This unit, Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language, helped me understand how visual language supports storytelling. Across weekly lectures and tutorials, I learned narrative structure, film analysis, and academic research skills, including literature review and Harvard referencing. My critical report explores how lighting shapes Cheng Dieyi’s character development in Farewell My Concubine (1993). […]
Category: Design for Animation, Narrative Structures and Film Language
This week I had a tutorial with Nigel about my literature review and report structure. He said my work looks pretty good and I am in a good position to finish it. I already changed my structure from “Scene 1 / Scene 2” to “Chapter 1 / Chapter 2”, and he think this is more […]
This week I had a tutorial about my literature review and my report structure. The tutor said my literature review is a good start. I have enough key theories for my topic, so I don’t need to change the whole direction. The tutor also told me I should not just write the report as “Scene […]
This week’s lecture focused on academic referencing and citation, with particular attention to Harvard referencing conventions. The session made it clear that referencing is not only about avoiding plagiarism, but about using sources to support and strengthen an argument. One key idea from the lecture was that sources should be integrated into writing in a […]
This week focused on understanding what a literature review is and how it functions within academic research. Rather than being a summary of existing texts, the lecture emphasised that a literature review is a critical process of identifying, comparing, and organising key ideas within a research field. One important point from the session was that […]
This week focused on narrative structure and character development, and how stories create meaning through structure, performance, and film language. The lecture introduced different storytelling models, such as the three-act structure and five-act structure, which are commonly used in films, animation, and literature. A key idea from this week was that narrative is not only […]
This week focused on understanding animation in relation to art history, cinema, and visual language. The lecture introduced how animation developed alongside major social, political, and artistic changes, rather than existing only as entertainment or commercial media. We learned that early animation was strongly connected to modernist and avant-garde movements. Artists and filmmakers explored animation […]
Today’s tutorial clarified that my topic—lighting and character across animation, film and games—was too broad for a 1,500-word critical report. The key is to focus on character portrayal and ground the argument in specific scenes rather than general statements. Nigel’s Feedback Tighten the scope. 1,500 words won’t cover “film + games + animation”. Pick one […]
Why I’m doing this While testing lighting in Unreal Engine, I noticed a “small tweak, big change” effect: tiny shifts in direction, intensity, colour temperature or contrast could flip a scene’s mood and push a character from approachable to distant, from trustworthy to threatening. I stopped thinking of lighting as just “making things visible” and […]
Mise-en-Scène Mise-en-scène comes from French and means “put in the scene.” It first appeared in stage plays. In film, it means everything that is placed in front of the camera. The director can use the camera position, lens, lighting, and set design to control the space, distance, and feeling of the scene. These choices help […]