Dissertation

Greetings once again and welcome to largely dissertation themed blog. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the reading week task and I’m hoping that that and the literature review things we are doing will help me get back into the swing of essay writing.

At the moment I am not too sure what I want to write about for my dissertation. I’m probably going about it completely the wrong way and looking at individual’s work rather than a specific theory as a starting point. Nevertheless I have carried on and looked at some interesting essays involving the Quay brothers and Jan Svankmajer, who I am interested in but don’t know a huge amount about. So that could be an interesting way of finding some theory’s to look at. On the other hand I am also quite interested in the whole 1920’s/30’s German art scene, DaDa and all of that, particularly the work of George Grosz and John Heartfield but I’m not sure how I would link that to animation.

The other are that I have considered looking at is acting theory as that would hopefully benefit my animation at the same time, the only drawback to that is that, from the little I understand of it, there are so many different theory’s and approaches to acting.

So the jist of what I am trying to get across is that I don’t really know what I am doing.

Anyway just a brief mention of my crazy old lady who throws puppies in the river story. I have had a play at developing my character designs from the original exercise. The originals, as you can see, where quite crude and sketchy and focused wholly on the puppy killing bit of the story.

I have been trying to soften up the character a bit so that the audience will just think it is a nice story about an old lady and her puppies, then I can spring the horrible truth on them!