesome.