I have chosen to do my Appraising Animation on Miwa Matreyek's work Factory. The website above is where you can watch Factory for yourself.
Imagery:
Factory, is a repetitive and surreal video. Through the video it shows how Miwa Matreyek, interprets going to work. People are shown repeating simple tasks over and over again. In the opening scene it shows the factory in black, white and grey. Above the factory there is smoke pouring out and blips that are carrying ships. The hands inside repeatedly picking up nothing then putting it down. It shows people working the huge machinery, which is oversized and shows the surrealism in this video. There are many scenes that show some sort of repetition in the opening scenes.
This was shown when the people walk in they all walk in almost the same way and are wearing the same boring uniform. Then it shows repetition with the people when they are doing all their different jobs like the women who is controlling the hand, making it do the exact same thing over and over again. The main backgrounds used in throughout the film are: outside the factory, inside the factory and the control room where they control the machinery. The machinery in some of the background scenes looks like it shouldn’t be there for example the blender and the huge binoculars.
Overall Impression:
The overall impression of the Factory would be that the people shown in the film are going to work, but the video is very strange because of the surrealism threaded through it. The audience’s mood would be affected by the sound / music played and by the colours used. This affects the mood of the video because it would be boring going the same thing over and over again and sounds as if the people by the colour scheme don’t like coming to work since it is very repetitive. They look depressed by the colours by only showing blacks, whites and greys in the factory this would be very pleasant to look at every day when you go to work would it? It creates an unreal reality where the tools used are bigger then the people handling them and where there are no colours.
Visual language cues, sound cues and editing:
The visual language used in this video uses colour to make the film come across as boring to some people or interesting to others since it is mostly made of different shades of blacks and whites. The sounds played in each changes and is different from the sound before, this music is mostly made of the mechanical noises the machines make which gives the impression that this film is suppose to show that the factory workers do their jobs well. While the people in the video are working it shows the audience that the factory needs every worker to do their job to perfection for the factory to run. That is probably why their movements are so repetitive.
The editing of Factory would be quite involved because from the look of the scenes in this video it looks like most of the backgrounds are hand drawn. After the hand drawn backgrounds the objects and people in the foreground would have to be edited in. This is shown in the scenes where the workers are going to work as well as when they are actually working. Miwa Matreyek has used in her animation Factory scale, repetition, movement, line, unity, shape and tone to emphasis the video. All this visual language adds depth and creativity to the work and helps for the audience to understand what would be going on in the film. Miwa Matreyek has used movement, scale, shape, repetition and tone to show how the jobs themselves are important and to grab our attention. This is contrasted with the machinery in the background, which makes it look believable but somehow out of place.
