A Space Apart: Animation and the Spatial Politics of Conversion
Reading cartoons and associated exhibition practices in the silent and early sound eras, this essay examines the expression of the black/white racial binary in American animation of the 1920s and 1930s. It treats cartoons as a case study in the visual representation of the intersection of spatial practice, aesthetics, and labor/management relations in the reorganization of the American film industry during the transition to sound film..
Diegetic Short Circuits: Metalepsis in Animation
This article explores a highly striking phenomenon termed metalepsis. A metalepsis is a fictional and paradoxical transgression of the border between mutually exclusive worlds that cannot be transgressed in our actual world. The hand of the animator reaching into the diegesis of his creations as well as characters communicating with the audience, escaping to the world of their creators, or altering their own worlds are all different types of metaleptic transgressions. Even though this phenomenon appears extensively throughout the history of animation, it has not been theorized in animation studies thus far. This article introduces transmedial narratological conceptualizations of metalepsis as an analytical tool for animation. It discusses a wide range of examples, testing the applicability of the framework to various animated forms.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.