Two days into the week and i have been feeling quite lost until i decided to re-read paul wells – understanding animation. I remember spotting a few points that intrigued me earlier (before i had decided on a topic of research). Revisiting Paul Wells- Understanding Animation, turned out to be the best thing as i now realize that his references to Moritz underlines essentially the basic idea that i am touching on.

The true abstraction and the true symbol must have an intriguing spirit and integrity of its own, and it must suggest more meanings, various, almost contradictory depths and speculations beyond the surface value; otherwise why bother to obfuscate? If the viewer comes to the point of saying, ‘Oh, that represents the police and that represents freedom,’ then that revelation is about as interesting as, ‘Gee, Donald Duck drives a car and mows his lawn just like an average American; he must represent the average irascible American!’
- ( Moritz, 1988:29) pg 44 – Paul Wells

Additionally, Paul Well’s categorization of animation into orthodox, developmental and experimental (although arguable) gives my paper a structure to investigate the visual aspects of style variation and its attributes related to the presence of the artist and evolution of content.

David expressed the lack of scene setting in my introduction and i think with my new find, i may just be able to fill that gap. However, i am not taking the introduction too seriously as i am certain that it will change (hopefully not too drastically) towards the end. However, the backdrop/background and forming a table of content has been the focus of the week.

Decided to indulge in some shopping and bought myself some magazines – monster children, empty and res. Res seemed to be touching on ‘new structures for narratives’ and a glimpse of the content caught my interest. More on that when i really end up reading it. Watched a bit of Animatrix and InitialD last night.

Came across the trailer of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and i just can’t wait to get my hands on it. Its films like these that you watch trailers of and remember why you are studying animation. Absolutely gorgeous – If anyone comes across this film – do let me know how i get my hands on it !
(apparently, ghost in the shell is competing with shrek2 at the cannes this year – Animated-News Article

check out this dude – 9am today morning – he drives down down high st. in a white van holding the noisiest bird in his hand. Is this normal around here ?
Dunno about you guys – but personally i find it kinda … well…. odd!

When one hard disk fails to work – Be concernec but Thank God
(because he gave you the noodle to back everything up on another drive)

When the other hard disk crashes coincidentally the very next day – be very concerned, stop thanking god, switch of the part of your brain that tells you to think logically, go on a long vacation and start wishing that when you return everything will magically return to normailty.

And thats exactly what i should have done-
instead i found myself on Tram 6 on the way to school to seek advice from the one person who i knew would have the answers to my worries – AIM’s Superman. He doesn’t generally go by that name anymore, but the resemblance seemed so uncanny to me that i just had to put up this picture.

Let me put my worries into perspective
(if not for anybody else – atleast for my own future reference)

Mac OS X for some odd reason had suddenly decided to stop recognizing 250GB hard drive The only system that did however recognize the drive was my G3 that ran a version of MAC OS 9.2. I figured that i would use my laptop as a backup drive whilst i formatted my maxtor drive and everything would be okay. My G3 however decides to launch a pre-emptive attack on me the next day by crashing.Now i am stuck with two troublesome hard drives. One of which happened to be the only machine that could read the other.

Murphy – i really do hate you and i hope you died a gruesome death.

Anyway, all said and done – the past week has been quite a productive break from research in terms of getting my files organized and artwork in order. My 250 GB hard drive now possesses an insane number of 8 partitions (thanks to FAT32 being the only viable format for both PC’s and MAC’s – efth!) and my G3 machine now runs OS X – Panther and has 2 partitions.

After all that hardwork, i realized some retail therapy would definitely do me some good and so i went out today and bought myself one of those slick 128MB USB drives thats about the size of your little finger.To top it all off, Dana called and told me she got accepted at CalArts!! how awesome is that ? I think she would do great there – they want talented ppl and she is definitely one of the few talented designers who i would vouch for personally. Congrats Dana! am almost very jealous right now.

Decided to go on a little photo expedition on Chapel st. today and explore the graffiti’s and stencils in the alley’s … Suprisingly didn’t come across too many that impressed me a great deal and then i kinda realized that most of them were being removed by being painted over…

…this was all that was left from what otherwise used to be a very colorful wall on greveille st.

However, the sight of this car parked in front of Borders on Chapel St. and its rather conspicuous nameplate was a rather funny sight