TUTORIAL ADVICE BEFORE THE TRANSFER

FROM Chris Mullen

For Soon Sun from Chris the dress rehearsal for the transfer meeting 23 08 2002

1. you prepared well for the display of work so far....

2. I met you from 10.00 - 12.30 for a detailed discussion. I think you really benefited from the opportunity to review how your work is best laid out.

3. You still show the tendency to arrange your work visually - that is to say how it best looks to give a superficial look of adequacy and achievement.

4. It was clear that you hadnÕt taken into account that the display should reflect the structure and organisation of your thinking. The material was used where it looked best - every space was filled with something.

5. So we divided the material up into three units - you had registered my criticisms of your baby tiger as being anthropomorphic in second hand ways. The third section addressed the vital issue of what was it that you were doing that took your project on from the MPhil to the PhD level

• the testing of the animations in front of children

• narrowing the audience down to a particular group -not just children everywhere

• asking yourself questions of some complexity

 

6. remember to restrict the examples you use to a number. I had the feeling you just kept going until you filled the space.

7. The display of each of the three units should have a consistency to help the viewer - two images to support a proposition, and I liked the captions on section one where you established a hierarchy. Ultimately you should work towards an editing of your work and the thought that underlie it - having confidence that your audience will understand from the visual propositions you make for them

best wishes

Chris

5 Report by the Supervisor (submitted separately)

She is eager to receive acknowledgement of work undertaken in this act of transfer. She has made considerable progress in developing a highly personal expression as an animator and in my judgment is at the right cusp in her project for transfer.

RESEARCH Her study of European animators such as Lotte Reiniger and George Pal has been well informed and well integrated within her own attitudes and style. See beneath.

MULTI MEDIA. She has become confident in using computer applications, and achieves originality.

INDUSTRY. Frightening amounts of work. She must realise that she has to edit down some times,

STUDENTSHIP. Soon Sun has been an exemplary student, supporting the others, contributing to group discussions and activities. Much of this is sustained as she enters part-time mode as a split student.

RECOMMENDATION. At the transfer meeting, we should recognise her achievements and encourage her to plan ahead more effectively and have more confidence in what she has already achieved.

I believe the programme is a good and realistic one.

The change to part-time mode of study will obviously extend the period of study beyond August 2003, perhaps for 12 months.

I have every hope that she will succeed.

Abstract

The project will create a sequence of interactive multimedia animations for use in workshops for children in Korea which will be informed by a cross cultural study of the representation of the animal. The stimulus for my project stems directly from my own work experience as an illustrator and teacher in the fifteen years since graduating as an MA student.

My major theme is the use of folk tales to study and teach important aspects of national culture. The medium of interactive multimedia animation presents me with the opportunity to make the transition from illustrator to animator without a change of educational or industrial context. Representations of the Korean Tiger were researched, previously unknown texts translated, and, from cross-cultural comparisons, the project will establish differences in attitude to the animal in Western European and Asiatic cultures.

Informed by these analyses, a sequence of educational interactive animations has been devised (to date two have been completed* to communicate aspects of Korean Culture to children of mixed race at the India Head International School in Korea. In support of the Multimedia animations a teaching and learning pack will be devised and implemented that combines digital and printed information. The project will encourage an understanding of Korean culture at a time when it is under threat from more pervasive visual cultures (Japan and the USA) yet will do so to children of mixed race who may themselves lack a clear sense of what is their own culture.

Aspects of designing in the medium for children will be explored; creating and sustaining characterisation; balancing educational aims with the need to entertain; balancing screen and printed information; exploring the possibilities of interactive navigation through strands of narrative information; framing and subdivision of the screen; creation of sound characterisation and perspective; balance of image and text; text and the spoken voice. In the final period of research, after transfer to PhD the project will conclude the sequence of animations, and devise teaching strategies based on it for a series of workshops in Korea and the UK.

The database of illustrations based on representations on the tiger will address issues such as The depiction of the tiger in Western European cultures as a wild and destructive beast; its role within the Romantic Movement and as a defining image of Imperialism; the influence of zoos and circuses on prevailing attitudes.; the cult of the exotic and its popularity in the illustrated childrenÕs book in the United Kingdom. Study will be made of the representation of the Tiger in the work of William Blake and George Stubbs. Nicola Bayley and other contemporary working illustrators.

The analyses will be used to explore the specific challenges in representing movement, gesture and expression, with an analysis of anthropomorphism. In comparison the project will offer a Korean interpretation where the animal is at the heart of how the nation defines itself, the wider emotional range offered the Horangi-I, from grandeur to silliness. The animations will provide opportunities for children to explore a database of information about the raw material of the Folk Tales, e.g. Food, Landscape, Symbolism and Depiction . The ideas and raw material will be available initially on a database on a website (www.koger.co.kr). In the PhD period of study this will be developed further as a structured learning support for the workshops.

The project will be completed with a series of recommendations on how interactive multimedia animation can be more efficiently and imaginatively used with children, and how mixed race students in particular can be helped in understanding visual aspects of culture.

" Hey! Magpie, Give me an egg" and "A Tiger and A Toad"