Week One Discussion Questions

Article # 1: As Furniss points out, the definition of what animation is is very hard to define and many attempts are ambiguous, but with recent films like 300 and Sin City that have live action but also a lot of animated set pieces and animated stylized enhancements it becomes hard to pin down what animation is. Would you consider films like these to be animated? or just aided by animation?

Article # 2: Computer generated imagery is definitely a new age of animation. But as technology advances and this form of art becomes so photo realistic that we cannot differentiate it from real life would it still be considered animation? To a viewer would it make any difference?

Article # 3: The ideas surrounding this metaverse are very intriguing because of its utopian feeling and of the promise that anything (literally) is possible (within this virtual world). Again, thinking into the future, if something like this took root and became a global phenomena would it eventually grow so complex that we would be able to interact with both the real world and the metaverse at the same time as if it was a physical layer over the real so that we would be able to see both realities overlapping?

In answer to Matt Cawley’s second article question:

I think that yes, in a way, video games will become recognized as a sibling to film. They would differ from film because they would be interactive, but essentially they would have the same visual, audio, and narrative impact as film. In the same sense that “choose your own adventure” books are still books, video games are basically just films where you choose what happens or films where you work your own way through a linear story (although sometime an unrealistically animated, unrealistically written, and unrealistically voiced story). All that needs to happen is that the quality bar needs to be raised to the level of good movies giving the person experiencing the game/story the same believable experience that he/she would get from a movie. In fact I think that this is already starting to become true. I say this because I have had experiences where a game has given me a more emotional story, a more interesting story, and a better quality experience then some movies (bad action movies mostly). I believe that the key thing here is that the qualities that make up a good film, things like interesting plot, characters that are believable, situations that draw the audience in, good emotions, good sound, etc., when carried over to video games do not translate into button clicks but into the narrative and experience that the game is presenting to us. Our input allows us to modify or react to our experience making it personal. I appreciate what Manovich says about computer media: “Computer media return to us the repressed of the cinema.” Computer media of this time, including games, are taking ideas (like interactivity) that cannot be expressed in traditional film and bringing them to the forefront of our culture. So yes, I do think that video game will become something like “interactive films”.

-Toby Staffanson