Tuesday 30 November 2010

The Devil and Tom Walker...

"The Devil and Tom Walker" is a short story by Washington Irving that first appeared in his 1824 collection of stories titled Tales of a Traveller. It was part of the "Money-Diggers" portion. The story is very similar to that of the ancient German legend of Faust. Stephen Vincent Benet drew much of his inspiration for "The Devil and Daniel Webster" from this tale.

Plot summary:

Tom Walker is a greedy and selfish miser of a man who cherishes money more than he does his equally miserly wife. They lived in a forlorn looking house, that had stood long and had an air of starvation. This is until he takes a walk in the swamp at an old Indian fortress and starts up a conversation with the Devil incarnate (referred to as "Old Scratch" in the story). "Scratch" is shown as a lumberjack chopping down trees, each with a prominent and wealthy colonialist name branded on the tree trunk. One rotted and soon to fallen tree has the name of a deacon who grew wealthy "trading" with the Indians. Another fallen trunk has that of a wealthy seaman rumored to be a pirate. Old Scratch strikes up a deal with Tom Walker: he offers the riches hidden in the swamp by Captain Kidd in exchange for Tom's soul. Tom agrees to think about it, and returns home.

Burdened with this secret, he mentions it to his wife. When he is not there, Tom's wife takes all the valuables in the house and goes to make a deal with Old Scratch. When Tom goes in search of his wife and property, all he can find of her is her heart and liver in her apron tied to a tree.

Tom Walker then agrees to the deal with Old Scratch, as his wife had been abusive towards him and he considered her death at the hand of Old Scratch a good thing. Tom agrees to become a loan shark, although Tom has "scruples" in not becoming a slave trader.

Tom never tires of swindling people out of money, until he suddenly becomes fearful about the afterlife. He then starts to become fiercely dedicated to God, always keeping two Bibles at hand.

When, one day, a person who had borrowed money from him and is asking for clemency blames Tom for taking his money. Tom says, "The Devil take me if I have made but a farthing!" At this time, there are three loud knocks at the door. Tom is drawn towards the black-cloaked figure and realizes, in horror, that he has left his Bibles at his desk.

Tom Walker is then taken away by the Devil on the back of a black horse and is never seen again. All his assets vanished and his house burned to the ground. The Ghost of Walker then haunts the site of the old fort.


Postmodernism Lecture 7 - Hyperreality...

Baudrillard claims that modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself.

Baudrillard suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more.

“…his postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life. The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior…

…In other words, an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely an entity influenced by media, technological experience, and the hyperreal…”

Hyperreality is ‘More real than real…’

THE MATRIX:

The character of Neo is woken up to the fact that the reality that he’s lliving in, is actually a construct. He’s living in a simulation. And then we find out that the real world is actually this dystopian nightmare.

The world that we take for granted is a copy; a simulation. Baudrillard is suggesting the world we live in is nothing more than an unreal world, that is interrogative which allows us to believe it is real.

THE TRUMAN SHOW:

It was about someone trying to get back to the truth; someone trying to break through the simulation; someone trying to actually get their head into the real world.

Postmodern minds try to get away from the constructed world to see it as it is.

DISNEYLAND, FLORIDA:

‘Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms: the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future World… Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality… but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real…’

We know that Disneyland is artificial, it’s a big fantasy place full of European castles. But he argues that all of America is in fact an illusion; it’s all as constructed. It’s just that because Disneyland is clearly hyperreal, we look at Las Angeles and popular culture etc as being concrete and true. He’s arguing that everything is constructed, that everything has moved into a simulation.

Umberto Eco (1932-Present).

“… once the "total fake" is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real. So the Polynesian restaurant will have, in addition to a fairly authentic menu, Tahitian waitresses in costume, appropriate vegetation, rock walls with little cascades, and once you are inside nothing must lead you to suspect that outside there is anything but Polynesia… And if in the wax museums wax is not flesh, in Disneyland, when rocks are involved, they are rock, and water is water… When there is a fake hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea serpent it is not so much because it wouldn't be possible to have the real equivalent but because the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program… A real crocodile can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding, but Disneyland tells us that faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands. When, in the space of twenty-four hours, you go… from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, and from the wild river of Adventureland to a trip on the Mississippi, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river, and then you don't see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can…”

He is discussing how Disneyland makes the world even more vivid than the world is. The problem is that when we’ve been to Disneyland, and we’ve seen nature perfected; when we’ve seen environments at their most perfect, the world that we live in starts to feel less by comparison; the real world that surrounds us starts to feel disappointing, bland and banal.

‘The pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it…’

So this made up reality starts to feel superior and preferable to the world in which we actually live.

DISNEY’S ‘CELEBRATION’ TOWN, FLORIDA:

‘Just outside Disney World, in Florida, you will find the spankingly ever-sowired, futuristic new town of Celebration - the one satirized in the film Shrek. Celebration was the brainchild of Walt Disney himself. He wanted to create a town with a sense of community and cleanliness…

…one clue that there is something a little peculiar about Celebration is that it looks scarily like the suburb that imprisoned Jim Carrey in The Truman Show… Another is the constant hype that Celebration is ‘real’…
… But what really casts doubt on the reality of the place is the way it pretends to some kind of permanence. Most of the homes are designed in turn-of-the century
style, like almost every Disney film you’ve ever seen. The shops have signs with bogus foundation dates like ‘since 1905’ when actually everything is less than five years old. It is designed to give a timeless sense of what smalltown America used to be like - or should have been like… Muzak is piped from speakers built into the roots of the palm trees in the streets…

Disney’s brochures call it a ‘hopscotch-and-tag neighborhood to be viewed from a front porch swing’ and a ‘special place for families … in a time of innocence.’

‘…When some of the families involved decided to pack up and leave, Disney offered to waive the rule that they couldn’t profit from the sale if they left in less than a year - but only on condition they signed a contract promising never to reveal their reasons for wanting to go…

… There are whole phone directories full of rules for residents… These can’t be changed, even by the elected Homeowners’ Association, without the written approval of the company. All power remains behind the scenes with Disney for as long as they want it…’

So this is a real town for real people but actually the truth is that there are rules. To maintain that perfection, certain things have to be managed and taken care of.

POUNDBURY, DORSET:

‘When people today talk about the real thing… they often mean something old-fashioned. They mean ‘real’ linen sheets or ‘real’ country villages with thatched roofs, of ‘real’ meals of roast beef… The trouble with that kind of real is that it harks back to days where authenticity was bought, either at great expense, or by misusing
women or black people or poor people, to provide these so-called ‘real’ things…

There’s a worrying extreme conservatism that lurks behind this. There are those who believe that an ‘authentic’ English town means that only people of Anglo-Saxon descent live there…’

Where do we get the idea of what is real?

For some people real was actually about suppressing the rights of others. So that real was just a construct, it was just a set of ideas by someone else to present the world in a particular way.

Truth is the one thing that we cannot rely on anymore.

“We live, not inside reality, but inside our representations of it.”

“According to Baudrillard what has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps [images] that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map.

In his essay, he uses as a metaphor, the story of people who build a full sized map of their world and then they decide not to live in the world, but to live in the map version of the world. And while they’re living in the map version of the world, the real world crumbles and deteriorates. So they move from the reality into the simulation. He uses this to suggest that, that is what we are doing all the time, we are moving away from what is real into existing in a simulation. His problem is that we no longer know the difference between the two things.

“Reality itself has begun merely to imitate the model, which now precedes and determines the real world… It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.

Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that postmodern culture is artificial, because the concept of artificiality still requires some sense of reality against which to recognize the artifice. His point… is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice.”

He [Baudrillard] argues that there are three "orders of simulacra":

1) in the first order of simulacra… the image is a clear counterfeit of the real;
the image is recognized as just an illusion, a place marker for the real.

2) in the second order of simulacra… the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies. Such production misrepresents and masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening to replace it. However, there is still a belief that, through critique or effective political action, one can still access the hidden fact of the real.

3) in the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.

We now think this simulation is the world, and real.

INTERNATIONAL FLAVOURS AND FRAGRANCES INC:

It’s there job to ensure the food we eat tastes like we expect it to. They give us the flavours and smells that we associate with real things.

Based on their based about savoury:

“Succulent beef, delicate chicken, and tangy cheese lead the way for IFF’s family of savoury flavour profiles… Whatever your product segment, IFF’s outstanding savoury meat, tomato, dairy, seafood, and vegetable flavours deliver the true taste, aroma, and mouthfeel for every consumer preference.”

Notice the use of the word true in ‘true taste’. This isn’t a company dealing with the reality of food, this isn’t someone giving us a steak, it’s someone giving us a hyper experience of steak; what we would imagine steak to taste like. Recall the scene in The Matrix where they can’t choose between porridge or a fake steak. The idea is, is it a steak if it tastes like a steak.

Character Design Crit Evaluation...

On thursday we had our first crit of our second year after 10 weeks of working on the character design project. I was given Western Kung Fu fighters as my genre mashup for the unit which at first i wasn't too sure about, but after i while, i found that it could be quite interesting. In the end, i came up with a heroin who is agile and is able to fire ninja stars from her heels, a trusty companion called Yang who's a horse with the ability to kick and punch kung fu style, and a sheriff turned evil, based on the design of a dragon. Overall, i feel a fair bit of work and research went inot this, but i'm extremely disappointed with my end product as i don't think i did myself any justice and i'm still waiting to create a final piece of work that i'm actually proud to show yet. I feel that Alan's comments about being stuck in first gear were spot on and this is something that i need to address immediately. I'm still trying to find a work ethic and process that works well for me, as i found myself quite exhausted in this past ten weeks and it feels like it was all for nothing. However, i can take some positives from this unit, as i feel more confident in my dawing skills because there was a lot of good stuff i drew on my blog, mainly reference images, but i felt this helped boost my confidence in terms of drawing. Now i look forward to the rest of the units, taking the ideas i have and refining them into strong pieces of work i'm proud to show everyone. Bring it on...

Transcription Initial Thoughts and Ideas...

I've been thinking about this unit for the past few days, trying to gather up initial thoughts and ideas about what route i would like to go down and from the word go, i've just wanted to adapt a story into a short animation. I think it's about time that i produced a piece of work that i'm proud of and i vow that this will be the one.

Since i've been watching a fair few animations recently, i've become particularly interested in Czech and Eastern European Stop motion and short animations. I'm really fascinated by the dark and surreal tones and moods in their work and i find them very stylistic and visual pleasing. This is definitely something i'd like to consider doing, possibly using a folktale or adult fairytale to create a very dark, stylistic and visually pleasing short animation. Two possible characters that come to mind are the devil, which is always fascinating to try and visualise as a dark character and Death, who poses another fascination in terms of character design. I particular like this idea of selling your soul, and with the devil in particular, i like the idea of attempting to visualise hell in a surrealist's way. This is definitely something i'm going to look into, and i'm sure there's many art works that i can drawon for inspiration.



Transcription Briefing...



In an artistic context, Transcription describes a process of interpretation from one source to another. For example, a piece of music being visualised as a music video or a book being imagined as a film.

We are commissioned to create a transcribed piece or work of our own choice, transforming an abstract source into a visual form – For example this could be Music to Music Video, Music to Animated Short, Text (Novel or Short Story) to Character Design, Text (Novel or Short Story) to Animated Short etc. This piece should be of an appropriate length (2-3 minutes) and we are asked to produce a pipeline of work from pre-production to production to post-production. We are also asked to provide a 'Making of...' document, a technical paper and a demo reel as well as maintaining our progress on the blog and continuing to develop our personal identities and brands.

Alice (1988) by Jan Svankmajer...



Alice is a 1988 Czech surrealist fantasy film by Jan Švankmajer. It retells Lewis Carroll's first 'Alice' book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in Švankmajer's unique style. The film combines live action with stop motion animation. The movie is considered a cult movie. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 100% of critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 7.8 out of 10 based on 13 reviews.



What i love about Svankmajer's work is his particularly unique style, and Alice is definitely no exception to his other works. I became very fond of the characters from start to end which never failed to fascinate me. The white rabbit was a beautiful masterclass of his stop motion animation skills and the transition between the actress and doll was extremely uncanny. Particular scenes that i enjoyed in this film were the white rabbit coming to life, which was beautifully thought and animated. The doormouse cooking on Alice's head which was another clever scene, as the mouse made use of her hair and other utensils to start a fire. The scene with Alice falling down the bucket and into the elevator was so dark and magical, as we watched her slowly work her way down each level. Also, particular characters that i fell in love with were the white rabbit, which was made from a dead stuffed rabbit, the caterpillar, which was made from a sock and teeth, and the march hare, which was a stuffed wind-up toy that moved around on wheels. Overall, Alice is another masterclass of Svankmajer's beautiful stop motion skills and unique style, incorporating everything that i've loved from his animated shorts into a beautifully constructed feature-length film that does Lewis Carroll's novel a lot of justice. This is by far one of my favourite adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and definitely the most stunning visually.






Monday 29 November 2010

Fallen Art (2005)...



Although the story in this animation is very strange and surreal, it doesn't take away from the wonderful cg and character design. I love the textures in the animation and the designs of the characters are very bold and memorable.

Sunday 28 November 2010

Plato's Cave...






Inside the cave

Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads "including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials". The prisoners watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.

Socrates suggests the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. They would praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world, and the whole of their society would depend on the shadows on the wall.

Release from the cave

Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.

"Suppose further," Socrates says, "that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true," viz. the shadows on the wall?

After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the "source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing".

Return to the cave

Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. "Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? "Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?"

Remarks on the allegory

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be taken with what was said before, viz. the metaphor of the Sun, and the divided line. In particular, he likens

"the region revealed through sight" – the ordinary objects we see around us – "to the prison home, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the Sun. And in applying the going up and the seeing of what's above to the soul's journey to the intelligible place, you not mistake my expectation, since you desire to hear it. A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the region of the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of good; but once seen, it must be concluded that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful – in the visible realm it gives birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible realm, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence – and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it".

After "returning from divine contemplations to human evils", a man "is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when – with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkness – he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself?"

Oktapodi (2007)...

Burning Safari...

An Animation per day... Fimfarum (2002)...

Starting with Fimfarum, a puppet stop motion animation, i've decided to watch an animation per day to help further my knowledge and understanding of the medium.







Fimfárum Jana Wericha was directed by Aurel Klimt and Vlasta Pospísilová in 2002 which presents five independent stories deriving from Czech folktale. The first of these, "When Leaves Fall from the Oak," tells of how a drunken peasant makes a deal with the devil, whom that man subsequently outwits. The second, "Fearless Frankie," relates how the father of a young man who is afraid of nothing arranges for his son to spend a night in a tavern where the spirits of the dead gather to gamble and cavort. The third, "Mean Barbara," revolves around the efforts of various persons to dispose of the body of a miserly old woman. The fourth, "A Dream Fulfilled," is about an elderly farmer who squanders his money playing the lottery, and the last tale, "Fimfárum," centers on a blacksmith with a scheming, unfaithful wife who is forced to perform a variety of impossible tasks.

Fimfarum is beautifully visual example of traditional puppetry and stop-motion anitaion which has been combined with some strange but interesting Czech folktale. In particular, the environments are very surreal and artistic, which combined with the strange and uncanny puppets create very interesting worlds. However, i would have liked to have seen a darker art direction on these stories as they are very light hearted. One story In particular, "When Leaves Fall from the Oak", which deals with the devil and we see the character go through hell, doesn't have enough vigour and conviction in its exuction of art direction. I really felt the animators could have gone to town with the style and visual aesthetic of these scenes. However, i did like their interpretation of hell, which did have some artistic style. Overall, i loved the short Czech animations mainly because theyre completely different to the kinds of folktale we are used to and the puppetry was wonderful to watch, with beautifully simplistic environments, models and characters.

Thursday 25 November 2010

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Character Rough Turnarounds Thus Far...





Here's my rough turnarounds so far. They're helping me to see how all the seperate elements to each character are coming together... The proportions and detail still needs some work but they're getting there...

Monday 15 November 2010

Sheriff Dragon Revolver Design...



Here's the design for the Sheriff's revolver. I'm really pleased with how this has turned out, i just need to go in a touch it up now and make it look more professional and clean, before i take it into photoshop and give it some life and colour...

Sunday 14 November 2010

The Matrix - Postmodernism Quotes... 'The Truth', Reality, Dream worlds and Hyperreality...

Computer: "Wake up, Neo."


Neo: “You ever had that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming.”


Neo’s Boss: “Do you have a problem with authority Mr. Anderson?
You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously you are mistaken… This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole. Thus if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem… The time has come to make a choice, either you choose to be at your desk on time, or you chose to find yourself another job.”



Agent: “What good is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?”


Morpheus: “Do you believe in fate Neo?”
Neo: “No.”
Morpheus: “Why not?”
Neo: “Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.”



Morpheus: “The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you got to work; when you go to church; when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
Neo: “What truth?”
Morpheus: “That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else your were born into bondage; born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch, a prison for your mind.”


Morpheus: “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth and nothing more.”


Cypher: “Buckle your seat belt Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye, bye.”
(Alice in Wonderland references are also used.)


Morpheus: “Have ever had a dream that you was so sure was real; what if you were unable to wake from that dream. How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”


Neo: “Why do my eyes hurt?”
Morpheus: “Because you’ve never used them before.”


Morpheus: “Rest Neo, the answers are coming.”

Neo: “Right now we’re inside a computer program?”
Morpheus: “Is it really so hard to believe?
Your clothes are different, the plugs in your arms and head are gone, your hair has changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self image; it is the mental projection of your digital self.”


Neo: “This isn’t real?”
Morpheus: “What is real? How do you define real?
If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, and see; then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”


Morpheus: “This is the world that you know; the world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as a neural interactive simulation, that we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world Neo.”


Morpheus: “Welcome to the desert of the real


Morpheus: “…At some point, in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to artificial intelligence.”


Morpheus: “… human beings are no longer born, we are grown.”


Morpheus: “What is the Matrix?
Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this [a battery].”


Morpheus: “I didn’t say it would be easy Neo, I just said it would be the truth.”


Morpheus: “I feel I owe you an apology. We have rule, we never free a mind once it’s reached a certain age. It’s dangerous; the mind has trouble letting go.”


Morpheus: “When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside, who had the ability to change whatever he wanted; to remake the Matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us; taught us the truth. As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.”


Morpheus: “I’m trying to free your mind Neo, but I can only show you the door; you’re the one who has to walk through it.”


Neo: “I thought it wasn’t real?”
Morpheus: “Your mind makes it real.”



Morpheus: “The Matrix is a system Neo, that system is our enemy. When you’re inside you look around and what do you see?
Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters; the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy… Many of them are… so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it… If you are not one of us, you are one of them.”


Morpheus: “I’ve seen an agent punched through a concrete wall; men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed is based in a world that is based on rules…”


Cypher: “I know this steak doesn’t exist; I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I realised?
Ignorance is bliss.”


Mouse: “If you close your eyes it almost feels like you’re eating runny eggs… Do you know what it really reminds me of?
Tasty Wheat. Did you ever eat Tasty Wheat?”
Switch: “No. But technically neither did you.”
Mouse: “That’s exactly my point… because you have to wonder, how do the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like?
Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like, was oatmeal or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example, maybe they couldn’t figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.”


Kid: “Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realise the truth.”
Neo: “What truth?”
Kid: “There is no spoon… then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

Cypher: “If you’d have told us the truth, we would have told you to shove that red pill up your arse.”
Trinity: “That is not true Cypher, he set us free.”
Cypher: “You call this free. All I do is what he tells me to do. If I have to choose between that and the Matrix; then I choose the Matrix.”
Trinity: “The Matrix isn’t real.”
Cypher: “I disagree Trinity. I think the Matrix can be more real than this world… Welcome to the real world.”


Agent: “… Some believe that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilisation. I say ‘your civilisation’ because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilisation.”

Agent: “Human beings are a plague. You are a disease and we are the cure.”

Neo: “… I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible…”

Baudrillard and Kant in The Matrix...





It seems that Baudrillard's theories can be compared to the ideas and theories that Kant has talked about, in which the world is in fact comparable to The Matrix.

Greek Philosophy Meets Post Modernism in The Matrix...



Here's a really helpful video about understanding how postmodernism has been integrated in The Matrix and how this can relate to the philosophical ideologies of Socrates and Platos. In particular it talks about Platos Allegory of the Cave, which is something i will do some further research into.

Saturday 13 November 2010

Sheriff Dragon Mempo Mask Designs...




After drawing an ordinary design for the sheriff's mempo last night, i decided to integrate more dragon-like elements to fit in with the dragon style i'm going for in this character. The last design is close to what i'm going for, although it still needs some work and details...

Friday 12 November 2010

Sheriff Mask Designs...



Here are a couple of designs for the sheriff's mempo, i'm particularly liking the first design and am currently looking at the possibility of making it look dragon like by adding sharp scale-like edges and spikes and i feel the nose already bares a similar resemblance to a dragon's nose...

Sheriff Body Shape Designs...



The second drawing is close to how the final body shape for the turnarounds will look, it still needs a bit of work though...

Animation Bible Page Example...



Here's the changes i've made to the design of my page template for the animation bible. This is based on feedback from a couple of people, and i've also decided to add some text and images to give an example of how each page would look...

Horse Tail Drawings...



Here are a few different tail designs for the horse character...

Horse Hair Drawings...







Here's some drawings for hair designs, i think an oriental style would be more interesting and fitting to the topic of kung fu...