Month: April 2024

Mark Z. Danielewski’s story House of Leaves is a very interesting read. The work diverges from the traditional structures of writing and creates a puzzle for the reader. From backwards text to rotated text, House of Leaves feels like a puzzle. In order to truly experience the story, you have to work to unravel it. This structure reminds me a lot of web series like The Backrooms.

Episodes from the series are not always released in order, and many appear to be irrelevant. The story is hidden, forcing the viewers to dissect the information each video holds and piece it back together. On the surface it all looks confusing, but when you sift through the videos, reorder parts in a new order, things become clearer. It leaves people, like the channel Film Theory, to try an figure out what the story truly is.

Much like hypertext, these stories add another level of involvement to the reader and viewer. The stories force the reader and viewer to actively decipher the material. Though other stories do similar things, telling their story out of order like in the film Memento, these kinds of stories push the reader to change them in a way that it can be truly understood. None of the material can be taken at face value, you actively have to change how it is displayed and ordered. Everything you read or watch is just a piece of the story, and you have to figure out where each one goes in order to get the full picture.

It is such an interesting level of interaction, having the readers and viewers physically change the order of events until the story is complete.

As someone who is going into 3D animation, I thought the discussion on media and materiality by N. Katherine Hayles was very interesting to read about. Digital technology is becoming more and more prevalent within society, and it is interesting to examine how it affects the physical world and our future as a whole. Much like Stephen Kline’s discussion on defining technology, the digital has become a prominent part of our lives, and we discuss how exactly it plays into our understanding of the world and materiality. As Hayles discussed in their book, the introduction of 3D software has drastically changed the capabillites of production, a shot that would have taken over a hundred cameras, coordination, and hours of editing is now able to be done in a digital space with a single camera, moved around the character and adjusted with a simple slider.

Another perfect example of this shift is with the making of Jurassic Park. The original plan for bringing to life the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park was using stop motion and puppets. This was the standard for doing visual effects, but some of the crew felt it would not truly capture the motion that audiences would be expecting for such creatures. So, Dennis Muren, the visual effects supervisor, suggested using computer generated effects. After doing some tests, Spielberg decided that they would move away from the stop motion plans and use computer animation to bring the creatures to life.

This is a prime example of the switch to the digital age, a marking from the physical to digital. Jurassic Park showed a movement from the materiality of stop motion to the digitality of computer-generated animation. However, the making of the film also supports Hayles’ claim that materiality is also prevalent for producing these simulations and computer engines. When switching over to cgi, the production team utilized the talents of the stop motion animators by creating a specially made hardware nicknamed the “dinosaur input device.” The dinosaur input device was a puppet, very similar to the ones that stop motion animators would use and encoded it so that the computer would register the movement so they could animate as they normally would. This gave animators a physical device they could manipulate and animate with.

While we are moving to a more digital centric world, the materiality is still very prevalent and can be combined with the digital to create unique and amazing products and solutions.

Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics brings to light an extremely fascinating concept that can be utilized in a variety of media by storytellers, the idea of the “Blood in the Gutter.” The main idea behind the Blood in the Gutter is that the human mind will create closure in the gaps left when transitioning between images, or panels. We are able to look at two images and fill in what connects them, or the sequence of actions that led from one image to the other. Understanding the gutter, this gap between panels, and how to transition between images is extremely beneficial to storytellers as it allows them to better learn and plan how to use imagery to tell their story.

There are many different variations of transitions between panels, ranging from action-to-action and non-sequitur, each leaving a type of gutter that will incite different meanings or perceptions. It is important to know how the gutter can work as it directly impacts the understanding of the images. The minds’ ability to create closure, interpolating what has happened between panels, is what allows artists to set up their images to convey a particular meaning, create the illusion of an action. Being able to know how to convey an idea or event to an audience through still drawings is important when working with a medium like comics, as well as others.

The gutter is not only applicable to comics, but also for other media like film. While film uses far more images to create a sense of movement, the way it has set up images as frames and edit them with others to create scenes is similar to the structure of a comic, using images as panels and placing them in a particular way. When a film cuts to a different shot, a different series of frames, it too has a gutter. The audience must perceive what has occurred between the two shots, using closure just as they would between comic panels.

McCloud’s concept of the gutter is not just useful for comic artists, but for those working in other forms of media, the storytellers looking to know how to convey their message or narrative.