Wednesday, December 5, 2012

The Hiatus & Silent Pioneers

Well, I was hoping that it wouldn't come to this, but it seems that I would have to go on hiatus with my reviews. As you know I write my reviews in advance and try to maintain a queue of reviews set to go up every Wednesday. Unfortunately, I have been doing a lot of traveling to interviews and exams and the like, and I just haven't found the time to write any of my reviews. And now my queue is down to zero, and I am just getting started in my travels. So yes, I will be taking a break from posting reviews. Hopefully I can complete all of the traveling I have to do for interviews and still have time to build up a new queue of reviews during this time, and start back up around when the new set of nominees are announced on January 10.

But would this mean that this blog will lie dormant for a month? Absolutely not! As I mentioned in the 1976 review, I have been taking an online course on the History of Animation, mostly in hopes of getting a chance to see Dedalo. That turned out to be a bust, but I did get a good lesson on animation history that goes beyond the Oscar nominated films that I liked to watch, covering the earliest examples of animation to historical pieces of animation in foreign countries. It was an interesting course, made even more so since the professor is somebody who actually worked in the industry. His name appears in the credits for the Oscar winning Geri's Game, selected as my favorite Oscar nominated short film from 1992-2001. Anyways, the course is split up into modules, and most of the course is done with online discussions about the module, of which one of the questions is always "What is the most successful film in this module?" Being unnecessarily verbose when it comes to writing, I wrote research paper-length responses for these discussion questions. I thought it would be a shame to have these discussion topics fall into oblivion in the internet servers at the Academy of Art University, so I figured why not let them fall into oblivion in the internet servers of Blogger. Since the discussion topics have already been written, I figure I can update them every Wednesday and Saturday. That way it would take us through the Oscar nomination announcement.

We might as well start off right now with Module 1: Silent Pioneers. This module explored the beginnings of hand drawn animation, from the early 20th century through the mid-1920s. (Stop motion animation has its own module.)

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