Monthly Archives: July 2015

Stop Motion

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It is now about a year ago that I had my first “proper” idea for a stop-motion project. The storyboard looked something like this:

at_sea_p1

at_sea_p2

at_sea_p3

As you can see it ends with a big question mark. That has always been my problem. I have lots and lots of half-ideas as I like to call them. Moments that I can see clearly in my head. I see the colours, I see camera movement, I hear all the sounds and noises and feel how the scene should feel, but then the big question mark. How does it go on, what happens before, how does the character develope, who is the character anyway? Although I still didn’t have an anwer to the question mark I did start creating short stop motion trials for this storyboard.

The first one is just a simple study of water.

For the second one I paid more attention to colour and TRIED to make it look like it was night.

but that’s as far as I got with it. I realised that if I wanted to creat a stop motion short for my final project there is no way I would be able to achieve it by myself.

So the plan so far is find a team and come up with a proper idea, one without question marks on the storyboard. Both issues are being worked on. The team will probably consist of me and my partner in crime from last year, Jasmine Hughes. However I’m debating whether we might need one more person, depending how big we want the project to be. When It comes to ideas, I’ve got lots more “half-ideas” which I’ll talk about in the next post.

Proposal

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Posthuman

The area I am interested in researching for my dissertation revolves around posthumanism and biotechnology. I am especially intrigued by the extent to which human beings will remain human. Several media texts predict a future of cyborgs and robots, or even a transition from the physical to the digital world. The scenarios range from creating human clones for “organ harvesting”, as in “The Island”, to using cyborgs as a new body, in “Surrogates”, to transferring our mind into the virtual world, as described in the novel “More Than This”. This implies biological as well as cultural changes, changes to the body and to society. I want to look at how the concept of the “self” will be transformed, how we will identify ourselves when we reach the stage of posthumanism – that is, if we reach it in the first place. There are also notions that suggest that human beings have always been posthuman.

technology1 genemutation

There have always been fictive visions of our modifying our bodies to make them better, faster, stronger even immortal. The question however is, how realistic these concepts are. The representation of the posthuman being is often supernatural and unrealistic. There are all kinds of superheroes and villains who are able to transform their bodies with the help of advanced science and technology. On the other hand, there are Iron Man and Batman, who quite literally use technology as a tool. Neither of them experiences a change in their human bodies, but rather use advanced technologies to fight evil. And then there is mutation, as in X-Men and Spiderman. However, in X-Men mutation happens “naturally”, it is part of human evolution and not caused by bio-, or nanotechnology. Ironically, at the same time society sees mutants as being non-human. It would be interesting to find out whether a human being who advances with the help of technology is seen as being more human than someone who mutates due to natural causes. I imagine that when technologies are used, we control and are in control of the transformation, whereas in the case of a mutation we would not be able to control it.

 

Read the complet proposal here: Proposal_FB.docx

 

Final countdown

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You have reached your destination, well almost.

One final year left – a frightening thought – but hey, time flies when you’re having fun, right? And the last 2years have definitely been fun. Even though I’m slightly freaking out about the amount of work that is still to tackle, I’m sure third year will be the best year of all of them.

To make sure that that is the case I’ll be putting EVERYTHING on this blog. Everything uni related that is. It’ll help me know what I have already done and what is still to do, look back at early stages of projects and keep links to sources and ideas.

The blog post will be sorted by categories. So if you are only interested in my reserch for my dissertation, just click the link on the right. Or maybe you only want to know how far along I am with my stop motion project? Easy, just a click to the right.

But for now fingers crossed. This year is gonna be awesome!