Anyone who has ever responded to a call for papers has, at one point or another, experienced the perverse pleasure of stubbornly latching onto a topic that was not mentioned therein and running with it. It was in that contrarian…
Indexes, icons, and symbols. According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory (1974), we can identify three basic types of signs: indexes, icons, and symbols. Indexes, such as photos, videos, and films, have a factual connection with their objects since they…
When designing sound for animation, especially when you have some latitude in interpreting the visuals against your fully designed soundscape, there can be a tendency on trying to match up everything you see on screen with a direct sonic match.…
Animation always had close links with sound and music. Synchronism provides a means of rich formal experimentations. It is particularly striking in the field of the music video where the progression of the music itself often determines the progression, the…
Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized animated film that also introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, was first publicly presented on November 18, 1928, at Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City. Unlike all other iterations of Disneyland around the world,…
Most people think of each classic commercial American animation studios as having their own distinctive sonic style. Warner Brothers had the postmodern, action-driven sound developed by Carl Stalling. MGM had the classically trained Scott Bradley pumping out modern, occasionally atonal…
The practice of dubbing over European productions, as with all dubbed foreign language productions, risks a potential disconnect between the spoken language and opposing cultural references within the diegetic world, ranging from instances of untranslated writing to a specific international…
As a part of my PhD research, I recently did an interview with two young independent Slovak animators, Michaela Čopíková and Veronika Obertová, who work together as a creative duo called Ove Pictures. When I studied their webpage http://ovepictures.com/ as…
Music informs images just as images inform music. This sounds simple enough, it is a manifestation of an essential (yet often overlooked) aspect of perception, that of “sense-giving” and of “sense-receiving” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, of course, Edmund Husserl, did brilliant…
Part two Part one of this two-part post on animated sound focused on the development of animated sound as a compositional tool. The second part of this blog post will outline a second type of animated sound, as developed by…
