This week’s session talked roughly about the brief and the structure of writing an essay with 1500 words, before picking up a topic it’s essential to think of a research question first. As the critical report needs to be straight, it’s always important to refer to or quote from other resources or authors to support ideas. Also, it can be essential to add movie clips or illustrations to support my topic, and then put my word into context.
There are several types of the resources:
- the primary: film festival, gallery, exhibition
- the secondary: paper, books, news
Several sites are good for finding resources, by learning from them, I can paraphrase the content and adding into my own essay:
- https://scholar.google.com/
- https://www.jstor.org/
- https://www.ebsco.com/products/ebscohost-research-platform
- https://blog.animationstudies.org/
- school library
When structuring a report, there are some important parts:
- Title/Subtitle
- Acknowledge – optional
- Abstract
- Key words
- Contents page
- Introduction
- Literature review (how does the journey or book support our report)
- Main body of the text
- Conclusion
- Image list
At the end of the lesson, the lecture challenged us to find an old animation that displays the animator’s hand inside, the French animated film Fantasmagorie (1908) below shows the animator’s hand drawing the first character in the first few shots.
In my free time as I am reading the book Understanding Animation by Paul Wells and aiming to produce an essay comparing abstract animation and orthodox animation, here are my notes from learning the second chapter ‘Notes towards a theory of animation’ and the third chapter ‘narrative strategies’.
Meanwhile, I am trying to review and summarise main points through what I have read to construct the structure of my essay:
Next week, I plan to look at more case studies of each orthodox animation and experimental animation, as I will be able to indicate the difference between them through specific media.