Reaction Shot Take2

My first attempt at the reaction shot was an emulation one of Michael Bay's "Bayhem" shots described by Tony Zhou in Every Frame a Painting. I hoped an iconic cinematic shot with an over the top sense or “epicness” would have a satirical effect, endearing the character to the audience through sympathy, similar to the affection fans of the Charles M. Schultz have for Charlie Brown.

Beyham - "use of movement composition and fast editing to create a sense of epic scale" through "layers of depth, parallax, movement, character, and environment" (Zhao)

The performative function of the reaction shot should be an alignment of the audience with the protagonist and an introduction to the goose's vulnerability through a visible awareness of his own fallibility. The intended perlocution is identification and affection through empathy (naïve demeanor under threat), but early test shots made it clear that the "Bayhem" shots were not going to be effective.

Tony Zhou describes Michal Bay's shots as having a good deal of “impact”, but more specifically there is an awe and admiration for the character who is literally and figuratively standing to face the challenging in a chaotic world. The Bayham primitive is awe generated by a metaphoric link to imagery and conceptual conjugate.

Austin categorized communicative failures, and Ronald Grimes wrote about the application of his taxonomy to ritual failure. The failure of this shot might fall under a “misinvocation” and/or a “misfire” because the act was “purported but void” due to a “misexecution” vitiating the act through flaw. But I think categorization of infelicities in narrative falls outside of Austin's scheme because the projected application of his theory is radically different from the nuances of performative narrative communication. For analysis of multiplatform narrative communication classification of primitives through their relationship to the perlocution would be the most effective tool for the deconstruction, analysis, and construction of narrative performative acts.

the reaction shot

I have been out of comission for a few days, and I am on pain medication, so forgive me if my focus drifts.

I have decided to emulate one of Michael Bay's "Bayhem" (I am going to make an orbiting/rising dolly zoom) shots for the reaction shot because they are iconic cinematic shots that give an over the top sense or epicness,
Beyham - "use of movement composition and fast editing to create a sense of epic scale"

these require "layers of depth, parallax, movement, character, and environment"
"lots of things of varying size in the same shot and move the camera to emphasize."

Every Frame a Painting season 1 episode 7 Michael Bay - What Is Bayhem? by Tony Zhou

imdb http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6167228/?ref_=ttep_ep7

direct link to the video 

The layers require a lot of objects and a detailed model, which is a lot of work, but I plan on trying the textured models in a reshoot of the "Text World" shot with a more appropriate font.

Getting unstuck

I don't really understand why I am detailing my meanderings with my theory, so the direction has been a bit chaotic. In an attempt to put words to paper, I am starting with a performative breakdown of the elements and trying to transform it into a detail of how the theory worked in practice.

The Form through the Formula

The technical, visual aesthetic, and formal linguistic (semantic/lexical/phonemic) decisions were informed by the performative function of each element and a counterpoint between the circular form of the goose's (heroe's) journey, interactive paradigm, suggestion of indexicality, character arc, and the indexical allusions of the aesthetic.

The interface changes from a book to an interactive animation at a moment in the story when the protagonist is out of his element. This is done in order to generate a disorientation for the audience and identification with the protagonist through a common experience. In order to be effective, the audience has to expect the interface to behave like a book. For this reason, several of the aesthetic decisions in the beginning of the story and the end are made in an attempt to evoke the presence of a book (my ideas of evoking presence are based on the “aura” described by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, but I do not think the actual artifact needs to be there to generate a similar sensation).

Examples of illusory imagery to imply indexicality are in the “book opening” animation, the “vine text” animation, and the sound of a page turning that accompanies the transitions between the scenes when the goose is in the human world. The performative function of the opening imagery, interaction, and animations associated with the experience of reading a book (i.e. paper texture, shading, and sound of paper) is to mislead the audience to anticipate the experience to be similar to reading a story from a book and the dramatic effect when the expectation is broken.

Locution	imagery, interaction, and animations associated with the experience of reading a book (i.e. foliage, shadow, imagery/sound of paper)
Illocution	suggest that the audience is holding a book
Perlocution	suspension of the awareness of the digital medium
Primitive	sound, interaction, and imagery with shading and dimensionality consistent with an object in the viewer’s space
Constative	this is an animation of a book
Explicit Performative Function	mislead the audience (i. e. build an expectation that the experience will be like a book in order to break the expectation for dramatic effect)

Cited:

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

More on Locution vs. Constative

The constative is a conceptual form; it is a statement without implication.

Locutionary concerns include

• spelling and grammar 
• tonal qualities of the music (i.e. that note doesn't belong there because the song is in the key of F)
• technical issues

A distinction between Constative and Locutionary is clear in the performative breakdown of the text in scenes 7 and 8.

Scene 7
Locution	Some of the words with strong syllables waddle across the screen with characteristics that suggest the words meaning. The poetic meter is anapestic with the substitution of a trochee (one long or stressed syllable followed by a short or unstressed) for an iamb (short or stressed followed by a long or unstressed), causing a speeding up (Corn 41). The poetic meter breaks in the words behind, people, goose, and tuba. So he did (soft, soft, hard) Or he tried (s, s, h) And he left (s, s, h) Geese behind (h, h, s) To show people (h, s, h, s) A goose (s, h) With a tuba (s, s, h, s)
Illocution	This is a whimsical story about a goose who thinks he can be a human
Perlocution	A light-hearted tone is established. The stumbling verse is reminiscent of a goose’s waddle, with a stumble for subtle dramatic emphasis (the word goose does not follow or fit into the poetic meter of the rest of the segment).
Primitive	Stumbling verse with a whimsical subject and variation in meter; shaping a lines rhythm so that it will support the conceptual content (i.e. interpreting visual imagery to evoke an emotional response through linking aesthetics with conceptual conjugates).
Constative	The goose is entering the human world.
Explicit Performative Function	Establish character and story as whimsical, and foreshadow character’s problems (The general performative functions of foreshadowing: An audience forgives plot turns when events have a certain degree of predictability (not completely unforeseeable, but somewhat challenging). It adds sense of a master plan to everything.)
Implication	The poetic imagery does not involve a confusion. There is a moment of interpretation, but it is not like a dolly zoom (it does not rely on tension)

Locution - form

Constative - statement without implication

Performative function - how the scene furthers the audience's understanding of the story

Perlocution -  psychological change in the audience

Corn, Alfred. The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. Port Townsend, Wash: Copper Canyon Press, 2008. Print.

Locution vs. Constative and Performative vs. Perlocution

Locution vs. Constative
Locution is the form, not a communicative statement to the audience. If someone was discussing the light and dark areas on the scene, the aesthetics, and how it guides the eye, without discussing what is going on, that would be a locutionary examination.
The constative is the element as a descriptive statement, without implication. For example, if someone sees a scene from a movie, but did not know what the movie was about or how the scene functioned to further the plot, the constative would be their description of the scene.

Performative vs. Perlocution
The Perlocution is the audience's psychological reaction to the element.
The Explicit Performative Function is the way a narrative element changes the audience's relationship with the story.

When I am making a breakdown of the illocution into the perlocution through the locution and the constative into a performative with a primitive, I find it useful to look at existing narrative forms that I find emblematic. I often look at the breakdown of the dolly-zoom shot from Vertigo, I think I find it helpful because I knew the shot before I watched the movie, so the constative form is the one I am most familiar with and distinct from my understanding of the movie.

Constative + Primitive = Performative
Locution + Primitive ≠ Performative

Emerging Technology as Blended Media

sources about the problem of new media
Joseph Gordon-Levitt states the problem with narrative on emerging media (specifically VR) at Sundance. This is really close to my statement of new media as a blend, and he starts to talk about the role of the spectator and narrative effect/function.

From this article by Jason Ferguson

https://uploadvr.com/virtual-reality-storytelling-problem-theater-will-save/

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)

Reflection/Conclusion

I find a better understanding of narrative communication through Speech Act Theory, but it is possible that others might not find it as useful.
I have unfolded one aspect of a narrative device that already existed in my work.
There is certainly a fractal order to perspectives on communicative analysis through narrative, this might be a post structuralist dilemma. There are many truths, quantization leads to an infinite series of discrete forms. But I have a way to talk about the work, and I feel comfortable and confident with the ability to talk and think about commonalities between different communicative forms, where initially I was overwhelmed. The comfort could be from a sense of ownership, discovering and mastering my own perspective; or it could be a virtue of the linguistic formula.

Hand-Made Aesthetic

I am looking for resources to cite and explain the difference between the experience of a hand held book and watching an animation. I have a sense that the hand drawn animation is closer to a book because the technique leaves artifacts that make the process transparent (i. e. people know how stop motion works, so visualizing the hand of the artist makes the product more indexical, like a hand made book).
Quotes I have and references:
 "Mary Ann Doane approaches the problem of sound from a psychoanalytic point of view and investigates the relation of sounds to the unified body reconstituted by the technology and practices of cinema. These technologies, which increasingly succeed in concealing the work of Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus, reduce the distance between the object and its representation, and this reduction of distance, and the attendant loss of “aura” first noticed by Walter Benjamin (see Section VII), is particularly evident in the case of the reproduction of sound. Doane believes that a proper understanding of the relation between sound and image is crucial to explaining the pleasure of the spectator in mainstream cinema. She analyzes such techniques as voice off, voice-over during a flashback, and the interior monologue and contrasts them with the disembodied voice-over commentary of the documentary. Its radical otherness with respect to the diegesis endows the voice-over with a certain authority. In the history of the documentary this voice has been for the most part male, and its guarantee of knowledge lies in its irreducibility to the spatio-temporal limits of the body on screen. The voice-over commentary speaks more or less directly to the spectator."

(Braudy 244)

"Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint." (Manovich 2)

 live-action films, i.e. they largely consist of unmodified photographic recordings of real events which took place in real physical space. Today, in the age of computer simulation and digital compositing, invoking this characteristic becomes crucial in defining the specificity of 20th-century cinema (2)

they relied on lens-based recordings of reality. 2

Cinema emerged out of the same impulse that engendered naturalism 2

Cinema is the art of the index 2

What he does Paragraph:

"This argument will be developed—in three stages. I will first follow a historical trajectory from 19th-century techniques for creating moving images to 20th-century cinema and animation. Next I will arrive at a definition of digital cinema by abstracting the common features and interface metaphors of a variety of computer software and hardware that are currently replacing traditional film technology. Seen together, these features and metaphors suggest a distinct logic of a digital moving image. This logic subordinates the photographic and the cinematic to the painterly and the graphic, destroying cinema’s identity as a media art. Finally, I will examine different production contexts that already use digital moving images—Hollywood films, music videos, CD-ROM games and artworks—in order to see if and how this logic has begun to manifest itself. " 3 

 CGI -meaning of these changes 

n. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting. 3

rather than the art of audio-visual narrative, or the art of a projected image, or the art of collective spectatorship, etc. 4

Not about indexicality, but surprisingly related to my thesis:
"Consider the CD-ROM Johnny Mnemonic (Sony Imagesoft, 1995). Produced to complement the fiction film of the same title, marketed not as a “game” but as an “interactive movie,” and featuring full-screen video throughout, it comes closer to cinematic realism than the previous CD-ROMs—yet it is still quite distinct from it. With all action shot against a green screen and then composited with graphic backgrounds, its visual style exists within a space between cinema and collage."  (14)

Works Cited:

Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Manovich from Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda. Post-cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. , 2016. Internet resource. <http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/POST-CINEMA_Theorizing-21st-Century-Film-PDF-13mb-Shane-Denson-Julia-Leyda-eds.pdf>

New Diagram of the Locution, Illocution, and Perlocution, through  Audience, Author, and Form.

Collage Approach

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

I am trying to organize the theoretical framework down into 3 steps/functions

Look at emerging media as a blend of existing mediums and break it into existing dialects with conventions, identify an overarching logical structure that can describe all the components, and use the logical form to analyze the structure, guide narrative support through the medium, and as a generative device to combine the dialects into idioms with virtues unique to the new blended media platform.

1. Overarching logical form to analyze structure,
   1. Speech Act Theory (J. L. Austin, Ronald Grimes, mentioned briefly in another writing on film crit which I have not found)
   2. The Heroes Journey (Joseph Campbell)
   3. The Spectator in the Text (Nick Browne)
   4. Mirror Stage (Jacques Lacan)
2. Applying the structure to guide narrative support through medium
   1. the decision to add pages to support the primitive
   2. importance of the equivocal artifact in the Pop-up page
3. Using the logical form as generative device to combine the dialects into idioms
   1. switching dialects to make the scenes performative

Speech Act Theory and Subjective Interpretation

Recent conclusions have undermined my initial criticism of other digital pop-up books, and the idea that J. L. Austin's performative formula might help categorize certain elements as detrimental to the narrative.

It was my perception that the interactive animations in some of the digital Pop-Up books do not do anything to further the story. I thought some of them looked tacked on, rather than integrated, and the resulting form is more of a toy than a book.

example:

Initially, I criticized the example though principals of Mise-en-scène (every element should give the audience new information, supporting the narration), and I hoped that an overarching linguistic form could clarify the function of cinematic, interactive media, and literary elements, discerning irrelevant and tangential Speech Acts.
After analyzing my own work through the theory, I cannot ignore the fact that the same justifications for my own use of interactive media in the form could be used to support the things I did not like.
The interactive animations in the above books give the reader an experience from the narration, and therefore could be viewed as an immersive narrative device.

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.

The Key Points of Speech Act Theory

I found one of the best summaries of the points of Speech Act Theory in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language.
visible off campus here.
Devitt, Michael, and Richard Hanley. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Pub, 2006. Internet resource.


It also mentions P.F. Strawson who I was excited to learn thought "most illocutionary acts involve not an intention to conform to an institutional convention but an intention to communicate something to an audience". Unfortunately, after further investigation , it appears his research was not going into a direction that would be useful in the creation of a logical structure based on linguistics. 

"there is no requirement to map ordinary language onto artificial logical structures, nor does that capture ordinary meaning anyway. "  
-Strawson (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strawson/#Lan)
"his slogan that ordinary language has no precise logic". 
-Strawson  (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strawson/#Lan)

Madeleine L’Engle and Children's Capacity to Handle "Darker Matters"

Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time shares many of my views on the value of unsettling elements in children's literature.

Notes

 "fear of trampling on someone else’s toes, that was, alas, the way of the world"
-Madeleine L’Engle

"point of this parable" (Illocution)
"We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them."
-Madeleine L’Engle

A good quote on censorship vs. discernment:
"The exercise of personal taste is not the same thing as imposing personal opinion."
-Madeleine L’Engle

"Fortunately, nobody ever told me that stories were untrue, or should be outgrown, and then as now they nourished me and kept me willing to ask the unanswerable questions."
-Madeleine L’Engle


Popova, Maria. "Dare to Disturb the Universe: Madeleine L’Engle on Creativity, Censorship, Writing, and the Duty of Children’s Books" Brain Pickings. n.p., Brain Pickings. n.p., Web. 19 Oct 2015. Web. 08 Aug 2016. https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/10/dare-to-be-creative-madeleine-l-engle/
(The Publication date is unlisted, but the web address suggests either April the 10th 2014 or October the 4th 2014)

Anton Ego Montage from Ratatouille and the Acceptance Sequence

I am having trouble getting what I want from the climax/resolution sequence.

A sequence with a similar interaction is the Anton Ego paradigm shift from Ratatouille.

The audience's perception of the character changes completely, in line with the characters paradigm shift.

Locution: Anton's eyes open wide, pupils enlarge; Dolly-zoom; Montage of Anton as a child, comforted by mother, eating ratatouille; Dolly zoom, cut to a shot of Anton dropping pen; close up of the pen; reaction shot of Anton in awe

Illocution: Anton is in awe of how powerfully the tasting experience reminds him of the comfort he got from his mother through her ratatouille, 

Perlocution: The audience identifies with the Antagonist, the power of the shift in perceptions is equated to the power of the emotional impact of the dish being served

Primitive: Build the character up as a villain then show him as vulnerable

Performative Function of the Animated Typography

After evaluating this shot in the light of J. L. Austin's paradigm, I think I will have to make all the text construct through animation... Originally I was only animating the first letter, but it occurred to me that the audience discovering the words as the goose is discovering the tuba, is a parallel experience. Additionally, it is a positive emotional experience, fundamentally different from the disturbing perlocution I have been evoking.

Locution:
Text describing the goose finding the tube

Illocution:
The goose found something shiny, something he likes, something he naively wants to be

Perlocution:
The audience is decyphering the words through the delay of the animated typographic construction, an experience parallel with the character's serendipitous discovery. At this point the audience and the goose should both feel a parallel familiar attraction, but the foreshadowing implied through "there was no one who said that he couldn't" suggests the naivety.

Primitive:
Disorientation, Context

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

Poststructuralism vs Uncertainty???

The performative function of every element of a scene could be broken down into locution, illocution, and perlocution and analyzed through the performative formula (i.e. every line of text, piece of wardrobe, set element, camera angle, character’s form, the lighting, and so on). At this point I think it would be most productive to look at each scene, and analyze the components as necessary. 

Poststructural slippage between signifier and signified pokes holes in the concept of 

Once again I am butting heads with Poststructuralism...
I think there might be an analytical in Heisenberg...

When physicists ran into a dual meaning problem, they didn't abandon structure, attempts at reductivity, and attempts at objectivity; they mapped the likelihood of the variable.
In the end everything is uncertain; Decartes, the quantum level, and semantics. Science is driven by imperfect people, and it's successes are judged by imperfect people, but that is not a reason to abandon efforts toward progress.

New Terminology
Metafunctions are systemic clusters; that is, they are groups of semantic systems that make meanings of a related kind. The three metafunctions are mapped onto the structure of the clause. For this reason, systemic linguists analyse a clause from three perspectives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafunction


P.S. The shot at the end of the Ted Talk is an interesting example of one of the Transforming Dramatic Performative Formulas I am working on. In this case, there is no narrative, so it it doesn't serve to align the audience with a protagonist. I am not sure what to make of it...