Role of the Spectator as a Narrative Device

When the audience reads a book or watches a movie, the events are read from the perspective of an omniscient spectator (see Professor Nick Browne's The Spectator in the Text). In interactive media the viewer is a participant.
The game mentioned below plays with this role for narrative effect.

The Stanley Parable (meta Aesthetic game)

Collage Approach

The text in this scene was made by cutting and pasting pieces from other texts to stitch together a narrative.

Illocution, Perlocution, and Primitive for the Acceptance Chapter

Illocution: Tuba-Goose is not a goofy comedy or a fairy tale, it is a metaphor for the dissonance one feels when they realize their limitation through failure to attain a dream. It is a personal message to the adults to remember the moment when you realized that you could not be anything, if you try hard enough, and a foreshadowing to the child audience.

Primitive: I want the story to transition from a tongue and cheek story about a goofy character into an embarrassing failure in the real world. The primitive I want to incorporate is the uneasy feeling the audience feels watching someone bomb on a stage, evoking the embarrassment someone feels watching a performer try to do something that they are unwilling to accept that they do not have a skill for.

Something Big from Found Footage Festival on Vimeo.

Perlocution: The audience's embarrassment turns to sympathy and a recognition of the humanity of the goose when he that he has failed (i. e. identification with the protagonist).

I planned to shoot ComFest, and local shows for looking for footage of an uncomfortably bad public performance in which to add the Goose. I have some performances that are pretty awkward and mortifying, but what I have needs audio to work, and I can't think of a way to integrate it into the form.

Metafiction

Interacting with the audience might be the direction for the next act.

B. J. Novak’s ‘Book With No Pictures’ and More
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/b-j-novaks-book-with-no-pictures-and-more.html?_r=0


Metafiction is a literary device used self-consciously and systematically to draw attention to a work's status as an artifact. It poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational theatre, which does not let the audience forget it is viewing a play; metafiction forces readers to be aware that they are reading a fictional work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction


Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature.^[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature

Sokumenzu Generator (Side-view Generator)

http://en.genzu.net/sokumen/?n=Tuba
A method of manipulating/integrating 3D interactive media and text.

Kinetic Typography Tutorial

Kinetic Typography

Kinetic Typography Channel is all about moving text


Moonrise Kingdom Kinetic Typography. from ANALOG EIGHT on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/channels/kinetictypography

The Power of Joseph Campbell

My approach is based on the premise that resonance is a pattern that can be mapped reproduced. I am not suggesting quality can be evaluated or engineered with a formula like Komar and Melamid, but forms like the hero's journey and characteristics of protagonist vs. antagonist reoccur and can be as a reference to analyze and inform the creation of narrative work.
Joseph Campbell's theories were used by George Lucas to add a legendary epic quality to Star Wars, and I hope that analysis of similarities across mediums can be used to enhance and preserve aspects in a mixed medium. My project is testing this idea with a user driven animation that is attempting to preserve the intimate charm of a book while communicating in a way unique to the new form.

Motion Capture vs Motion Poem

The Motion Capture for the words in the street shot did not turn out as well as I hoped. Especially when you put it next to a motion poem like this:

I kind of envy the flow and camera freedom.

I was thinking something that was closer to the goose's feet might speed up the tempo. I think there is some sort of mental POV shot (Barsam 100) like this that is used to transition from one environment to another, but I cannot find a reference.

Anapestic Tetrameter

Understanding Metre with Dr Seuss

four rhythmic units of unstressed + unstressed +stressed sometimes referred to as a "reverse dactyl") in a line 
https://badtoverseblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/understanding-metre-with-dr-seuss/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapestic_tetrameter

A Couple More Words

Butcher shop interior (text world shot?)
down sidewalks
through doors
up aisles,
to places where people go
(Dolly zoom shot)
the things he expected to see
is not what people do

Chompskybot

http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl


Possibly brilliant... Possibly terrifying, because I am starting to sound like this.

The Big Idea (as of 2 am Tuesday 01/19/16)

The Big Idea (subject to change without notice)

This semester I am focused on creating a form that blends cinematic animation, interactive media, and literature in a complimentary way. The shot that I am working on now is the interior of the building Tuba-Goose entered last semester. I am changing the location to a butcher shop because it adds to the dramatic effect, and horror films have a lot of paradigmatic camera and lighting techniques that would be interesting to apply to another medium. I thought it would be complimentary mix of media to make the interior all narrative text (people , shelves, everything except the goose would be extruded polygonal text), use motion capture to animate the people, and use a dolly zoom for a shot where the goose sees the butcher doing what butchers do.

I am not sure how I will texture everything or how I will organize the words so they function as characters and are readable as text, but I think motion capture will add an inherently human quality to the movement that should give me more freedom to deviate from anthropomorphic shapes while relaying the intended actions. I am hoping that when I have the movement for the scene, I will be able to create a model based on the text and the key frames that becomes reveals itself to the reader in a way that alludes to the internal dialogue of the goose when he realizes what is going on in the butcher shop (I want the audience to be thinking "Is that a person chopping off the head of... YES IT IS!" in parallel to the character's realization). This shot does not do much to exploit interactive media, but I am worried compounding too many distracting elements (e.g. putting a tilt interaction, prompting an expand gesture on the touch screen, or something of that nature) would drown the humble, quiet nature of a book.

Junk

The narrator and the cinematographer share the stage in this animation in a way that I really like. The tone is also similar to what I would like to achieve.
I think it is dactylic tetrameter.
Dactil (Stressed + Unstressed + Unstressed) Tetrameter (four groups)
But it ends in an iamb (a short syllable followed by a long syllable)

It might be anapestic tetrameter.

Changing the CVS to a Butcher Shop

It occurred to me that the shot where he gets kicked out of the store, would work much better it it were a butcher shop. So I am looking for images, and locations.

The red and white awning is iconic

I like the checkered floor and the font

I might be able to get away with adding a sign, and changing the stuff in the window (the interior is was all done in Maya anyway, so it wouldn't be that hard).

I like the idea of meat hanging in the window that is not visible from Tuba-Goose's approach, but visible to the audience

Signs

Maybe a close up of the door as it closes behind him with the words "Deli and Butcher Shop"

I might take a video inside a butcher shop for reference or to use as a texture

Intro?

Once upon a time there was probably a goose
there were probably lots of geese,
and this goose was no exception
but he didn't know that,
because he was just a goose

A human thing was around,
and that's what he thought he would be,
because there was no one said who said that he couldn't

So he did, or he tried, and he left geese behind
to show people a goose with a tuba*

(it was actually a sousaphone, but geese don't know that)

Simple Animations That Evoke Strong Emotion

I thought I would put together a list of animations that evoke an emotion similar to the one I am trying to capture.

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2014/12/31/yearbook/

https://vimeo.com/4262780

Chased Out with a Broom

The reflections are a bit tricky. I want the tuba to reflect the environment, but not the windows... But I want the windows to reflect the tuba, with the environment...
I have a lot of render layers to deal with this problem...

I used a separate mesh for the fabric collision and it appears to be blocking the shadow of the words on the ground except in the places where the ground is higher than the bounce plane...

Re-framing the role of Myth (Narrative?)

When Andy Warhol created "Brillo Boxes" he was making a satirical statement. By using techniques that required a mastery of printmaking, the time, and the effort of a hand crafted work of art to make something that was indistinguishable from a stack of common Brillo Pads boxes, Warhol challenged definitions and made an argument about the social qualifications for good art. The comment, though clever when Warhol made it, would not be accepted in the same form again. The Heroes' Journey has been mapped, structured into formula, and it continues to emerge. There are fundamental differences between the anti-fairy-tale I am trying to tell and The Heroes' Journey. When I signed up for the class, I hoped I would find an corresponding pattern for ironic children's stories, and recreate the circumstances that lead George Lucas to the creation of Star Wars. Mythologist and philosopher Leszek Kołakowski was of the belief that myth could not be consciously created because the knowledge of its profane origins would undermine the conditional perception as aethereal. The analogous elements I am coming to determine are between the hubris in an attempt to reproduce a phenomenon instead of culturing an original, and the inherent flaw in consciously constructing your own god.
I think an approach that would be more conducive to successful creation in my situation would be the study myth as a frame of reference rather than a recipe. For my final paper in Myth and Religion, I am going to try to find research studies on Volksgemeinschaft and the self esteem movement to contrast and compare as functional mythologies in the sense that both are social constructs that impart the culture's instruction onto its participants about "what is and is not a value" (Kolakowski 25).

Key thinkers in the self esteem movement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Branden

Volksgemeinschaft:
I need to find this author

Looking at Character Archetypes (Narrative/Social Context)

Looking at Character Archetypes
http://www.soulcraft.co/essays/the_12_common_archetypes.html
http://www.uiltexas.org/files/capitalconference/Twelve_Character_Archetypes.pdf