The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Fabia Ling-Yuan Lin
Poses and movements
Originated from suspicion emerged in the making of practices, this paper begins with the wondering that is there something keeps pixilation, the stop-motion technique of using live actors as ‘puppet’ in an animated film, ‘alienated’ from cartoon’s realist approach.
The gold principles for cartoon’s realistic registration are developed by the leading Disney animators and other Hollywood followers from 1930s onwards. Though originally designed for hand-drawn animation, the principles have been successfully adopted by various kinds of object animation, and also today’s prevalent computer animation. It seems that with a little modification, this set of principles could work in all kinds of animation to improve a sense of realism, preventing the animated figures from looking like automatons. The technique of pixilation, however, has rarely demonstrated cartoon’s realist registration in spite of its kinship with animation family.
It could be argued that cinema begins by thinking of the inter-relationship between poses and movement. In that event, pixilated and live-action films belong to two different image systems, and the core difference between them is that the former is constituted by ‘poses’ while the later is by ‘sections’. That is to say, the smallest unit of the former is ‘the condensation of time’, whereas that of the later is ‘the dissection of time’. The two modes of image system, as suggested in this paper, can be examined in three ways: 1) detached or immanent elements; 2) closed or open forms; and 3) different attitudes towards the unseen. In the light of the comparison, this paper argues that as a creation which have been aspiring to the realistic image system of live-action film for more than half a century, the notion of movement in cartoon films becomes so analogous to which of the live-action film that the distinction between it and live action becomes much smaller than that between pixilation and live action – even though pixilation is made by photographing live actors just like what happens with live action.
Nevertheless, borders could be collapsed. This paper argues that one of the impacts the digital technologies make for the aesthetics of moving image is that they have provided new ways to collapse borders between ‘the condensation of time’ and ‘the dissection of time’. By examining contemporary short films, different ways of expressing the ideas of time and space through the materiality of moving image are identified. The significances of these strategies are also discussed.