Rhia Crouch's Blog

In contextual studies we started to think about what influences our own work and what has influenced others in the past be it their childhood, historical events, fears, dreams or other cultures. One thing that we came across is that animators are influenced by abstract paintings as these are not bound by reality. This helped us to think about how we would look at our chosen film or CAA product for our essay as this will be something that we will have to focus on.

Our third lesson in contextual studies involve us going over the work of surrealism and the impact it had when it started to how we see it nowadays. The best way to understand surrealism is that it is a form of escaping from the real world and along with creating a new language in the way we see objects in paintings therefore making people think in a way they don’t want to all or that was uncommon at the time. However surrealism has lost its shock value as the public has become desensitised to it and is just seen as being normal by today’s standards, this could be mostly seen in the way that surrealist paintings are reused in pop culture such as in Alfred Hitchcock’s film spellbound. Surrealism in itself can be hard to understand but I feel the best way of understanding it is to imagine a world in which the ideas of surrealism makes sense and to question how everything works if it was real. An example of this is the animated short “Destino” which was a collaboration between Salv...

Our second contextual studies lesson was based around us going over the different ways in which old ideas are always reused or in someway help to influence modern works. Such examples that we looked at included conparing Futurist works, by such artists as Balla and Muybridge, and how they helped to inspire ways of showing movement in movies such as The Matrix (1999). Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

The talk we had about contextual studies helped me to think about the feel that I wanted to convey to the audience about my city design. Thinking in deph about it will help me fine tune my designs along with making the final designs more believable, these include thinking about: Should it be a Utopia or should it be a dystopia?  Is the city inhabited by one type of social class and if so who? Do different classes live in the same city and if so do they mix or are they separated? Is the city old or new and does this show with how the buildings are laid out? How do the inhabitants move round the city? This was something that has crossed my mind when I was reading the text and trying to think about each of the cities. The best way that I get round this was to go thought the text and try and pick out any clues that are given about the materials that are used for the city or the way that the people behave their.