COP3 Week 1: Initial Idea Presentation - Play Acting

George Orwell's 'Down and Out' has inspired me to explore animated performance. The novel itself is is an autobiography of Orwell's youth, in which he spent living in poverty, working rough jobs and encounters with different kinds of personalities who are living in more or less the same situation as him. Having experienced living in poverty, Orwell approached the subject in a very natural way and it struck me that he does not give a stereotypical image of tramps but crafted complex characters from their behaviour and differing views on life formed through experiences. I realised the transition between one instance to another is a process that leads to growth or decay of a certain human being - the reflective consequences of action. 

In animated feature films, the running time prompts the production team to be more pragmatic with the narrative, hence many characters are made different from the rest of the crowd. Caricature plays a huge part in film characters as it helps to isolate the main characters and narrows down the scope of the narrative. The peculiarities in the designs of the main characters helps to sets the right mood to excite the audience about the journey that awaits. Therefore, character design is a potential theme that I'll delve into for the extended essay.

As I did more research I think character design is not what I should be focusing on because I think that world building is more significant than just character design, which leads me into a more generic topic of production design. I am particularly interested in auteur filmmakers such as Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson and David Lynch who conveys emotion through a combination of well designed premise, performance and narrative.

Play acting is another thing that I am interested in after doing more in depth research of character design. Play acting means crossing the line between everyday reality and some invented reality, like a mime performance. Chaplin is a respectable name from the silent comedy golden era because he uses caricature-like gestures to convey different emotions and creates invented reality in the audience's mind through such strong characterisation. Another example of caricature artist that I want to explore is Hokusai as he used to do performance sketches when he was an apprentice and I am interested in the dynamics in the still image that he creates through the thickness of lines and definition forms that helps to convey fluidity in his drawings.