A Modest Appraisal

I will try hard to not use this last blog post as a way to blast the utterly disorganized, illogical, and scatterbrained way in which this course; designed by media professors feeling utterly overwhelmed by the admittedly overwhelming current changes in the nature of media production; failed to teach what it was designed to teach simply because that much can not be taught so quickly to a student body with such diverse prior experience and by a department with such inadequate funding for the required technology.

No, I will not broach that subject at all.

Instead I will explain what I learned.

I learned more about how the television and movie industries work, which strengthened my resolve to generally avoid them as a career. But I also learned how to use various technologies that will improve my creative and professional output.
I learned that I really do need to teach myself CSS sometime if I want to actually learn web design. I learned the basics of how to use Flash, which I will use in the future in my creative and professional projects. I learned the absolute basics of editing, but I mostly just learned that the media department doesn’t have enough money to install Final Cut on all of their computers, which is unfortunate, because if I had learned editing, a main reason I took this course, I could have searched for basic film-making internships and maybe change my mind about going into production if I felt competent in digital production skills.

The main thing I learned in this class is Flash. And that was worth the time and energy and frustration of everything else, since I do absolutely love how just by applying lots of time and energy into a piece of software, I can turn the funny little drawings I’ve been doing forever into funny moving drawings.


Having an introduction to digital media is a bit like having an introduction to analog media. And they never had courses like that, did they? A course that taught sculpture, painting, book cover design, architecture, typography, film-making, photography, and cooking in the same class, simply because all of the activities mentioned take place in the same space of the real world. The course seems to be designed from a perspective that things have a lot in common if they all take place on a computer screen, and they simply do not anymore.

Animation Blog

This blog post is the hardest, because it is very difficult for me to pick just one animation that fires my imagination. I love animations and have seen hundreds or thousands by now. Instead of picking one that’s particularly beautiful or genius, I will pick one that inspires me when I, myself, work with Flash.

I chose Joel Veitch and Rob Manuel’s “Chill Out”, a music video for Youth of Britain’s song of the same name.



The sense of space is both limited and three dimensional, since it is obviously a collage of a few sources thrown on top of one another, it looks like just 2 or three layers. However, the content of the background has a very strong sense of space. It is driving footage shot from kitten-eye-level. The laying of the motorcycle on top of this almost makes it look like it’s in motion. It is a clever trick, but not realistic enough to fool anyone’s eye- just believable enough to entertain people by its obvious unreality.

The character is also extremely simple. The character is barely articulated. It is mechanistic. It looks sort of like an animated bobblehead. The kitten bobs its head to the beat in an almost uniform fashion for the entire video. It does not seem to have any complex emotions, but its movements do effectively communicate both speed and an enjoyment of the music. He also pauses when the footage and the music pauses and, pops a wheelie whenever the music does what electronic music fans call “dropping a break” (starting up a new layer of sound, to the proper rhythm.) These movements’ synchronization with the music give the impression that the kitten is enjoying the music, and the character effectively becomes an embodiment of the song.

Truthfully, I like this video because I like seeing a kitten enjoy loud electronic music, and now I like it even more because it is simple enough for me to aspire to create something of a similar quality. Now that I know the basics of Flash, given enough time, I could make this, and that fact makes me very happy (because I’ve been watching and loving silly flash animations for a decade now, and it’s a new, very internet-centered, geeky medium that I think has a lot of humorous and creative potential.)