Individual Animation Project #1

Due 8th session, 10/16/14

Conceive, design, and produce a short animation that comments on the tradition of Mimesis. See the Critical Paradigms section of my website and the Mimesis Research Topics page for help understanding this topic.

There are no restrictions on the content or style of your animation -- as long as you are thoughtful and as long as you are commenting on the mimetic tradition. In commenting on Mimesis, you may work within the mimetic tradition or outside of it. You may agree with it or disagree with it. You may ridicule it or praise it. You may dissect it, replicate it, or destroy it. You may limit yourself to the Western tradition, or include other non-Western traditions. You may focus on animation, film-making, still imagery -- any artform, or all artforms. Your animation may be narrative or non-narrative, realistic or abstract. It may involve characters or no characters, recognizable objects or none. Anything is possible, as long as you are thoughtful and as long as you comment in some meaningful way on the mimetic tradition.

Your animation will necessarily be very short because of our production scedule, Typical running times might be between 5 seconds and 20 seconds. However long it is, your animation must be fully finalized and complete by the due date.

The final format of your animation will depend on your final intended display. Some possibilities include: viewing on a monitor; projection onto a large screen; display on a hand-held device; part of an interactive display; part of a static image work. The final display must be considered as an integral part of your design from the beginning of your production process.

Note: At approximately the mid-point of this project, I will give you feedback on what I feel is your progress. This will not be a grade, but will give you a sense of what grade you might expect to receive if you continue working as you have been.

On the due date, bring to class all materials needed to display your finished work. Also post your animation to your blog for this course. If necessary, post it to Vimeo or a similar site and link to it from your blog. Also, hand in to me a DVD disk containing an uncompressed file of your finished animation, plus your working files. If necessary, hand in two DVDs.