Computer Animation Arts

Friday 27th January is your Dissertation Hand-in.  More usually, this auspicious moment in a third year's life would find me posted outside the Campus Registry office in readiness to welcome you and clap you on your backs in congratulation.  Past years have also seen me dashing after latecomers and dragging them into the office before the deadline expires!   This year, I'm away in Poland, so won't be there to ensure you've all hand-in in okay and everything is fine and dandy.  For this reason, I'm offering up these reminders in terms of your submission so no one does the wrong thing, or self-sabotages, or simply underestimates the seriousness of the deadline. Hand-in DISSERTATION FRIDAY 27th JANUARY 2017 4pm – 5pm to the Campus Registry, Ground floor Campus Registry will not accept your submission at 1 minute past 5pm.  They're not allowed and they will not do it, and it doesn't matter how much you plead or cry.  There will be nothing that...

In preparation for the kick-off your Space Oddities film programme, I'm featuring here the 'Do's & Don'ts' of academic writing for your reference.  Ideally, you will have already taken the opportunity to take a look at the advice on offer here.  If not, be sure to familiarise yourself with this style guide before attempting your first film review of the year. Your brief asks you to use the Harvard Method in terms of referencing your published sources. Please note - this is a mandatory aspect of the presentation of your film reviews, so I suggest you take some time to investigate the 'How To' resources available on myUCA .   We don't want to waste valuable time (yours/ours) correcting these more technical elements of your writing.  Using the Harvard Method and proper bibliographies and illustration lists are something you just need to adopt from the outset as part of the new terrain of your undergraduate life.   To begin with, you...

Your dissertation tutorial groups and schedule - share widely.  Many thanks.

I saw this, and thought of you... The Hero's Journey from Iskander Krayenbosch on Vimeo .

Hopefully you've already seen your provisional year 3 timetable here . For your reference, I'm likewise making your actual dissertation groups and weekly schedules available * , so you can get a bit more organised prior to the start of term. If you could ensure all your classmates have seen this information, I'd appreciate it. Many thanks. *Apologies for weird formatting glitch - no idea what's causing that, but there's no significance to it, so worry not Will and Ant - you're not being singled out for harsher treatment! :)

I thought this might prompt some discussion: materiality versus hyperreality?

"From Chris Rock's jive-talking zebra in Madagascar to the racial hierarchy in Rio, Hollywood's animated films have been bombarding children with lazy caricatures for years. Should they come with ethnic sensitivity warnings?" The relationship between stereotypes, caricatures & character design in animation is always a hot topic for dissertations - this article by Steve Rose in The Guardian provides food for thought, likewise this follow-up by Steve Hulett over at TAG .

Hi Anita and hello Mike - saw this article on the Gothic in the paper this weekend and thought of you!

Lots of fascinating insights and research ideas contained herein! The Psychology of Scary Movies from FilmmakerIQ.com on Vimeo .

The History of Horror from FilmmakerIQ.com on Vimeo .

As dissertation pressure looms it's hard to find a way to concentrate. When I was writing mine a savior for me was having the right music to listen to, and the main source for me was a constant stream of classical music. You may already be using sites such as Spotify and YouTube, but a favourite of mine is Last.fm . All you do is type in your genre or desired artist, such as Baroque in this case, click the 'Listen to radio' link and it will generate a radio station with only similar music playing on it. There are few adverts and I found the constant stream of music beneficial because I wasn't always looking for something else and having to click links to remove ridiculously long adverts. I definitely recommend listening to classical music, (I don't know about you) I always want to sing along to music I know and that leads me to lose where I am, whereas classical music is always pleasant in the background! :)

Hi 2nd years! I have just noticed on my UCA, that Chris Hunt has posted the following - Dissertation Proposal - results and feedback Posted on: Wednesday, 8 May 2013 The feedback sessions for dissertation proposals will now be on Tuesday 14th May (not 6th and 13th as previously advertised). Location: Lecture Theatre 1. The assessor giving feedback on these is Kath Abiker. The format is: Group A - 10am Group B - 11am Group C - 12 noon Group D - 2pm Group E - 3pm Please ensure you attend the appropriate session to receive your feedback so that you can build on the feedback over the summer. It is strongly recommended that you work on your dissertation over the summer period - this will enable you to get the most out of your tutorials in the first term. Any students who don;t attend will receive their feedback the following day in their pigeonhole.

For any third years who are currently doing their Dissertation, Has anyone successfully emailed Jude? because I have emailed through the uni email and she hasn't received it and I have tried a few times with my personal email but I get sent back failure to send messages? I checked with Jude today that I wrote the email down right and was confirmed that it was so I don't understand it so Has anyone managed to email her and get a reply back? Thank you in advance Adam Webb

Hi Everyone, Whether it's your very first film review or those first speculative moments of your final dissertation, it's the start of a new academic year and pretty much everyone studying at university, of all years, is about to embark on an uncharted journey of self discovery and research which often involves climbing a few sets of stairs to the library so that you can discover new and exciting things about both the world and of yourselves. You're all like academic George Mallory's and Andrew Irvine's, but hopefully without the grisly, frozen demise! To avoid being stranded on the metaphoric Mount Everest of academic writing, the best trick to survive is to prepare yourself for the climb so you don't get caught in a tricky to navigate blizzard without the correct equipment. And that means books, and lots of them. While studying my MA, for the entirety of the year I carried around a canvas bag full of books which made up a quite sizable reading list ...

Did you know... "Nearly half of the UK's video game players are women, and now they are designing and writing them too, including top sellers Gears of War 3, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution..." Read the full article here.

The Avery Index , Arts Bibliographic Modern , British Humanities Index , and the Design and Applied Arts Index are key resources for finding art-centric information in journal and newspaper articles.  See below for a reminder/refresher re. accessing the resource.

Art Full Text is a database where you can search for journal articles - see below for a reminder/refresher on how to access and use the database etc.   

JSTOR is a database where you can search for journal articles - an invaluable resource for your written assignments and dissertation.  See below for a refresher/reminder re. accessing the database.

A short documentary about video games and storytelling. Off Book: Video Games from PBS Arts on Vimeo .

A venn diagram illustrates shared attributes between different topics or groups.  Improbable though it may seem, the now-notorious sequel, The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011) lurks in the intersection between CGAA Unit 1 Anatomy and CGAA Year 2's current Postmodernism  unit.  I haven't seen the original The Human Centipede   (Dir. Tom Six, 2009) - not yet, anyway -  but I know enough about its good-taste baiting premise to slot its scatalogical shenanigans into the compartment marked 'body horror' and sub-genre 'torture porn'.  Of course, in a departure from the CGAA Anatomy project, these titular centipedes are not an inter-species hybrid created accidentally by teleportation like poor CGAA student, Andy McDowe , but rather luckless humans co-joined surgically by psychos. As some of you will know, The Human Centipede 2, again directed by Tom Six,  has achieved the sort of infamy no amount of marketing dol...