Semester 2 Week 1 Animation Narratives (Research and Thoughts)

(Firstly, I want to Apologize for this messy post. I had a lot of thoughts in my head I wanted to put down. I'll post again about my team dynamics.)

The week in Animation Narratives:


  1. Class: We talked about the way media has evolved since Theatre and Literature, up to film, and how the arrival of new technology (e.g. the internet) these days hasn't changed the way we view content nearly as radically as was expected.
  2. Class: The Hero's Journey and Implicit/Explicit meaning. If you don't think about the implicit meaning of a story you're creating, people are going to come up with their own meanings anyways. 
  3. The Week's Task: research The Writer's Journey and Joseph Campbell, and in groups analyse and present certain sections of the book. Think about the origin of these concepts, and why they exist.

The Presentation & Research:

Our group was tasked with The Resurrection and The Road Back chapters of the book. I read the full segment, and then we decided to split the topics within it evenly amongst ourselves. 

I took a fair amount of time researching the topics mentioned in my part of the book, so I've put a few of the sources up here:



In retrospect I wished I'd looked at the library and what they offered in terms of writing tactics and analysis, since I remember seeing a couple interesting books on films down there. I'll try and remember that for the future.

The topics I had to present were as follows:
A NEW PERSONALITY, CLEANSING, TWO GREAT ORDEALS, PHYSICAL ORDEAL, THE ACTIVE HERO, and the SHOWDOWN.

My research was focused essentially, on why these themes are so common, and why they seem to need to be in stories. I came to a few interesting conclusions. Below are my questions and answers:

Why does there need to be a Cleansing and Purification upon re-entering the Ordinary world?

Vogler's answer was pretty simple; The Special World requires one personality, and the Ordinary, another. In a sense, the Warrior the hero becomes in the Special world must be reborn into the Ordinary, so as to not bring the destruction of the Journey with him.

Campbell's view is more about the escape from the Special world. In his comments, he mentions that a common motif is the Hero either not willing to leave that spiritual place, and sometimes being chased out.  Campbell notes that many mythic and religious figures are praised for the return, like the Buddha, but other heroes have been known to stay in the Special World.

Why are there Two Ordeals?

I was most interested by this. Vogler stated that the Ordeals are like a college term; the Mid-term is the great test of ability, but the Final is where the student is tested to see if they will take this knowledge with them into the future.

I don't entirely agree, actually. I think that there is more logic to the Two Ordeals than just that. J. Schwartz talks about how the most evil villains in noirs are generally the "fat men", who, having worked themselves up to the top, can rest easy and let others do their job for them. In other words, power is really in the number of your followers. Machiavelli's The Prince, which came to mind for me, says that the main goal of a leader is to gain followers through rewards and payment. 

As such, there are two prongs to a villain; The Followers, and the Ideal. Many films, like The Dark Knight, Bond Films, and many, many westerns featuring John Wayne, have the Hero defeating the Villains followers, and then destroying the villain face-to-face. In other words, the Hero destroys their power, and then their chance to ever regain it. However, many stories have the villain escape, opening the hole for sequels, or, more intriguingly, to imply the evil threat will never truly be gone.

How do you make a Character Arc feel important, and how do you emphasize the showdown's importance?

This was interesting, since most films' main conflict is a Life-or-Death situation. The more uncommon, but equally interesting option, is to have a conflict with seemingly minor events be the focus. The challenge then is to invest the audience, and make it so that the conflict feels life-altering. Silver Linings Playbook, centered on a Dance competition, is a good example of making the small feel big (The example is from the source).



My random thoughts about the Class topics:

I thought the Class was engaging this week. It's a good point to bring up that New media really hasn't fundamentally changed our thinking or experience. I think there have been attempts at such a change, but either through bad design or audience laziness, they haven't taken off. I think of the Wii U, or interactive TV content, and I realised that the core idea of consuming content with two screens at once doesn't really work, because the audience has to look between both screens constantly, and it's an effort level that people don't seem to want to put in.

I do think there's an untapped market for new media though. I'm surprised that outside of Video Games, there hasn't been a huge push for a broader experience beyond the TV screen. Sometimes Shows come out with phone games and secondary content, but most of the time, what you see is what you get. 

The only example I can really think of is in Video Games, where they've started incorporating phone apps into the experience. Some use it as another control method, and some even suggest that they can be used for multiplayer experiences (Where one person uses the Phone screen, and the other the traditional controller-TV method). I haven't seen a lot of positive reception to it though. 

I think the main thing is that there needs to be refinement of the idea. Most of these attempts (that i've experienced and seen online) seem pretty awkward and gimmicky, aside from maybe the game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, where one looks at the TV to diffuse a bomb, and the other player, not being allowed to look at the TV, has the bomb diffuse manual, forcing the two to communicate with one another.

Implicit/Explicit:

I think this hit home for me. The best way to explain an idea to someone is through metaphor, not explicit meaning, and this is something that opened my eyes to my own projects. I once made a terrible short film for a project, and the core problem with it is that, as a character based conflict, I couldn't avoid telling and not showing. I think that a better way for me to express the emotions I wanted would have been to make the story revolve around a core event that would be indirectly related to the themes of the film. In other words, make the film about some event, like Prom, and have  the implicit meaning to be the inner conflict of the characters. I should have stepped away from characters explaining their emotions, and have them express it through a physical struggle.

(I know this probably doesn't make much sense without the film, but I'm trying to say that I understand why some of my projects failed)

The week's task:

This week I've had the job of presenting the Resurrection stage of the Hero's Journey. This stage has two main points in Vogler's book to research:

- Why are there two ordeals?
- How does this Ordeal play out?

The first question:

Ive grabbed a few sources. One analyses the Noir film antagonist tropes, and I found that they often use a 'fat man' in Noir. "White-Collar" crime was, and still is, considered a worse form of crime, since the ringleader doesn't actually get their hands dirty. this is left to the 'strong-man' and the 'femme-fatale'. Thus, the two ordeals are both between the empire the villain has built for themselves. The second ordeal though, is a personal showdown between the protagonist and antagonist, like in Touch of Evil, where it's Orson Welles versus the protagonist. 

Another idea that got into my head was that a lot of action films involve one climax where the Hero destroys the villain's empire, getting rid of their followers and their power. The second one is a moral battle, where, as the Hero is close to victory, is tempted by the enemy to join their side. The hero overcomes this as the second climax of the story.

So, you end up with two climaxes; one where the villain's plans are ruined, and another where his morality and beliefs are destroyed or superseded. 

When you have a tragic character, you end up with a Hero whose morals don't stand the test.

I also read a bit of Machiavelli to think about why this double-conflict happens. Machiavelli has a good point in that the ruler cannot rule without followers of their belief, whatever the belief is. so, to truly defeat another, one has to take their followers and then take their place. Without one, there is no victory.

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