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Animation approaches, styles and software padlet

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Animation approaches, styles and software padlet

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Translation theory: key issues and questions pdf

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Translation theory: key issues and questions pdf

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Translation theory is concerned with the processes of ‘carrying over’ meanings from one ‘text’ in one form or language to another ‘text’ in another form or language. (my definition). Texts may take many forms: spoken, written, visual, digital, musical and the ‘carrying over’ may be within or between these forms, or even ‘updating’ within the same form.

Translation theory borrows concepts and approaches from a range of disciplines including: comparative literature, computer science, history,  linguistics,  philology,  philosophy,  semiotics, and terminology.

– analysis of source texts and meanings eg is there only one or many meanings in a text? how can meaning be derived?
– analysis of target text and audience understandings of meaning eg how far does the purpose and audience require adaptation and change in the final form?

Nature of ‘equivalence’ and role of the translator

‘Foreignizing translation’ vs ‘abusive fidelity’? (question from Venuti, L. 1992)

Given that conceptual frameworks as well as individual idioms vary significantly between different languages and visual forms, is the role of the translator to be a 'faithful messenger' replacing one ‘word’ in the source text with another ‘formally equivalent’ word in the target text? Or is there a need for greater creativity to clarify contexts and make meanings more 'universal'.

Power relations

Of particular relevance for empowerment and participatory approaches are linkages that have been made between translation theory and post-colonial and subaltern theory by authors such as Tejaswini Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak. They are concerned particularly with power relations between translators, those producing the source texts and those consuming the target texts.  This includes initial selection of voices and texts for translation as well as the translation process itself and how and to whom translations are presented. ?

How does one write about or represent another culture in one’s own language and terms without those very terms and conceptions altering that which is being represented? How do one’s conceptual notions color what one see and reports? (Niranjana, T. 1992)

The Western scholar/translator can partially access the subaltern condition, not through what is specifically said…but by reading that which is not said – reading the gaps, the silences, and the contradictions symptomatically…it is necessary to ‘unlearn’ in order to allow the mute [sic] to speak (Spivak, G. C. 1990)

Translation as creative experimentation?

The question becomes how to get beyond the problem of dualistic, either/or thinking, in order to explore the in-between space that includes both the same and the other...translation serves as a metaphor for writing that frees, transforms, and multiplies rather than possesses, controls and defines. (Gentzler, E. 2001, p.197 discussing work of Quebec feminist translator Nicole Brossard.

How far should translators be creative authors of the target text? When does this cease to be 'translation', rather than a new work 'drawing on inspiration'.

Sources consulted:

Berman, A. 1985. Les Tours de Babel: Essais sur la Traduction, Maurezin, France, Editions Trans-Europ-Repress.

Mahasweta Devi (Author) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Translator) (1995) Imaginary Maps, London, New York: Routledge.

Eccleshall, B (2019) An Analytic of Making: Translating Berman’s Twelve Deforming Tendencies in Translating Across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys Between Media Edited by Ricarda Vidal and Madeleine Campbell 2019, Palgrave Macmillan. Pp269-??

Gentzler, E., (2001) Contemporary Translation Theories, Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, Sydney: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Morton, S., (2003) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London, New York: Routledge.

Munday, J., (2012) Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Application, London, New York: Routledge.

Niranjana, T., (1992) Siting Translation: History, post-structuralism and the colonial context, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press.

Schulte, R. & Biguenet, J. (eds.) (1992) Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

Spivak, G. C., (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, New York, London: Routledge.

Spivak, G. C., (1998) In Other Worlds, London, New York: Routledge.

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Community Voices and Context: Uganda blogpost

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Community Voices and Context: Uganda blogpost

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Uganda is one of the countries where I first started to develop the GAMEchange methodologies from 2002, building on other pictorial methodologies that already existed from organisations like Action Aid, and also local Ugandan artists working with development agencies. It is a country where I have a lot of photographs of community drawings and also contextual information from two coffee-producing regions:

Rwenzoris in Western Uganda with three organisations: Kabarole Research Centre, Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Union and local Community-Based Organisations like Mwana Mulho where I worked first between 2003-2016.

Mount Elgon in Eastern Uganda with a Fair Trade coffee Cooperative: Gumutindo from a gender empowerment process funded by TWIN UK 2012-2014. This process was linked with Bukonzo Joint from Rwenzoris.

In my selection of images to work with I focus on images that contain sufficient narrative to translate as animation. In Rwenzoris people - many of whom could read and write when they started - have developed a very distinctive colour style and symbolic language to produce very complex pictorial narratives of their experience as infographics and/or information manuals with sequential illustration. Animated symbols could form the basis for interesting interactive infographics. They could also be animated as narrative, but this would require a lot of time, much more documentation on precise meanings and should be done with participation of the people concerned to develop the narratives.

The Gumutindo drawings from discussions of 'What do you like and dislike about being a wo/man' were very expressive 'mini-narratives' as individual images rather than a pictorial language of juxtaposed symbols. As such I decided they would be more suitable for my experimental animation, looking at ways in which animation can clarify or alter the meaning of the drawings based on documentation I have available.

Link to 'Mother of the Nation': Mary's Story, Uganda

Gumutindo is a Fair Trade coffee cooperative on the slopes of Mount Elgon. As elswhere ion the coffee sector, although women perform about 70% of the work on coffee, men own the land and control the coffee money. Married women are generally not admitted as cooperative members - and so are not eligible for training and credit. GALS empowerment methodology was introduced as part of a gender strategy of TWIN-UK who were prominent buyers of Gumutindo coffee and did a lot of the training for them.

Men locked the store to stop the women getting hands on the coffee money. Domestic abuse and male alcoholism were very common (about 70% households). These were dominant features of the role plays at the workshop - see the three different couples in the photos.

The single-image vignettes by women about their situation shown in the slideshow below are some of the most expressive, poignant and raw that I have encountered. Each image manages to tell a story in itself that can be largely understood even by someone from outside. I have not acknowledged the artists because although they were happy that the drawings and photographs from the workshop would be used in manuals etc, that was on the understanding that they would not be identified in ways that might make them more vulnerable if they are known to express themselves in this way.

Equally interesting is the very graphic final drawing by a man of what he did not like about being a man - running after a woman with an erect penis - although he was too embarrassed to explain exactly whether this meant he did not like the fact of his arousal, the fact that women always ran away, or a particular woman was not interested in his advance. He later hid the drawing from view after another man made fun of it.

Community-based organisations in the Rwenzoris to the far West of Uganda: Kabarole Research Centre, Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Union and Mwana Mulho have been working with me to develop and adapting PALS since 2003. Women and men in the area have developed their own pictorial language and do very detailed diagram analysis for their own life planning. Organisations have also integrated the pictorial systems into their organisational planning and impact assessments.

Many of the drawings are very detailed in terms of information, colourful and organisational drawings, like those on the right, are often large and colour-coded with quantification in their adapted number system.

Many of the images are figures doing something that are quite easy to understand for people from the area who know the crops, trees etc. However because they have become a 'pictorial symbolic language', there is a tendency for drawings to become formulaic rather than innovative and expressive. Particularly in manuals produced by staff like those on the right where the more polished style is very noticeable. Though understandable as the aim of the manuals is clarity.

But as can be seen from the videos below, the drawings enable women and men to describe and analyse many issues in their lives, including sensitive topics about family relationships, adultery and land ownership that provide rich contextual information as background to the narratives from Gumutindo.

'Mother of the nation'??: Constructed Narrative

This video 'Investing in women farmers in Africa' is quite interesting for the somewhat patronising and complacent attitude towards women farmers - the compliant but neglected mothers who need 'support from their men' so that they can feed their families and feed and educate the nation. Issues of land rights and domestic abuse have been raised since the 1980s and still many countries have not changed. Even Fair Trade working with men's cooperatives and increasing men's incomes can simply increase alcoholism and enable men to marry more wives.

What is clear from the workshops in Gumutindo and Rwenzoris, and particularly videos from Bukonzo Joint, is that many women farmers resent many of the cultural practices and inequalities. Wanting rights to land, credit and profitable businesses. Many men after the workshops also support these changes - they have seen their mothers and sisters suffer.

But the video can provide an interesting counterpoint to the realities of women's lives as they depict them in their drawings and role plays. And documented changes since the workshops can also provide a pointer to future possibilities.

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Uganda is one of the countries where I first started to develop the GAMEchange methodologies from 2002, building on other pictorial methodologies that already existed from organisations like Action Aid, and also local Ugandan artists working with development agencies.

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Community Voices and Context: India blogpost

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Community Voices and Context: India blogpost

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Indian development animations

Community versus External Voices?
Overview

I selected these drawings from participatory workshops in India 2003-2006 because they show the diversity of drawing styles. In the case of West Bengal and Gujarat I also had extensive background knowledge of the context from my own academic or participatory research.

The distinctive use of line by tribal women in West Bengal and Gujarat who had never held a pen before. Tribal women also work in the fields, forest and with livestock. They do not have such a strong tradition of handicrafts (unlike Pakistan for example) that give them an immediate facility for drawing. Particularly in the case of older women, they tend to use very abstracted stick figures but add symbolic elements and gestures. Certainly to a Western eye (eg my own) fascinated by the expressiveness of cave drawings and petroglyphs these abstracted drawings are in many ways more artistically interesting than the more figurative drawings of people with more education. I had earlier done short Flash videos of the workshops showing the context, drawing process and interpretation of the drawings.

The drawings from Chennai in South India are done by women and men who have some literacy. These attempt more figurative representation of women an men - hair, clothes and status distinctions. Some indicate very clearly the differences between women and men's perceptions of 'women's empowerment'. Others do not visually distinguish between different forms of empowerment and rely more on verbal/written explanation.

There are many professional Indian animators producing artistically creative animations, often based on traditional handicraft styles or drawn animation. I found them to generally lack the distinctive visual expressiveness/rawness of the community drawings. Moreover, the animations I found on-line all relied heavily on dialogue and/or text in local languages or English.
See post Indian animations on women's empowerment

Animation in English about benefits of women getting loans and training for handicrafts.

This has nice very simple white on black drawing. More arty than detailed concept. By Arcsoft Animation.

Artistic Sand Art on women's empowerment.

Cartoon of apparently random drawings of different aspects of women's position as a card for International Women's Day.

Jamghoria Sevabrata is an NGO in West Bengal - most of the women they work with are tribal Santal who speak little Bengali (at the time when this work was done) and most of the paid staff were Bengali men who did not speak Santali. This livelihood planning workshop - for women to plan how they would use a grant from Trickle Up in US to invest in and increase income from different livestock - using pictorial drawing was the first time they had really communicated. The staff also drew and said they had 'never felt so liberated'.

Most of these women had not held a pen before. I was facilitating 60 women in relays on 20, starting with the first batch for an hour then they taught the next batch and the next batch, with me catching up to take the first batch further to more advanced drawing once everyone was happy. From being very shy and not talking initially, within an hour they were confidently laughing, talking and teaching each other.

It was explained that everyone can draw and that all drawings are just different types of lines (straight, curves, wiggly etc) and circles (round, rectangular, squishy, loopy etc). With a bit of thought anything can be represented that way. The first woman below had quickly worked out a way of drawing lots of different types of goat - plain ones, stripy ones and foreign ones with bigger horns and needing to be tied with a rope on one leg. Others drew pigs of different types. The filled dots and circle lines represent different money to do their income calculations.

This shows that this type of mix of symbolism and figure abstraction comes easily. As can be seen from the video, some of the line drawing is also very expressive - Basquiat-like. That sort of 'attacking the paper' is less common when people try to draw 'artistically'.

Contextual Resources

For Jamghoria Sevabrata I have a range of contextual information: drawings and workshop photographs and video - including footage not used in the 2004 video above. I also had photographs of the landscape and village. Including women feeding pigs and a singer.

I also looked at some Bengali videos on livestock farming on You Tube to see how general the issues raised by the women were. And to see if there was any suitable material for rotoscoping.

As my anthrolopogy PhD was on women and gender inequality in West Bengal, including tribal women, I also have some understanding of power relations and economic issues. I also speak quite fluent Bengali to understand contextual resources on-line.

!! Insert pdf of discussion of translation issues raised by Mahasweta Devi.

One of the participants feeds her new foreign breed pig while her children and neighbours watch.

Santhali singer. A really beautiful song performed for us just before we left. But unfortunately I do not have translation.

On-line resources: Goat and pig farming issues

Main point is that goat raising is potentially very profitable with an expanding market. But it needs a lot of investment, medicines, vets etc. Or there are serious issues with disease. Although this can be done gradually, it is more risky. Particularly without training, credit and where vet services are not available.

Goat farming in Bengali (I understand it, but need to make detailed notes.) Main point is that goat raising is potentially very profitable with an expanding market. But it needs a lot of investment, medicines, vets etc. Or there are serious issues with disease.

Goat farming in Bengali (I understand it, but need to make detailed notes.) Advantages and disadvantages of different breeds.

Pig farming in Bengali (I understand it, but need to make detailed notes.) How to start: breeds, feed, disease, buildings.

On-Line resources: Pig Fight

ANANDI (Area Networking for Development Initiatives) is a women's empowerment organisation working with women in tribal, muslim and scheduled caste communities of Gujarat in Eastern India. These drawings were made as part of a 2003 participatory review on empowerment impact of their organisation, focusing particularly on response to the 2001 earthquake that devastated the area.

The drawings in biro on paper were part of an Empowerment Diamond exercise. As can be seen from the video, many of the women had never drawn before. Many are very expressive. Some can be more or less understood by an outsider eg goats (but what type?) a woman with a car (does she own it? drive it? woman carrying a bundle on her head (but is it a profitable bundle? is she carrying it for someone else?) etc. Other drawings are better understood by people who know more about the context (types of crops). Others are only understood by people in the process who are accustomed to common ways in which people draw things like rectangles for land. Others are symbolic and innovative eg use of a fan? for development.

They look quite 'scruffy' just doodles on very cheap paper. It would be interesting to see if they would be treated better if they were cut and framed as 'works of art' like Tracy Emin drawings with more Basquiat-style text.

They really need annotation to understand the full richness of expression. For example why is a stick woman with a red stomach 'healthy', what is the thinking behind that.

These drawings were done as part of an international gender training for micro-finance programmes, hosted by Hand in Hand in Chennai, South India. Hand in Hand worked with men and women, most of whom had some education, some were quite educated. They were not nearly so poor as the tribal women in JS or ANANDI above. Hand in Hand had not focused on women's empowerment, and the aim of the exercise was to get some community indicators of women's empowerment and happy families and see what differences there might be between women and men. The women had a strong handicraft tradition and so could draw quite easily.

The women's concepts when they explained them were clear - around owning property, being able to go where they wanted, having a sense of identity and respect. The drawings however were not clear without the explanatory text. There was some difference in drawing style between powerful (confident marker line) and powerless (wiggly pencil) but it is not clear whether this was intentional or just a difference between media and group. There is also some differentiation in clothing and appearance, but on the whole all the figure drawings look quite similar.

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Indian development animations I selected these drawings from participatory workshops in India 2003-2006 because they show the diversity of drawing styles. In the case of West Bengal and Gujarat I also had extensive background knowledge of the context from my own academic or participatory research.

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Women's empowerment, Uganda workshop video

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Women's empowerment, Uganda workshop video

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GALS Phase 1: Women's understanding of empowerment in ANANDI, India

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'Mary's Story', Uganda: creative translation bricolage padlet

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'Mary's Story', Uganda: creative translation bricolage padlet

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'Pig tales', India: creative translation bricolage padlet

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'Pig tales', India: creative translation bricolage padlet

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'The airplane', Pakistan: creative translation bricolage padlet

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'The airplane', Pakistan: creative translation bricolage padlet

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'Tupa Tupa', DRCongo: creative translation bricolage padlet

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'Tupa Tupa', DRCongo: creative translation bricolage padlet

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Padlet of research links to animations and blog posts, focusing on animations without words

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Whose voice? creative translation framework and questions

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Whose voice? creative translation framework and questions

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Empowerment and development inevitably require participation and negotiation of diverse interests and conflicting power positions. The role of creative artists can usefully be seen as that of an intermediary ‘creative translator advocate’ between communities and powerful institutions.

KEY QUESTIONS

What practical and ethical issues are involved in ‘creative visual translation’ of community voices by external actors?

What visual communication strategies do women and men in different communities use to represent empowerment and gender inequality? How far do the drawings speak for themselves? What needs translating, why and for whom?

What different visual, animation and narrative approaches used by graphic artists, animators and film-makers from different cultures could be used to help address these limitations?

What are the limitations of visual communication where text is needed? For whom?

What are the implications for a participatory protocol for creatively translating community voices for a wider global audiences?

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Click on the image to bring up the interactive animation file and then click on the text.

Based on:

Davis, M., (2012) Graphic Design Theory, London: Thames and Hudson.

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My professional website gives details of the pictorial empowerment methodology used and global experience, together with numerous videos of workshops and songs I produced in different places (using Premiere and/or Flash)

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A world
where women and men are freed
from all forms of discrimination
so they can realise their full potential as agents for
empowerment, happiness and sustainability
of global humankind.

The GAMEchange family of empowerment methodologies adapt similar tools, facilitation and implementation processes to enable women and men from any background to identify and implement their own individual and collective strategies and communicate these to powerful stakehokders.

The community-led processes are linked with government, private sector and development stakeholders to develop guidelines and create advocacy networks to mainstream empowerment and social justice strategies at the centre of institutional practice and decision-making.

Empowering Enquiry action learning approach integrates and builds on complementarities between

to build produce and communicate information for individual and collective action, institutional change and policy advocacy.

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A world where women and men are freed from all forms of discrimination so they can realise their full potential as agents for empowerment, happiness and sustainability of global humankind. The GAMEchange family of empowerment methodologies adapt similar tools, facilitation and implementation processes to enable women and men from any background to identify and implement their own individual and collective strategies and communicate these to powerful stakehokders.

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Participatory Action Learning: Livelihood Planning by tribal women in West Bengal

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Community Voices and Context: Pakistan blogpost

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Community Voices and Context: Pakistan blogpost

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The community empowerment drawings from Pakistan are by women and men clients and staff participating in gender workshops for micro-finance programmes 2004 - 2005.

Many of the drawings are in the form of 'Diamond Tools' that I developed for identifying community criteria for assessing empowerment, 'happy families' and differences between women and men's poverty. The Diamond shape was chosen because if you just ask 'what does poverty mean here' people just say 'everyone is poor' or 'has no power'. In order to tease things out I started to ask 'what do the richest people look like?' 'what do the poorest people look like', the Diamond shape representing that one might think those are the fewest people, with most people in the middle. If it turns out most people are at the bottom, then that is a discussion point. For full discussion of the Diamond tool and its various uses see post on my professional blog: https://gamechangenetwork.org/gamechange-methodology/diagram-tools/diamonds The other drawing is a very early 'Road Journey' showing progress over time from bottom left to top right.

These drawings were done before I had developed a systematic process for participatory drawing where everyone has time to reflect and draw for themselves, and then everyone shares and contributes their ideas. The artists are unknown, and also there is limited documentation on the drawing process from Kashf where staff conducted the workshops without me.

Findings and analysis

The same themes recur on most diagrams from different places, and also by men as well as women:

Signs of empowerment and wealth are cars - sometimes driven by women or at least at women's disposal with a driver, mobile phones for women and men, love, affection and respect between husband and wife. In one case also flying in an aeroplane for women. Men also identified being able to educate their daughters (learning to use a video camera and computer) and being able to go out freely with their wives to cinema and elsewhere as being part of a happy family life.

Signs of disempowerment and poverty: violence by men and women (mother-in-law??), dirty unkempt hair and stress, too many unruly children, men's drug addiction, sickness and lack of medical care. Where these are quantified based on assessment of their frequency in the community these issues affect at least two thirds of the population/micro-finance clients.

There are a wide range of styles of figure drawing, even on the same diagrams and using the same media - markers, biro or pencil:

Some of the drawings have very expressive faces. Sometimes this is intentional - frowning, tears, smile. Other times this is from 'happy accident' where expressions are because of lack of drawing experience. But still relevant for my own adaptations either because they are so expressive or they make people laugh.

Type of clothes are important markers eg between rich and poor. But significantly women are rarely drawn with veils either by men or women, even where they were in reality wearing full burqa.

Selection of key drawings

What happened to my airplane?' story line ideas

In terms of storyline, the most poignant is the image of the woman lying dead in a cemetery with her children crying around her - so many women identified with that. Compared to the vision of flying in an aeroplane and the happy couple.

The animation could actually be quite simple. It could focus only on women, or more interestingly/accurately/less stereotypically include the visions and situation of men also expressed in Taraqee Foundation:

Scene 1 Visions: A foreground drawing of a woman with (probably unkempt hair) with a series of flashed up dream bubbles of aeroplanes and happy family etc. This could also include men's visions.

Scene 2 Reality: A sequence of what actually occurred : violence, too many children etc. These could just be sequential still images. Or a series of very short 3-5 frame looped animations. This could also include men's frustrations and the reasons for their descent into violence.

Scene 3 Tragic Result: The final shot of the cemetery with the children animated then replicated to show the numbers of women in that situation. There could also be an image of a man distraught at what he had done.

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The community empowerment drawings from Pakistan are by women and men clients and staff participating in gender workshops for micro-finance programmes 2004 - 2005. Many of the drawings are in the form of 'Diamond Tools' that I developed for identifying community criteria for assessing empowerment, 'happy families' and differences between women and men's poverty.

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Community Voices and Context: DRCongo blogpost

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Community Voices and Context: DRCongo blogpost

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The visuals I chose for my second set of creative translations are from stories already composed by farmers in two role plays - one by women and one by men - from a GALS gender training for Muungano Fair Trade coffee cooperative from DRC. I chose these images for in depth analysis because the role play narratives were very powerful and highlighted different things about women and men's perceptions - echoing many of the issues about gender inequalities in the coffee sector from Uganda.

This was also the only clear set of visuals I have of farmers' complete stories, as opposed to vignettes from drawings that I then interpret from interviews and other contextual information. The photos are of variable technical quality as they were taken in difficult bright lighting while I was focusing on facilitation and documenting the narrative. But many are very expressive and dynamic when edited as the basis for sketching and further development for animation. Importantly the photos provided a basis for developing my ability to draw local expressions and body language so that animations could abstract and clarify without resorting to stereotypes and potentially racist tropes. They also highlighted both the ways in which women and men perceive their own and the opposite gender - both seriously and as comedy.

These stories and effects of men's control of coffee money, alcoholism and adultery and corruption of officials are common across all the coffee sector in East Africa, including Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. So these role play stories have wider implications as advocacy in the coffee sector - Fair Trade as well as private sector companies.

For the Creative Translation: Tupa Tupa See:

The Role Plays

The workshop itself was held in Rwanda because there was too much bombing in the area the farmers came from. Also to link them with women and men in Rwanda who were doing the same methodology.

The role plays were to look at differences and similarities between women and men in how they perceived women and men's roles in coffee production and benefits from coffee. Participants were divided into one men's group and one women's group and given props so that women could play men and men could play women - adding a lot of laughter to the proceedings.

The idea was to combine the two role play stories into one, experimenting with different ways of sequencing of the storyline - as in Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story. Although I did not have good drawings or audio from this workshop, I did have some relevant media I could edit and add to increase the power and clarity of narrative.

The photos straight from the camera were of variable quality as I was taking them in difficult very bright light and shadow, and having to concentrate on facilitating and understanding translation of the role plays themselves for the job I was paid to do. Some of the most interesting images in terms of story were not always of the highest technical quality.

My first task was therefore to edit them in Lightroom to get more consistent colour and tone. And to make a selection for a narrative.

Women's Theatre original photos: women do all the work, men get the coffee money and spend it on alcohol and women in town. But fight the woman, not the man.

Men's theatre original photos: men use coffee money for drinking and gambling. This leads to fight and involvement of police. All the money - include mortgage of land - goes to paying off corrupt lawyers and police chiefs to get the men released from jail.

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The visuals I chose for my second set of creative translations are from stories already composed by farmers in two role plays - one by women and one by men - from a GALS gender training for Muungano Fair Trade coffee cooperative from DRC.

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Potential power of pictorial communication
‘A picture is worth a thousand words’

– clarification of complex ideas and concepts
– immediate and memorable communication
– more information conveyed in a much smaller space and  time
– resources accessible to all and more equal communication across inequalities of literacy and power
– reduced need for translation across national and international language barriers.

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Animation is a rapidly expanding and evolving industry, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are an increasing number of highly skilled professional animators and animation studios producing high quality animation for advocacy to a global audience. This includes powerful animations on gender equality and empowerment, including popular TV shows. Growth has accelerated as a result of COVID-19 pandemic, and is set to continue to expand.

Global animation inspiration: Pakistan
Global animation inspiration: India
Global animation inspiration: Africa

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Potential power of animation

– to enhance communication of the drawings and reduce the need for text through placing pictures in a narrative context informed by other information.
– to attract attention and increase the visual impact and memory through use of visual design and narrative strategies.
– to increase accessibility across educational, national and international barriers.
– to develop an animation approach that valorises and showcases the voices of those without power or formal education.
– thereby building mutual understanding and respect between those with and without power and education.

On-line potential

Moreover, the potential for on-line dissemination of these change strategies is likely to significantly increase:

- Rapidly growing numbers of men and women in rural as well as urban communities worldwide, particularly youth, now have smart phones and are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other national social networks.
- Rapid spread of technology and cheap on-line software and apps potentially enable people in communities as well as staff in development organisations to produce visual information for learning and advocacy.
- The COVID pandemic has accelerated use of on-line communication.

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What are community voices saying? Semiotics and Semiology

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What are community voices saying? Semiotics and Semiology

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Looking at the ways in which ‘meanings’ are constructed from visual symbols, focusing on relationships and elements in a conceptual system but (following postmodernism) exploring the challenges of potential plurality and instability of pictorial (as well as verbal) meaning across cultures and contexts.

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols in the process of production and communication of meaning (my definition). It provides a framework for investigating meanings of community drawings and diagrams. Looking at the ways in which ‘meanings’ are constructed from visual symbols, focusing on relationships and elements in a conceptual system but (following postmodernism) exploring the challenges of potential plurality and instability of pictorial (as well as verbal) meaning across cultures and contexts.

Semiotics includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy,  allegory,  metonymy,  metaphor,  symbolism, signification, and communication. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, structuralist, and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology and sociology.

Apart from being a branch of linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. The term ‘semiotics’ refers particularly to discussions in the United States where semiotics has been prevalent in discussions of Communication Theory, behavioural science and cybernetics. In Europe the term ‘semiology’ is common, referring to discussions around cultural meanings of signs in everyday life and political discourse, particularly in post-structuralist questioning of modernism, capitalism and universal meanings following the political upheavals in 1968.

Pictorial semiotics

Pictorial semiotics focuses on the properties of pictures in a general sense, and on how the artistic conventions of images can be interpreted through pictorial codes. Pictorial codes are the way in which viewers of pictorial representations seem automatically to decipher the artistic conventions of images by being unconsciously familiar with them.

Semiotics provides a technical language to describe how images are coded and decoded. Amongst other concepts semiotics uses connotation and denotation as a way of describing actual and intended meanings:

– Denotation describes the obvious, literal things in an image.
– Connotation describes the associations we have with that image. These associations are determined by our social, economic and personal perspectives.

Meanings also reside in visual dynamics:

– which images are chosen and what they stand for
– connotation of different types of line, shape, colour and texture
– where images are placed and the hierarchy of relationships between each of the signs. Placing something at the front or top of an image will create a different meaning from placing something at the back or bottom.

According to Swedish semiotician Göran Sonesson in (1988). “Methods and Models in Pictorial Semiotics” (1988 pp. 2–98.) pictures can be analysed by three models:

– narrative model, which concentrates on the relationship between pictures and time in a chronological manner as in a comic strip;
– rhetoric model, which compares pictures with different devices as in a metaphor;
– laokoon (or laocoon) model, which considers the limits and constraints of pictorial expressions by comparing textual mediums that use time with visual mediums that use space.

Sources consulted:

Barthes, R., (1967 (French 1964)) Elements of Semiology, New York: Hill and Wang.

Barthes, R., (2009 (French 1957)) Mythologies, London: Vintage Books.

Barthes, R., (2010 (French 1967)) The Fashion System, London: Vintage Books.

Barthes, R., (1977) Image Music Text, London: Fontana Press.

Barthes, R., (2000 (French 1980)) Camera Lucida, London: Vintage Books.

Cobley, P. & Jansz, L., (2010) Introducing Semiotics: A graphic guide, London: Icon Books Ltd.

Collins, J. & Mayblin, B., (2011) Introducing Derrida: A graphic guide, London: Icon Books Ltd.

Downs, S., (2012) The Graphic Communication Handbook, London, New York: Routledge.

Guiraud, P., (1975 (French 1971)) Semiology, London: Routledge.

Hall, S., (2012) This Means This, That Means That: a user’s guide to semiotics, London: Laurence King Publishing.

Horrocks, C. & Jevtic, Z., (2011) Introducing Baudrillard: A graphic guide, London: Icon Books.

Thody, P. & Piero, (2013) Introducing Barthes: A graphic guide, London: Icon Books Ltd.

To get: Sonesson, Göran (1988). “Methods and Models in Pictorial Semiotics”

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However, despite the power of many of the pictorial outputs to clarify concepts and exchange important ideas and experiences for participants, using these drawings to communicate to people who did not participate presents a number of challenges.

But what do the pictures say?
Pictorial communication challenges

‘symbols may be context-specific’ or specific to particular individuals

‘ the medium may not be the message’ : Many of the drawings and role plays are very immediate and expressive – including drawings by people who never held a pen before. But the drawing style and content may be by local availability of particular media (pencils/ biros/ markers, lined/blank/coloured paper, role play props). The participatory workshops are also very time-constrained where the aim is empowerment of participants, not ‘effective’ design. This means that the visual outputs may not do full justice to the messages and meanings they represent.

‘Just pretty pictures by illiterates’: Visual outputs are rarely in a form that is easily communicated to people who were not participating in the process. A lot of the impact of the community-level imagery is lost because lack of visual literacy by people with formal education – ie those in power – mean they often miss the deeper meanings and sophisticated analysis behind the drawings.

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Empowerment and poverty: issues in pictorial communication

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Empowerment and poverty: issues in pictorial communication

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Empowerment and poverty are highly contested concepts. Different people within 'communities' often perceive realities in very different ways. Outsiders - both development staff within countries as well as people from outside - inevitably base their assumptions and even questions based on their own subjective experiences and opinions as well as what they see and hear from people they talk to.

Much of my professional consultancy work with international development agencies has focused on development of participatory pictorial methodologies to help people in poor and marginalised communities to clarify and analyse their situation, assumptions and behaviour in order to identify strategies for change. The process and outputs of these participatory pictorial processes have proved extremely powerful in terms of facilitating understanding between participants from different communities and development agencies and governments to develop 'win-win' agendas for change.

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The quest for a visual communication practice that can 'translate' community voices into powerful voices for advocacy requires research frameworks and methods that correspond to the empowerment aims.

I propose a 'bricolage' approach to theory and methodology. 'Bricolage' comes from the French 'bricoler' which means 'creatively using materials left over from other projects to construct new artefacts' (Rogers, 2012 P1).:

Bricoleur: someone who brings together ideas about ways of working with different local materials as a means for physical as well as digital dissemination of images. Bricolage is potentially an open, playful, mixed media methodology for 'translations', 'cobbling together' different styles and cheap local materials for image making and combines these into interactive narrative information graphics. Aiming for a 'multicoloured cloth' a that people from different backgrounds and perspectives can unite around.

Sources consulted:

Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (eds.) (1999) The SAGE Handbook of qualitative research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Phillimore, J., Humphries, R., Klaas, F. & Knecht, M.,(2016) Bricolage: potential as a conceptual tool for understanding access to welfare in superdiverse neighbourhoods. IRIS Working Paper. Birmingham: Birmingham University. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-social-sciences/social-policy/iris/2016/working-paper-series/IRiS-WP-14-2016UPWEB3.pdf

Rogers, M.,(2012) Contextualising Theories and Practices of Bricolage Research. The Qualitative Report, 17, 1-17. University of New Brunswick, matt.rogers@unb.ca: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1704&context=tqr

Wibberley, C.(2012) Getting to Grips with Bricolage: A Personal Account. The Qualitative Report, 17, 1-8. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1760&context=tqr

Wibberley, C. (2017) Bricolage Research Methods. In E. A. Glasper & C. Rees (Eds.), Health Care Research: at a glance. Ch 52 pp106-1071. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307888252_Bricolage_Research_Methods

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Why this research? Questions and process

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Why this research? Questions and process

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However most animation produced by and for development agencies is disconnected from the community level. There is currently a profound social, educational and linguistic gap in development agencies between those who participate in and implement participatory processes on the ground and those employed specifically to design 'development messages'. This makes these messages seem 'top down' and externally imposed - even where people in the community might agree or even be more 'progressive'. It also means that the large numbers of people, particularly women, who have no formal education and do not speak majority languages are marginalised.

Common limitations of animation for development organisations

Top down 'professional design': Many visual materials produced for development agencies on empowerment and other topics are very standardised in appearance and simplistic in their messages. Their top-down (and often rather patronising) approach means that even important information risks being ignored.

Increasing exclusion The most 'professional' design relies on written diagrams - often in English or French! Large numbers of the most marginalised people - from minority ethnic groups, poorer backgrounds and many women - who cannot read and write and/or do not speak any of the major international languages. Many also do not speak the main national Asian or African languages.

For analysis of 'external voices' from development agencies see:

External Voices:
Gender Equality and Empowerment Animations

My own animation practice, like that of anyone else, will inevitably be at least partly subjective. However people participating in the participatory workshops are better able to understand and respond to a diversity of community points of view. The diversity of community voices can then be placed in the context of experiences elsewhere, questioning and/or reaffirming the analyses and policies of develop agencies and other powerful actors.

Ideally I would have been able to test my visual experimentation directly in communities myself to do in-depth ethnographic/ action/anthropological research. Initially in early 2019 I had envisaged a participatory action research process, designing and testing animations with people from different backgrounds at community level. Then presenting and discussing these with a range of global audiences to test different responses. However due to COVID-19 revisiting communities producing the selected community drawings or conducting a new process for this research were impossible within the timeframe. Feedback networks were also very curtailed as colleagues were very busy with even more challenges in their work.

I therefore changed my research design to focus more on developing my own 'Zemni animation voice'. I continue to work within a broad framework for Participatory Visual Communication practice, aiming for a detailed understanding of:

- what different people (women, men, rich, poor, those with and without power, with and without formal education, different ethnicities etc) in communities are trying to communicate.
- the ways in which these different messages are likely to be received by those in power.

A key aim of the research is:

Reflective practice: exploring and applying visual communication theories from graphic design/info-graphic theory and wordless narratives to improve my own visual work as creative translator.

I base assessment of my visual experimentation on a 'creative translation bricolage' framework of aesthetic and ethical prompts bringing together existing theoretical frameworks. I use this framework to identify, develop and test 'usefulness' of multiple experimental 'creative translations' as a portfolio of possibilities for future community and audience discussion as and when the contexts are more favourable.

!!Insert section on research approaches: inductive/deductive/abductive and design cycle

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This visual research project is driven by a professional transition to diversify my consultancy work for international development agencies from working directly at community level because hypersensitivity to air pollution now prevents me from travel abroad. My 'unique selling point' is my professional consultancy reputation and understanding of development concepts and global experience in many different contexts. Visual work from the UK can be usefully integrated into existing consultancy arrangements, not necessarily needing to stand on its own.

My initial research ideas in Assignment 1 covered a range of outcomes and media including infographics, logos, cartoons as well as animation, but with a focus on strategies for textless communication across language and social barriers. I decided to focus on animation because incorporating a time element into the community drawings provides the most engaging way of clarification of the messages that people from different audiences might want to look at. There is a growing demand for on-line visual materials linked to my consultancy - significantly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic - to reach large numbers of people more rapidly and sustainably and reduce budgetary and environmental costs of travel. Although there are a growing number of professional animation studios in many countries, most development agency animations are done by technical people in urban areas in international languages with written text with limited connections at community levels. They do not have the depth of development experience needed to design animations for my work.

My research process was not linear, and became progressively less linear as I worked through interconnected and interlinked questions, research on other animators and my own skills development and 'creative translation' experiments (see diagram above).

I started with limited animation experience, intending to focus on 'simple' stick animation of line drawings in Adobe Animate. Focusing on drawings, photographs and video from participatory community workshops on strategies for empowerment, gender justice and livelihood development in Africa (Uganda, DRCongo) and Asia (India, Pakistan) these animations aim:

to be visually driven so that they can be globally understood without relying on text or spoken languages, and thereby needing translation into hundreds of local languages.

communicate not only the style but also the meaning of the original sources.

be interesting to a range of audiences - including people who cannot read and write as well as international audiences with high levels of formal education and access to global visual cultures.

workable for an independent animator like myself who does not have the support of a large design or animation team and/or budget. And importantly for me to be RSI-friendly.

Then between Assignments 3 and 4 a number of things happened:
- the COVID-19 pandemic that put all my consultancy work on hold from March to August 2020. This included work on leadership that I had initially considered including.
- I signed up for a number of on-line animation courses because I had become frustrated by the limitations, and also RSI impacts, of working solely on an iPad. I decided that if I really wanted to understand animation to give me the flexibility of creativity, I would need to develop a more diverse software workflow. So I could focus the research back on issues of translation without getting continually sidetracked by the practicalities of iPad animation.

As I increased my understanding of basic animation principles, my bricolage research on global contemporary animation pointed to possibilities of other moving image and documentary animation approaches:

rotoscoping,

Stop Motion: puppets, cut-outs and use of physical media like charcoal and coffee

integration of video and video effects.

Working with a range of approaches enabled me not only to reduce issues of RSI, but importantly to incorporate a wider range of community source material in developing my own contemporary creative style. More effectively combining 'visual magic' by the animator with 'realities of life' from community voices.

Cross-cutting all these approaches are principles of visual narrative, visual dynamics and - in the case of animation - Disney principles continue to be relevant. But experimenting across a range of approaches has helped me to understand these cross-cutting issues better than just focusing on 2D animation.

Development of my own 'creative translation' animation voice continues to be a very steep learning curve. Producing final combined professional animations is outside the timeframe of this research, and also my current skill level. I focus on developing a framework of 'creative translation' prompts and an experimental portfolio of alternative stylistic vignettes before arriving at draft animations for future community and client feedback post-COVID. Clarifying also what community inputs I might need to ask from colleagues on the ground in future, what further animation skills and research I myself might need and/or in what form I could hand over draft concept/narrative visuals for final development by other animators.

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Visual Research Process: Review and Assignments

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This visual research project is driven by a professional transition to diversify my consultancy work for international development agencies from working directly at community level because hypersensitivity to air pollution now prevents me from travel abroad. My 'unique selling point' is my professional consultancy reputation and understanding of development concepts and global experience in many different contexts.