Semiotics, read the signs!

Two more lectures, two more topics, however these are kind of intertwined topics as intertextuality is a branch of semiotics.

In basic these lectures were about how signs such as language or pictures relate to different people, in my case this would be how I as an animator communicate to an audience through my animation. How the characters are designed, the colours, the environment, these all give a particular signal to an audience. If a character looks dark and sinister this will give an impression to the audience that this character is evil, or if I decorated an environment with warm bright colours would reflect a feeling of warmth and friendly atmosphere in this environment. So every part of the design as an animator must be carefully done and thought through.

There are many examples of highly talented concept artists that purposely design something for a particular meaning and purpose within a movie/game etc.

My two favourite concept artists that I have seen so far would have to be Feng Zhu and Zhu Li. Helps that they have same names to remember them :)

Feng Zhu
http://www.fengzhudesign.com/

Zhu Li
http://thedesigninspiration.com/articles/talented-game-concept-artist-zhu-li/

Both are stunning artists that create amazing works.

Although I was aware that it is important to consider every part of a design as I have been told during University it was good to have it displayed in a more theoretical way of how people will interpret different signs on an image. Such as important information for me and character design that we were told was that scientists have discovered that we find beauty in symmetry, so if a face is symmetrical we consider it to be more 'beautiful'. I will definately take this into account during character creation processes and can manipulate how the character will look to others.

I also thought the fact that people are naturally semiotic was interesting, that we always try to make sense of the shapes and signs we see infront of us. This relates to one lecture this week with Martin as we did an exercise for creating composition. We did a rapid fire series of compositions with 30 seconds each just drawing lines randomly then at the end our minds would naturally try to make sense of these lines and possibly create a composition. He told us that are minds try to "find the recognisable shapes in chaos" which I found very interesting and true.

Every individual will interpret a sign automatically in a different way such as some will interpret the colour of red for love whereas others will interpret red as danger! It was useful to learn the two types of signs to apply to animation.

Signifier: The physical indication or presence of a sign

Signified: The mental concept of a sign.

Iconic: Most representative representation of sign e.g picture of a cat

Arbitary: Symbolic representation

Overall I picked out some bits of information of semiotics to be useful however it is not something I would research and look into myself again as it does not grasp my interest too much. I will however keep the concept of semiotics in mind as I create and design animation as it is important to know how to appeal to and manipulate a viewers mind....... scary :)