Semiotics

This lecture covers how meaning is shaped from signs and introduces us to the keywords often used to describe signs, such as signifiers, signified, denotation and connotation. Ferdinand de Saussure, who is a Swiss linguist, described making signs as looking for hidden pattern that affect the unconsciousness of the audience. In semiotics, there is no logical relationship between the signifier (sound image) and the signified (mental concept) since it is decided by culture. In film and animation, this communication system comes in the form of formulaic plot of narratives with respect to the genre codes and framing conventions. As we acknowledge this system, we will be constantly judging these cultural artefacts according to a fixed standard derived from shared knowledge, and deem anything else that deviates from this standard as idiosyncratic. As compared to the modernists, we live in a society that can better appreciate idiosyncrasies, such that it encourages animators to explore the possibilities of animation as a medium of art. For example, a group of animators from a collective, and made an animated film from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, a compilation of Gibran's prose poetry essays. The animation itself is a narration with compilation of segments uniquely made by each artists based on their own interpretation of the literary work.

The second half of the lecture covers myths and how the meanings of sign shifts according to arbitrary connotation.'The myths which suffuse our lives are insidious, precisely because they appear so natural' (Barthes, 1984). There were instances in which myths have disguised the history and validating cultural attitude. This enables the artists to trigger the conscious and the unconscious mind of their audience, and that's why works of art are powerful tool to introduce ideas to the masses.