Thursday 13 January 2011

Picture this...

With the preproduction and post production project, I've chosen to do Pre production as I think most of my strengths on the course are in this area of animation.

With the randomised cards, I recieved-

Character-
Satyr

Show-
Live at the Apollo

Style-
Surrealism (Originally Picasso but COME ON! I can't work with that!)

Setting-
Middle Ages

So I've certainly got a lot of things I can research historically. I'm leaving Satyrs for the moment as although I've browsed them online, I'm hoping to get some Mythology books out for something more indepth. However, here is some copy and paste research from a website on them-
"The satyr comes from Greek mythology; they were companions of the Greek god of wine and entertainment, Dionysus. There was no actual female of the species until “satyress” was invented by poets, seeking to make the ever lustful satyr a female companion."

Better it goes after it's own species, apparantly. I haven't found when the term satyress was created yet but it sounds like something much later, so that might fit into the "middle ages" theme for the greek mythological creatures.
"Satyr is the root of the word for satire, which generally means comedy."

Which, if true, woud work very well with the Live at the Apollo theme or at least is worth horrible pun. That and I've been mispronouncing it constantly.

"The satyr was generally depicted as a man with sometimes cloven feet, small or full horns of a goat, large, point ears and a constant erection."

I might not include that last part into the designs. Might.

" In mythology, they are usually associated with comedy, sex drive, mischief, and fertility; they roamed the woods and mountains. Usually, satyrs were quite busy preying on the various forest nymph; minor deities and children of a union between mortal men and women and gods. Satyrs were said to be obsessed with them and are often depicted in different mediums of art as copulating with them, or at least trying to."

Satyrs seem to be work shy, sex obsessed drunks to smmarise them at their most basic, which is the same stereotype as a lot of comedy protagonists. I'm also looking at the story of a Satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest and lost sorely which would be a really wonderful thing to use as reference for a story.

What I've been looking at in slightly more depth is the surrealism, although beyond basic artist research I'm not very far with that either. I'll post more on it when the research is done rather than picture links as the upload seems to be broken on blogger right now.

Here, however, are some examples of surrealism in animation I found.



This is a frankly insane series of short animation called Popee the Performer. the stories follow Popee, the guy in the stripey rabbit suit, and his 'friends' Pepee the circus leader(?) and Kedomono the wolf (my personal favourite). The three live in a circus in the middle of the desert and generally don't get on at all. Examples of story lines include anticipating the other persons movement so much they stop moving completely, becoming ghosts to stop someone killing them and creating an imaginary friend to steal somebody elses imaginary friend.

They're extremely random, frequently very funny if you like bizarre humour but 'd say he example I posted above epitomises the kind of surreal atmosphere of the show and the strange setting.


You know, I was checking through my posts to see if I'd already linked to this video, but it doesn't seem like I have. I am surprised!




This is an advertisement for Loius Vitton for a new range by Takashi Murakami, a japanese artist who both parodies and exploits Japans obsession with cute and childish things. This particular advert was directed by the director behind the Digimon film, in case you recognised the style of the little girl.

Anyway the point of posting this is because of the strange way the girl ends up inside another dimension and the general oddness of the environment.

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