Draft Literature Review

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The Point of a Story in Good and Poor Animation Staging

This literature review describes the animation methodologies behind staging principles, and the ways in which this translates the scene to the audience. ‘Staging is how ideas are organised within a scene’. Location and cinematography techniques with purpose behind the staging. That determines how performance space is translated and presented to the audience. A clear organisation of visual elements within a scene is essential to drawing the audience’s attention to necessary narrative aspects.

However, there are many ways you can produce bad staging without knowing it, things to avoid. The extent that the original design of the animation can be changed due to bad staging (among other aspects of the animation) is interesting in itself. The resulting effect may change not in a negative way sometimes. Other times it is subtly disastrous for the translation of narrative information to the audience. Fundamentally, the scene relies on good staging for the audience to discern the meaning of the actions.

The fundamentals of staging are direction of the audience’s eye, design of composition, exaggeration of theme and story, twinning and emotional punctuation. Interpretation for the staging principle can be narrowed down to readability, personality, and mood. Each of these are contributing factors, elements that add or that you should avoid when designing the scene.

There are certain theoretical methodologies in the fundamentals of creating good staging that determines how the story is portrayed. Considering this, the direction of posing, strategies of composition and expression of actions have functionality to determine the way that the scene is presented to the audience.

I wish to discern through extensive research the extends of the meaning good and poor staging, and the vast varieties of resulting affects this has on the change of perspective of the scene.

Bibliography

(CG_TV, 2021)

CG_TV, 2021. Animation Education: The Staging Principle of Animation. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeiJfbSJUQ8> [Accessed 27 February 2022].

(Clark, 2003)

Clark, K., 2003. ‘Inspired 3D Character Animation’: Posing and Staging. [online] Animation World Network. Available at: <https://www.awn.com/vfxworld/inspired-3d-character-animation-posing-and-staging> [Accessed 24 February 2022].

Cutting, J.E. Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies. Psychon Bull Rev 23, 1713–1743 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1051-4

Schmid, W. (2010). Narratology: An introduction (A. Starritt, Trans.). Berlin: De Gruyter.

(Animation Principles: Staging, 2017)

Wave Motion Cannon. 2017. Animation Principles: Staging. [online] Available at: <https://wavemotioncannon.com/2017/05/27/animation-principles-staging/> [Accessed 29 February 2022].