More essay titles

Mario

Why certain game structures are used over and over again

Christopher Booker in his book The Seven Basic Plots suggests that all our stories are variations on the following themes; Overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth. Booker sets out at the beginning of the ‘Overcoming the monster’ chapter to make a clear comparison between the oldest story we have, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and a story filmed 5000 years later Dr No. This is booker’s description of this James bond movie vehicle.
“The Western world falls under the shadow of this great and mysterious evil. The source of the threat is traced to a monstrous figure….who lives in an underground cavern on a remote island. The hero James Bond, goes to the armourer who equips him with special weapons. He sets out on a long and hazardous journey to Dr Nos distant lair, where he finally comes face to face with the monster.” (Booker, 2004)
From Booker’s description we can see that Dr No follows exactly the same formula as the Epic of Gilgamesh. These deep seated mythic stories are compelling, and lie behind many comic book, film and game narratives.
However gameplay or “how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes." (Rouse 2001, xviii) is also vital and can be seen as independent of graphics or narrative. This can be linked to the human need to play games as an essential element of what it is to be human. (See Huizinga’s Homo Ludens)
The perfect game could therefore be one that followed a basic mythic storyline, engaged the player in a subtle enough manner to ensure that ‘life type’ choices were constantly being made within a context of play that supported a willing suspension of disbelief.

Bibliography
Half-Real: A Dictionary of Video Game Theory. http://www.half-real.net/dictionary/#game. (Accessed December 17, 2010.)
Aarseth, Espen. "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation". In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 45-69. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
Frasca, Gonzalo. "Ludology meets Narratology: Similitude and differences between (video)games and narrative." 1999. http://www.ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950.
Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.
Rouse, Richard. Game Design: Theory & Practice. Plano, Texas: Wordware, 2001.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman,. Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
Booker, C (2004) The Seven Basic Plots London: Continuum

The introduction to an essay based on this could be:
The integration of game and narrative lies at the centre of games design and in order to achieve this certain game structures are used over and over again. This essay seeks to examine the key elements to go into the most successful games and to propose reasons for why these elements will remain constants no matter how technology develops.

Starting an essay

It was good to hear that all of you had ideas as to what you could write about. Not just because it means that I can expect a range of interesting essays but also as course development.
Communication theory implies learning from the receiver by using feedback mechanisms. Your feedback is that the content of the lectures and seminars so far doesn’t yet match up with your particular interests. In some cases there are overlaps, but in others the content is still outside of the theories so far introduced. There is nothing wrong with this and it partly reflects our age differences and backgrounds. As a way of addressing the issue what I’m therefore going to do is develop the next series of blog posts as responses to the issues and areas of interest that students as a group are interested in.
Please prompt me to reflect on your own interests, in the meantime I shall start with the themes discussed as I remember them.



The Superhero
The classic text on Superman is that written by Umberto Eco.
Eco points to Superman’s mythic status as being something that relates back to the need we have to relate to beings like gods, and he sees the split personality of Superman/Clark Kent in particular as being important as this signifies something new. It is a way of illustrating how humans can be ‘normal’ but at the same time they can internally mythologize their lives, the drama of the Greek Gods being played out with a very human dimension.
The comic format also fascinates Eco. In particular he is interested in "retroactive continuity" This is the ability of comic book stories to keep going back and adding aspects of the story. For instance, every time a new Superman film comes out his birth story will be re-visited and on each re-telling something new will emerge that wasn’t there before.
Bibliography
The suggestions below could be used to start a literature search, see the handout on essay writing that explains how to do this.

The in-depth critical theory text is:
Eco, U (1972) The Myth of Superman Diacritics. Vol. 2, No. 1. (Spring), 14-22.
Find an on-line copy of Eco’s text here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/11466209/Eco-Superman
Find a commentary on the text here: http://staticred.net/four-colour/archives/002653.html
The Eco text is the one that you ought to read as it links different theories together and could be the text that in particular connects with what we have been looking at during seminars.
An easy to read short history is Superman: A Mythical American by Michael A Rizzotti
Available at: http://netage.org/2010/03/01/superman-a-mythical-american-2/
The name Superman comes from Frederich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”
For initial thoughts on psychology of superheroes: http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/35714
The classic texts are:

Rosenburg, R (2008) Psychology of Superheroes, The: An Unauthorized Exploration London: Ben Bella

Morris, M & Morris, T (2006) Superheroes and Philosophy New York: Open Court
Kaveney, R (2007) Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films London: Tauris
White, M. D. (2008) Batman and the Philosophy of the Dark Knight London: Wiley
Irwin, W & Housel, R (2009) X-Men and Philosophy: Astonishing Insight and Uncanny Argument in the Mutant X-Verse London: Wiley

Also see: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11472706245

So how would you start the essay?
Something like this:
The superhero has been part of popular culture since the mid 1930s. However the last decade has seen a proliferation of film/comic crossovers that suggests that their interest stems from something much deeper rooted than that of children’s entertainment. This essay seeks to explore the ways in which the role of superheroes within contemporary culture can be understood. It will use sociological, psychological and philosophical methodologies in order to develop a holistic understanding of the issues uncovered.


John Martin The Great Day of His Wrath 1851-3

The Sublime, the Liminal and moments of Epiphany.

These subjects came up as a consequence of a conversation around why certain images hold our attention in such a powerful way that they seem to take us beyond our everyday experience and provide an entry into higher states of consciousness.
In order to understand how this might be theorised and how an understanding of this could lead to a method for elevating everyday experiences or images towards this state, three separate areas of theory can be combined. The sublime, liminality and the concept of a moment of epiphany.
Definitions.
In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis "sloping up to the lintel, uplifted, high, lofty, elevated, exalted") is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic.
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes.
An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, "manifestation, striking appearance") is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.
There are several definitions of the sublime but the writings of Burke in particular point to the fact that the sublime can be discussed in terms of its effects upon the perceiver. This was an important change in how aesthetics were thought of since the reactions of the perceiver became, for the first time, more important than the formal qualities of the object. However the ability to stand back from this was perhaps more clearly developed by Kant in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime who termed the phrase, “disinterested interest”. Ruskin, who discusses the sublime within the context of his own 19th century culture, proposed that nature worship, delight in the picturesque etc. all derive from urbanization. I. e. when people find themselves living in cities and cut off from nature they began to romanticise it. However the main pictorial thread for the sublime was developed by John Martin, his paintings were and still are powerful indicators of what we regard as sublime visions.
The concept of liminality can be used to explore the state between things. For instance the 'trickster (a type of shaman), stands in the liminality between the sacred realm and the profane. In religion it is when the individual experiences the revelation of sacred knowledge where God imparts his knowledge to ordinary humans.
James Joyce coined the term ‘epiphany’ to describe a moment of intense insight, which briefly illuminates the whole of existence. His novel Ulysses which is set in one day in Dublin, is meant to evoke the levels of myth within Homer's Odyssey.
Bibliography
Turner, V (1967) Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage, in The Forest of Symbols New York: Cornell University
Turner, V (1975) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors London: Cornell University
Homas, P (1995) Jung in Context London: University of Chicago Press
Douglas, M (1984) Implicit Meanings London: Routledge
Joyce, J (1922) Ulysses London: Penguin
Shaw, P (2006) The Sublime London: Routledge
The Bible (Acts 9:1-31)

So how would you start the essay?
Certain images hold our attention in such a powerful way that they seem to take us beyond our everyday experience and provide an entry into higher states of consciousness. This essay will explore the possible theoretical interpretations of this situation and will in particular seek to provide an understanding of how an awareness of this could lead to a method for elevating or enlightening our experiences of everyday images. In order to research these issues three separate areas of theory will be investigated; the sublime, liminality and the concept of a moment of epiphany.


Christopher Nolan’s Inception

Writing about an individual film is fine as long as the writer can reference a wider set of theories or can open out comparisons with other films. Christopher Nolan’s Inception, is a film set in a world where technology exists that can enter the human mind through dream invasion. Nolan builds a construct and then plays within that construct in order to interrogate narrative, visual symbolic codes, and the rules and limitations of physical laws. The dreams used in the film are recreations of familiar conventions, from recognisable urban landscapes to car chases and gunfights: these could be read as documentary elements inserted into a genre (science fiction or action adventure) film. The people invading the subconscious of the target mind keep up the appearance of reality, of verisimilitude, to keep the dreamer unaware of the dream. This echoes the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ or "willing suspension of disbelief" which is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literature. It was first used in English by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative. The film also references the craft of film making itself. Ariadne the architect is set design, Arthur functions as a producer, Eames is their star (taking on other identities beyond his own) and Yusuf the projectionist, providing the venue for the dream movie to occur.
Cinema has often been compared to dreams. It is interesting to compare Inception with Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) which has a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí.
The area of theory that could be used of course is psychoanalysis. Read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/jun/17/features.review this review picks out the importance of Freud’s ideas on how we can read cinema. “The birth of cinema offered a collective sense of what Freud called the uncanny: the images on screen were both familiar and somehow strange, alive and yet lifeless, real but illusory.”
From Wikipedia: In a film theory context, the term oneiric ("pertaining to dream") refers to the depiction of dream-like states in films, or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state to analyze a film. The connection between dreams and films has been long established; "The dream factory" “...has become a household expression for the film industry”. The dream metaphor for film viewing is “one of the most persistent metaphors in both classical and modern film theory”, and it is used by film theorists using Freudian, non-Freudian, and semiotic analytical frameworks.

Bibliography
Van Sijll, J. (2005) Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know London: Michael Wiese
Botz-Bornstein, T (2008) Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai London: Lexington
Freud, S. (1997) The Interpretation of Dreams London: Wordsworth
Jung, C. G. (1995) Memories, Dreams, Reflections London: Fontana

Hobson, J. A. (1980) Film and the Physiology of Dreaming Sleep: The Brain as a Camera-Projector. Dreamworks 1(1):9–25.

So how would you start the essay?
Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010) can be used to illustrate a range of approaches to thinking about the interrelationship between reality and fiction. In particular the relationship the cinema has with its own construction and the notion of the dream factory. This essay will attempt to reveal how the film Inception operates as a structure within which the very nature of the cinematic experience is conceptualised. This will include a discussion of genre, the importance of the willing suspension of disbelief and the relationship between film and psychoanalysis.




The B Movie
The continuing interest in B Movies suggests that they hold a fascination for us beyond the fact that they are so bad they are funny. B movies can be seen as a type of kitsch and as such their reuse within popular culture could be read as a typically post-modernist gesture. Baudrillard states, "To the aesthetics of beauty and originality, kitsch opposes its aesthetics of simulation”
Wikipedia definition: Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal. Kitsch also refers to the types of art that are aesthetically deficient (whether or not being sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative) and that make creative gestures which merely imitate the superficial appearances of art through repeated conventions and formulae. Excessive sentimentality often is associated with the term.
The B movie can also be examined from the point of view of the uncanny, the other, the abject and as a particular reading of the sublime.
The Uncanny is a Freudian concept where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the person who experiences the sensation due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. The ‘monster’ is not really there, this isn’t really happening to me etc. This helps rationalise why when we follow a horror film we accept the plight of the characters. We have all been there before and experienced the way logic goes out the window when we are faced with these situations.
The Abject: According to Kristeva, the abject is situated outside the symbolic order. Being forced to face the abject is an inherently traumatic experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely be repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world. The body when alive can be seen as a subject, but once dead becomes an object. This repulsion from death, excrement and rot is itself the start of a new symbolic order and the B movie fascination with these areas of experience is perhaps part of the reason for their continuing popularity.
The Other has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude 'Others' whom they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society. The concept of 'otherness' is also integral to the comprehending of a person, as people construct roles for themselves in relation to an 'other' as part of a process of reaction that is not necessarily related to stigmatization or condemnation. It often involves the demonization and dehumanization of groups so could be used to think about those large crowds of zombies B movies can be sometimes peopled with.
You could compare many B movies with ‘The Other’ a 1972 psychological horror film directed by Robert Mulligan.
The Sublime: Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused.” While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction. Therefore one aspect of the sublime is the possibility of facing death without having to actually experience it. E.g. in a horror movie.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, J (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage
Burke, E (2010) A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful London: BiblioBazaar
Calinescu, M (1987) Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism London: Duke
Creed, B. (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York, Routledge.
Creed, B. (1990). "Review Article: Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie." Screen 31.2: 236-42.
Jancovich, M. (1992). Horror. London, B.T. Batsford, Ltd.
Neale, S. (1980). Genre. London, BFI.
Tudor, A. (1997). "Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre." Cultural Studies 11.3: 443-63.
Royle, N (2003) The Uncanny: An Introduction Manchester: MUP
There are chapters on the death drive, deja-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness", the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness.
Douglas, M (2002) Purity and Danger London: Routledge
Kristeva, J (1984) The Powers of Horror London: Columbia

So how would you start the essay?
The continuing interest in B Movies suggests that they hold a fascination for us beyond the fact that they are so bad they are funny. This essay intends to investigate the reasons why they still have this fascination for us and sets out to examine this from a psychoanalytical perspective and as an aspect of post-modernism.




Zen and film
The experience of film has often been cited as being something that equates to a religious experience and it has been argued that popular film has become a significant venue for meaning-making in modern society. (Niemi, 2003) Like religion, film provides models for understanding and behaving within the social world, it also acts to reinforce this content through emotional resonance. Film could therefore be seen as presenting an alternative mechanism for the transmission and processing of “religious” ideas and ideals.
One way of interpreting the film Fight Club (1999) is to see it as a story of a man’s spiritual journey and the need to break his cycle of suffering and achieve enlightenment. This narrative sits at the core of many religions but there are aspects of the film that indicate that it is Zen Buddhism in particular that we should examine if we are to reach an in depth understanding of the film’s interpretation. However within a Western culture, images of bleeding half naked men are hard to separate from those of Christ crucified, hence the gospel according to Fight Club.

Bibliography
Jones, C. B. (200) Zen and the Art of Being Jedi http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/sf_and_society/40320 accessed on 16. 12. 10
Reed, C (2007) Fight Club: An Exploration of Buddhism Journal of Religion and Film Vol. 11, No. 2 October
Niemi, A (2003) Film as religious experience: Myths and models in mass entertainment Critical Review, Volume 15, Issue 3 & 4 , pages 435 - 446
Yool, George R. 1992, April. “Glossary of Zen and Buddhism: An Introduction to Zen Thought.” 12 Oct. 2005. 12.
Herrigel, E (1971) Feb. Zen in the Art of Archery. New York: Vintage Books. 11.
Mccarty, Pat. 2005, Aug. “Experts explain how we are ‘One’ in film.” The Seattle Times, Religion Section, B5.

So how would you start the essay?
The experience of film has often been cited as being something that equates to a religious experience and it has been argued that popular film has become a significant venue for meaning-making in modern society. (Niemi, 2003) Like religion, film provides models for understanding and behaving within the social world, it also acts to reinforce this content through emotional resonance. Film could therefore be seen as presenting an alternative mechanism for the transmission and processing of “religious” ideas and ideals. This essay seeks to examine the interrelationship between film and religious experiences, in particular it will highlight the relationships and similarities between the venues for both (the dark interiors of temples, churches, caves and cinemas) and the potential for individual transformation through spiritual journey narratives in film.

Look out for further blog posts, but do remember to remind me of your possible essay titles/areas of interest.

DFGA Level 5 Assessed Tasks for the Blog

At the end of the session I still wasnt clear whether everyone understood what was needed for the assessment. Is this clear?

Assessed tasks that should be on your blog by the end of the year.
1. A statement as to what you are interested in. (This is not marked, but was a task that was designed to get you to set up an area of your blog labelled Contextual Studies Level 2, to which all posts tagged with that name could go to).
2. A scanned in image of an annotated text. (This was to be taken from the Film Theory text posted to Moodle)We worked through the 'Cinema as Door' section during class.
3. Notes from seminars. If you didn’t attend seminars you can of course go to the contextual studies area of your DFGA Moodle and look for the lectures and other supporting information and texts. The more notes you have the better the mark.
4. A short review of a film or a film’s opening credits.
5. Notes taken from a theoretical text. (These could be notes taken from the Marshall McLuhan 'Medium is the Massage' reading)(Scan in)
6. A mind map demonstrating how you developed an idea for an essay.(Scan in)
7. An image analysis. (This could be stand alone or part of the essay)
8. Other work done that has helped you develop an essay. Such as notes made, practicing writing academically (for this you could use the set academic writing tasks in the eassy writing handout such as how to triangulate or summerise), an introduction to the essay, examples of practicing correct Harvard referencing.
9. The essay itself which could include an image analysis, could demonstrate good academic writing, have a clear introduction, be Harvard referenced correctly etc. and as such it would evidence 7 and 8. However you could develop a higher mark for the portfolio by demonstrating the fact that you tried out things before writing the final thing. This is a good way of using drafts and ideas that perhaps don’t make it into the final essay to bolster your portfolio.

Additionality (i.e. ways of getting higher marks) can include personal reflections on theory/practice, responces or comments to what Garry Barker has posted to his blog or comments on other students' blogs. This demonstrates a commitment to the whole group learning.
You could also post about films that you have been to which could be commented upon and analysed, computer games you have played, books you have read, events you have been to etc. Basically anything that you have experienced or thought about that helps demonstrate that you are thinking contextually about your practice.

The actual essay has to be printed off and submitted to the contextual studies office by:
26/1/11 4PM
The final blog which will act as your portfolio to be submitted by 30/3/10 4PM for summative assessment.
NB The final blog portfolio can include a revised version of the essay done in response to formative feedback.

Writing and Being

One of the outcomes we have to deal with this academic year is essay writing. Today’s session is an introduction to that and I just wanted to put it into context.
All writing is really the telling of stories. We tell stories about ourselves and our exploits, sometimes vocally to others and sometimes silently using our internal voice. It has been said that we are our narratives and that we construct an idea of ourselves by telling stories within which we act in certain ways. Indeed if we do this long enough we develop for ourselves a character, one which when we know we are acting out of character, can make us change opinions or act differently in order to get back to being the character that we have developed.
Neuro-imaging techniques support this idea. Michael Gazzaniga states that within the left hemisphere is an interpreter centre that creates the unified feeling of a unique self. (New Scientist, 13th Nov 2010, p. 53) The ‘interpreter’ brings to our individual sets of experiences theories about our lives and ‘narratives’ of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography.
Damage to this area of the brain disrupts the story and we find people creating narratives unconstrained by reality, (living a fiction) or not being able to create any sort of narrative, external or internal.
Our inner voice is vital. To quote New Scientist, “One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected this showed activity in the classic speech production area known as Broca’s area. But also active was Wernicke’s area, the brain region for language comprehension, suggesting that not only do the brain’s speech areas produce silent inner speech, but that our inner voice is understood and interpreted by the comprehension areas.” This is the moment of the ‘narrative self’.
So when we come to write an essay, all we are really doing is making yet another narrative and it may well start internally. The trick is to get this across to the reader and there are only so many types of stories. Many of these end either with boy gets girl or the death of the villain and the triumph of good over evil. In our case boy meets girl could be two theories are brought together to resolve a problem or the triumph of good, becomes the strong true Marxist argument that overcomes the weakly put together Conservative thesis. Or the other way round, remember it’s the winner that gets to write history.

I will return to this because the digital narrative will still have to contend with the universally understood story prototypes. The book, the Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker will be our guide to this, but for now I just wanted to air the fact that non of you should be worried about this writing element of the module. You all tell stories and you tell them all the time, we just have to harness your talents.

The Uncanny Valley and Phenomenological Communication Theory

At the very moment that you want to deeply emphasise with a 3D animated character you notice something is wrong, the eyes are completely lifeless or the body movement is all wrong, this is the moment of ‘The Uncanny Valley’.
The concept of the Uncanny Valley originally applied to robots, and was developed by Japanese roboticist Mashiro Mori.


Mori suggested that as robots look and behave more like humans, they became will be accepted by humans, but only up to a point. It is this tipping point that is important and when the moment is recognised it strikes deeply into the psyche as a moment of the uncanny Of course if a robot behaves just like us, with no differences we have no choice but to accept it. .
The Uncanny Valley applies to 3D characters in games and films as well, the high levels of realism making it a problem that is going to occur much more frequently.
Mori has three areas he examines as to when the Uncanny Valley effect takes place: Appearance, Movement and Behaviour. He uses the diagram below to explain how it works.




It interesting that he uses the example of Bunraku puppets. The heads of these puppets are made to represent different genders, social class and personalities and it can take up to 30 years training for a puppeteer to master the body movement and expressions.



A Bunraku puppet

Appearance is of course essential; we read people at first glance even when we know we shouldn’t. Emotional acceptance of a character makes a big difference, especially if the character is designed to be abstracted or to look realistically human. This is why early animation can be very abstract and yet we can emphasise with the characters and understand which emotion is being represented.




However in 2004, the game Half-Life 2 came out using the character of Alyx which had relatively realistic facial animation and, in particular, eyes that seemed to respond to emotion.



Alex from Half Life 2

In 2007, Bioware's Mass Effect attempted to model conversations more realistically by using better facial animation and expressions. However as better realism occurs the ‘uncanny valley’ effect deepens and in particular if eyes go wandering off we get a sense of dislocation.
All this relates to the phenomenology of communication and the fact that we are biologically attuned to each other’s faces.
This isn’t about better technology, artists could use facial expression in animation as far back as the 1930s, Medal of Honor soldiers are looking pretty realistic , but when you see their faces, they have no human emotion, they also don’t move in ways that make us think of human feelings. Movement being another area within which c ‘human’ experience is vital if we are to effect authentic communication.

It was Tomb Raider, (1995) that introduced the idea that realistic 3D movement was possible. It was one of the earliest examples of using motion capture graphics of real people, and applying it to real-time, interactive game animation.
Procedural animation, applying animation algorithms to models, rather than motion capture data, is now also being used, but the same limitations apply in that unless movement is spot on we read the emotional aspects of the character as disturbing or in some cases just funny.
It’s not a matter of making people move realistically. The problem is how to make human characters move in a way that doesn't leave you with the ‘uncanny valley’ vague sense of unease.
Modelling behaviour is more difficult than modelling appearance or movement.
The real problem with behaviour is our expectations of behaviour, which are of course based on our years of real world (phenomenological) experience. In built predictability for a character, ends up limiting possible options and minimizing realistic behaviour.

Recent movies such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, demonstrate that you can achieve high levels of authentic phenomenological communication, (The problem there being to graft an adult actor's above-the-neck performance on to the body of a smaller actor) it will be interesting to see when these levels of authentic communication reach games design. However, if we go far enough away from the humanoid, then we much more readily accept human simulations as being like us. This accounts for the success of cinema characters such as R2-D2 and WALL-E. They act like humans but they don’t look like humans. This is perhaps the area to focus on, our anthropomorphism allows us to make connections with all sorts of non human things. Tom Hanks and his volleyball Wilson in the film Castaway for instance. But you have to get it right, look at the demise of ‘Clippy’ the puppy eyed paper-clip that used to come with Microsoft Office.



At some point the lessons of all the seven areas of communication theory will be embedded within artificially generated scenarios and at that point we just won’t know any difference between reality and simulation but occasionally when a character looks at you with that cold eye, you will shiver and realise you have just walked down the ‘uncanny valley’.

Communication Theory part two

We covered a few more communication theories on Wednesday. All of them were constitutive. The remaining 4 were.
Rhetorical
Socio-Psycological
Socio-Cultural
Critical
The handout was designed to sum these theories up and provide a matrix that could be used to set one theory against the other if you wanted to set up an argument that highlighted the weaknesses in each theory.
This will be added to the information on Moodle.

Communication Theory

Above: The Rosetta Stone. Find a copy in Leeds museum. This is a fantastic example of solid comunication theory.

The communications lecture
Just a few thoughts.
The first is that I was very aware that not everyone had been taken through how to take notes. In the handout given out on the day it says that we recommend the Cornell note-taking method. You can download a copy from http://eleven21.com/notetaker/
Typing up your notes is a blog task and easier to do when you can still remember what was being said.
So how would these look on a blog? The first problem is that you can’t, (or I can’t divide the page into two) so unless I scan my original notes, I have to type stuff.
It might therefore look like this.

Communication Theory Lecture
Everything to be said about this is summed up in: Lasswell's maxim:
“Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect"
PowerPoint is a problem because it can make you think in bullet points, but the tutor will give us a PowerPoint presentation anyway. We have to make notes when he rambles on.
There are 7 different sorts of communication theories.
These are either Transmissional or Constitutive.
The first one we are looking at is the Cybernetic or Information Theory of Communication. This is the only Transmissional theory.
Developed during WW2 because it was understood that good communications wins wars. Finally written down by Shannon and Weaver of Bell Laboratories 1949. It is a theory obviously written by telephone engineers, their early diagram is a bad drawing of a phone conversation of people speaking and listening, with the transmitter and receiver separated by what they called ‘noise’. This is a useful system because it can be turned into equations and so you can measure if things are working or not.
Its weakness is that it is not concerned with the production of meaning itself, which is a socially mediated process.
Three levels of potential communication problems
Level 1 Technical Accuracy
Systems of encoding and decoding, Compatibility of systems/need for specialist equipment or knowledge. E.g. PC and Mac operating systems, the tutor’s lack of computer knowhow.
Level 2 Semantic
Precision of language, How much of the message can be lost without meaning being lost?, What language to use? The tutor tried Serbo-Croat out on us but he couldn’t really speak it, but the point was communication is impossible unless we all understand the language it comes in.
Level 3
Effectiveness
Does the message affect behaviour the way we want it to? What can be done if the required effect fails to happen? The tutor tries to wake some of us up, he is worried about his effectiveness as a communicator.
The cybernetic theory can be seen as a type of Systems theory, we then looked at who are we communicating to? Audiences and Social Class. We thought that class was no longer a big issue. We also thought that no matter how you break an audience down into categories in the end everyone is different.

Semiotics. This is a Constitutive theory
Blah, blah, blah you get the picture, same type of writing as above.
Then at the end, if you remember I used the whiteboard to sum up.

In Summery
Communication Theory
“Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect"
7 Traditions
2 sorts
Transmissional and Constitutive.
Transmissional
Cybernetic
Constitutive
Semiotics
Phenomenological
The next 4 will be gone through next week

Thoughts on the Bradford Animation Festival

No session this week as it’s the Bradford Animation Festival but even so there are always issues to think through.
I notice Lionhead’s Fable 3 is being promoted and you will get a chance to meet people behind the new 3D set up.
As always it’s what is behind this that intrigues me.
Fable is advertised as being set in the “enthralling fantasy world of Albion”. This links the game back into a long history, Albion not only being the ancient name for Britain but it has a poetic resonance for us because of the still powerful influence of the poet William Blake on our ideas of what it is to be English.
The earliest writings (6th century BC) that refer to where we live as Albion, refer to the Albiones. By the 1st century AD, the name definitely refers to what we would call Great Britain. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History states:
"It was itself named Albion, while all the islands about which we shall soon briefly speak were called the Britanniae.”
As late as 930, the English King Æthelstan was sometimes styled: "King and chief of the whole realm of Albion".
The name conjures up our nostalgia for King Arthur and the Nights of the Round table and the old myths of faerie.

"Brutus! there lies beyond the Gallic bounds
An island which the western sea surrounds,
By giants once possessed, now few remain
To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.
To reach that happy shore thy sails employ
There fate decrees to raise a second Troy
And found an empire in thy royal line,
Which time shall ne'er destroy, nor bounds confine.

Geoffrey of Monmouth tells tales of the giant Gogmagog and the history of the reclaiming of the soil of Albion from the old Faerie peoples. See Spenser's Faerie Queene. Shakespeare was referring to these early mythic times in ‘A Mid-Summer Nights Dream’ and King Lear was a mythic descendent of the first kings of Cornwall who defeated the giants in order to settle here.
These deep seated myths are compelling, for instance, recently Hellboy 9 (The Wild Hunt) revisited these themes.
So we have something old and often told. Tales that have been woven on an evening around camp fires and gas lamps, still being elaborated as 3D gaming adventures.
Perhaps this is where contextual study comes in. These old stories resonate deeply. It’s no accident that Tolkien was a professor of Medieval literature, his knowledge of these stories being woven into his own epic tale, which as we all know still grips people today as powerfully as it did when it was first written in the 1950s.
However what James Joyce was able to bring to our attention was that narratives occur everyday and that they can be mythic. (See his novel Ulysses)
Whilst it's true to say that a narrative is no more than a story, the important realisation is that when we tell or write a story, we all tend to use a very similar form and structure, no matter what the story and whether it is imaginary or not. Narrative is easily one of the most common varieties of social discourse and a day will not pass without you reading or hearing a story - or constructing one of your own.
From early childhood, we become accustomed to making sense of the complex events of the world through the simplifying and satisfying means of narrative. It has been suggested that we might even be born with such basic structures and forms embedded within our subconscious; they certainly have an enduring and unshakeable impact upon our psychology. Certainly, it is clear that as human beings we do have a need for security, control and order within our lives and narrative, is a means by which order and security can be created in what is, in reality, a disordered and potentially dangerous universe.
Recognising the links between the everyday and the world of myth can be a wonderful opening into new forms and a potential for audience engagement on the highest level. It is this that perhaps has most potential.

However here is another myth.



Jeff Astle of West Bromwich Albion

The start of a new phase

This week’s meeting was quite useful as a catch-up. Can I remind everyone that said they would start making posts to do this?
In the meantime I take on board the fact I ramble and that I could summarise the issues covered and bring them together by using a flipchart or whiteboard, so will try and remember to bring these along to the next session. The issue about taking notes though was important, so find below my notes on the session that can also be used as a reminder for you.
We began with the Guardian Guides to film, see the link at the bottom. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/series/film-season-genre-guides The point here was that genre is subjective and that there are several ways that we can look at this. For instance no Western genre or Film Noir, there was then some discussion as to whether or not Film Noir is a genre or a style.
The main purpose of the session was to review the fact that as the last practical module was now finished (the titles sequence animation) how well had the contextual information introduced supported this. Was theory really being used to support practice?
The history of type lecture, was it seemed useful and some people had already written interesting reviews of opening sequences. In particular the text on the cinema as door seemed to have been a useful support. The session on embodied meaning and how to discuss/analyse movement had perhaps been less useful. I reminded everyone though that this needed to be linked with the resources already posted in particular ‘Key works when trying to write about film techniques’ is there to remind you that camera angle etc needs to be linked to other descriptive terms when analysing short sections of film.
The main issue though was to check where you now were and the two new modules were discussed. One to develop a ‘pop’ video and the other to develop a short character animation.
We then opened these areas up for discussion. These were some key points.
Pop video. There are several ways we could deepen the discussion around this.
History. History can be something that just looks at the specific nature of pop videos, starting with perhaps Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. But this doesn’t include early Dylan (Subterranean Homesick Blues) or the fact that the musical is integral to an understanding of film’s history. The first ‘talking film’ The Jazz Singer, of course foregrounding the issue. We then discussed the issues surrounding ‘silent film’ and the fact that these were not really silent and that Steven Severin had recently performed his new score for Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet at the Hyde Park cinema, there was some interest in how his early Siouxsie and The Banshees work could lead to this. Essentially though the point about the discussion was to open out the context for thinking about music and film.
The context issue was returned to in a more general discussion about the background of ‘how to be inventive’ or ‘how to use context change’ in developing ideas. This created another digression. But perhaps useful to remind everyone who didn’t take notes on what that was.
We looked at a seminal moment for contextual change which was created in the late 19th century by Comte de Lautréamont, his poetry collection, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. The key line from one of his poems I introduced was, “The chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”. Another early advocate of contextual change we looked at was Raymond Roussel, in particular his book ‘Impressions of Africa’. (This was text where we saw the traveller discovering a tribe that told the time by looking at wind direction) Finally I introduced Alfred Jarry his character Ubu and the science of Pataphysics, all of which helped to lay the foundations for Surrealism. The point being that all you need to do to change a context is to follow the implications of a chain of thought and ‘logic’ can lead you to a position that seems illogical. This is just another way of being creative.

All this was simply about how to not end up making a clichéd pop video.
The other area of discussion was the character development. Quite a few people were into comics and the text I was referring to was Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is a great read because it is written by a practicing comic artist.
The ‘what people are into’ area was opened out a bit more because a lot of people were into science fiction and horror and last year everyone had looked at the Uncanny. We tried to open this out a little further as it seemed that some people might well want to write about horror. I went through the related concepts of the Abject, the Other, cognitive dissonance, Burke’s notion of the sublime and how all these things overlap.
A good background text is: Royle, N (2003) The Uncanny: An Introduction Manchester: MUP
There are chapters on the death drive, deja-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness", the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness.
One final area we looked at was narrative and story. Again one of the key resources was pointed to, the book was: Booker, C (2004) The seven basic plots: why we tell stories. London; Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
Next session will be a lecture on Communication theory.

Week 4 The embodied mind

Peter Kubelka: Schwechater Film still

Thinking about how we use our own bodies to develop an understanding of the world reminded me of meeting Austrian film-maker Peter Kubelka. He gave a fantastic talk/performance about how he thought about film as part of the Evolution Festival in 2007. He started to talk about his film making by walking about trying to measure out lengths of film which he had wrapped around his arms. He would link seconds of running time to how far he could extend the film by using his hands and feet. Holding the film down with his toes he would stretch out, so that his body was contained in the film loop. He would then lay the film across the floor and walk along it, each stride being linked to a time and rhythm that would be of course part of the film run time as it would be when eventually put through a projector. In order to get his audience to remember to digest the information he was delivering he gave out donuts, which not only reminded him of a sun symbol (therefore light) but the looping of film and the cosmic circularity of all things, as well as the fact that once information is digested it is absorbed and unwanted elements become waste.
That soft shape we get when we round edges off has set up another embodied train of thought. Why is it that so many people hate Comic Sans typeface? Is it just too 'babyish'? See link below: Death to this typeface.

Week 3 No session this week

We dont have a session this week, but I hope things can still move forward. Those of you that havnt started your Critical Studies blogs this is a good time to do that. You could write up your notes, do an analysis of a chosen film's opening sequences/credits and annotate a section taken from the Film Theory text book that is one of your resources.
The next session's close reading will include a passage from a book called the 'Corporeal Turn', by Maxine Sheets-Johnson. It's from the chapter, Thinking in Movement. The book introduces terms such as the 'mindful body' and suggests that moving organisms create kinetic melodies. (See section above, which you could enlarge to read) The reason we will be looking at this is so that you can develop a theoretical language that can be used to illustrate how moving images (including moving typography) make meaning and relate that meaning to how you yourself feel when you experience something. Sheets-Johnson often refers to a body of theory called Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are the key writers in this area that we will discuss) and theorists such as Johnson and Lakoff who write about the embodied mind.
So if you are not having to work on putting up your blog or catching up on tasks, have a read through and try and annotate/make notes.
We should be back doing a live session next week.

Second session Cinema as door

Just a few thoughts on the session. I hope everyone got something out of doing a close reading of the cinema as door section from the film theory set text. A couple of things were mentioned and I thought I'd elaborate in order to make sure we were clear as to what was being said.
The set task this week is to annotate a text.
One of the words mentioned in connection with this was 'hermeneutics'. This can mean either the art of interpretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation and it was started by monkish scribes writing between the lines of their bibles. I suppose for you your bibles are the theoretical texts introduced. If you look at the image above you will see that in some bibles the annotations were longer than the actual text. The other thing is that the typographic layout is an integral part of the way it works. Perhaps when approaching the task you may want to consider this?
Another interesting thing that came up was in relation to the film 'Synecdoche, New York' when we were thinking through what was the meaning of diegesis. (The fictional world in which the situations and events narrated within a film occur) A synecdoche is a rhetorical term that describes a figure of speech in which part of something is used to refer to the whole thing. This is a type of metonymy (something we will be looking at soon) Metonymy can be applied to something that is visibly present but which represents another object or subject to which it is related but absent. Therefore an opening sequence can function metonymically for the whole of a film. E.g. the beginning of Hitchcock's Vertigo.
One other thing. I mentioned semiotics and a good primer is the web-site Semiotics for beginners. I'll put a link in at the bottom.

The first face to face session

I hope everybody got the idea of how the module is going to work. I will introduce certain theories/historical information and try and make sure they relate to what students are doing within the main programme. The introduction, 'A very short history of type' being designed to give some historical background and at the same time introduce possible areas of theory that we could open out later. Gestalt psychology, post-colonialism, typographic stereotyping, structures of power (who owns these typefaces?) (Foucault), the parergon or space between the ‘real’ world and the book page or screen. (Derrida), the embodied mind (Johnson and Lakoff) , phenomenology (Merleau Ponty), communication theory, narrative theory and Marshall Mcluhan’s idea of the ‘Media is the message’ were all in there somewhere. But which area was more interesting?

A task.

Can you write a brief introduction to your interests? Are you interetsed in becoming an animator, games designer, film director, sound recordist etc etc
What areas of theory already interest you or what sort of areas would you like to find theory about?
What is the book you have chosen to respond to typographically and why?
What do you want from this module?

Another task that you can do if you want to. Write a short review of a film you like. If you remember I mentioned that I went to see Scott Pilgrim over the weekend. It has some interesting typographic sequences within it. So I'll review it.

Scott Pilgrim Vs the World
Director: Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead)
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is an unemployed 23-year-old bass guitarist in a garage rock band who is dating a 17-year-old high school girl, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). He then bumps into Ramona Flowers working as a delivery girl on roller-blades.(Mary Elizabeth Winstead) Ramona has moved to Toronto from New York City to leave her past behind. Scott is facinated by this new girl and her mysterious past and wants to go out with her but before Scott can begin dating Ramona, he must prove himself by defeating the league of her seven exes. They will do anything to get rid of and destroy any new boyfriend Ramona may consider. If Scott wants to find true love with Ramona, he must defeat all seven.
The film brings together several genres. Initially a comic book by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim mixes together elements of video games, comic books, music and film.
The film connects back to older stories, such as Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, (check out the old maps of the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, see above)and at the same time old forms of computer games such as the Super Mario platform game for Nintendo as well as ninga and other fight games. What is interesting is that as soon as you get the idea of genre mash-up you start mentally adding others such as the fact that the evil exes turn into gold coins when they are defeated and as ‘super-humans’ they are almost like gods. Zeus, the head of the Greek pantheon of gods, turned himself into a shower of gold and poured down into the love of his life’s lap (Danae) and as a result she had a son. (See Danae by Gustav Klimt) These mythic links are not unusual. Most heroes had to have some sort of magic sword or other help when they went off the fight the monster. They nearly always win the princess too. Just as Scott does at the end. Even the fact that Ramona's hair keep changing colour makes a kind of odd sense. It starts as blue and then 'Knives' copies this and then Ramona goes green. Scott at one point says that he cant take this as changing hair colour means she is insincere. This could be a comment on the whole film. As it flips from genre to genre we are not sure where the director stands, but as the film ends perhaps we know that it really was just another romantic comedy all along.

Dont forget to let me know if you have posted up anything. Make comments if you need to. It reassures me everyone is looking.

Thinking about type

When we meet for the first time next week, we will be looking at a short history of type and how this relates to screen based fonts and moving type. You might want to look at a few things first to familiarise yourselves with the area. A great resource is the one at fontshop and they keep adding to it. (See links at the bottom of the blog page)If you want to try building your own font using grid structures try the font builder at FontStruct.com for hours of fun making your own. Beware it can be quite addictive. For a good typography blog follow ilovetypography (again the link is at the bottom)not just for information but to look at in terms of how a blog might work.Once we get into moving type, which will be the second week (hopefully) title sequences will become important and art of the title is a good place to look. I am asking Mike to post some resources and other stuff on moodle for people to look at as well, so again, if you have time, cast your eye over what is available. We will be going through this stuff in seminars though, so dont worry if you havnt got time.
I was thinking about the things we are supposed to do during the course of the module and one of these tasks is to annotate a text. The image at the top is of an annotated page and it seems to me that this page itself is interesting in terms of how it visually communicates. The contrast between hand written text and the type set page, the introduction of colour to highlight certain elements that are important etc. all combine to make an image that communicates interrogation of a text. Perhaps we can look at tasks that make visual images, at the same time as making academic sense. For instance could we work on creating examples of moving type using simple technology within a seminar session. I would be interested to hear your thoughts.

Introduction to OUDF205

This is a very long first post and I would like students working with me this year to read it and make some comments. Communication is a two way process and I need to know how much is getting through.
This blog is part of a dialogue between myself as a facilitator/tutor and groups of students who are on the second year of their BA (Hons) and FD programmes. It is also an arena where issues raised can be explored and the usefulness and appropriate nature of content can be debated.
I will start with my worries.
The first thing I am concerned about is whether or not as students you have had a bad experience in the first year. Contextual studies is often seen as something that is not central to the educational experience in art and design. It can be thought of as an add-on that feels as if it isn’t helping with a student’s main study. So how can I demonstrate that it is useful and prove to students that it can be directly used to support what they want to do?
This all goes back to my own experience.
I am a practitioner who has over the years always found myself engaged with some sort of research in order to develop my practice.
Trained initially as a printmaker I have worked commercially running a print workshop, gradually broadening my practice to eventually include industrial interior design, interactive digital media, public art, fine art painting and illustration. Over the last 10 years specialising in illustration/fine art image making and leaving behind the computer as a tool for working with. One area has though remained constant, I draw and out of drawing I get ideas. I never worried about which area I found myself in, I tended to follow my nose as to what was at the time interesting. I have taught fine art as well as design, in the past covering everything from typography to sculpture.
So how did I find myself working in Contextual studies?
A bit of history.
I have been teaching for over 30 years. When I started this area was called Art History and Complementary studies and as I had a Commendation in Art History as part of my DipAD, I was asked to teach art history to Foundation students in the early 1970s. However as the design areas grew in size and importance, design history was added. Then as media studies entered the fray, it was decided to call the whole lot cultural studies and I found myself having to read all those people like Foucault and Derrida in order to broaden what I was teaching. This however became confused with University Cultural Studies departments that tended to take a very Marxist view on how society worked. It was then decided to call the whole area Critical Studies as this would highlight the critical thinking which it was expected the area would develop. Practical areas objected to this as it implied that practitioners were not critical thinkers. Hence the present title, Contextual (Historical, sociological and cultural contexts) and Theoretical (Philosophical, Psychoanalytical, Sustainable etc.) Studies, but, it could be argued there is slippage between the two, as theory is as much a context as history.
When the Coldstream Report looked into art education in the 1960s it specifically highlighted the problems in starting to award degrees to practical art and design courses. (I have a Dip AD because art courses were not awarded degree level parity with academic courses until the mid 70s) It decided that degrees could be awarded if these courses could demonstrate parity with other academic degrees by ensuring all students undertook an academic aspect of their study. This was why the initial Art History and Complementary Studies modules were so important. The dissertation remains an important element in an art student’s final portfolio, as external moderators still look to the mark of the dissertation as an indicator as to the final grade if it is on a cusp and MA courses often ask for dissertation grades and a report from such as myself, as proof that the student can study at a higher level, which of course usually requires writing a dissertation or thesis.
So where is it useful? It’s probably at its most useful in consultancy work. My partner runs a public art and design consultancy. Each project demands research and contextualisation to get it off the ground and secure funding. For instance a local authority might want a public art policy written or they might want to commission an artist or designer to help regenerate a city centre. They need reassuring that decisions made are based on knowledge and awareness of the parameters within which the city planning regulations work. This demands researching everything from local planning law, to historic documents as to the importance of local areas of interest, to potential audience make-up and their interests, to concepts of regeneration through the arts, to theories on how space is used and understood, to historical examples and contemporary examples of practices in both art and design. On top of the research there has to be the ability to then present all the information as a clear written proposal. This is not too dissimilar to a cross between the dissertation and a feasibility study, as it includes all references and has to have a narrative and an argument as to why the activities proposed are needed.
The other area within which contextualisation has been useful is my personal work. Initially it was mainly building up an awareness of what other artists and designers had done, if only to be able to show a potential client what it might look like or to give myself something to aspire to. (Historical and contemporary art and design) But the more subtle use has been that wider awareness of philosophy, psychology, literature etc. that allowed me to develop reasons for what I was doing. (An informed critical dialogue) This has been of growing importance to me as when I have exhibitions or need to contact people about my work they want text that explains things for them. If I can do this it gives them confidence that what I am producing has some meaning. More importantly it has fed my own ideas as to what I am doing and why.
So what as students do you want to get out of this? What are your worries? How can I help?
I also know that you need to pass this module and that the marks will go towards your overall result. I am experienced enough to know what that means in terms of what you need to do. So can help you achieve this component of your degree. So try and follow this blog which will develop as the year unfolds.