Following on our Animal as Object assignment for Animals, People, and Those In Between, we were asked to create another piece adopting the point of view of our chosen animal. Here’s the project brief:

5. Animal Subject
Due date: Mar 24
Format: pdf or other form (paper, film, web site) AND character model sheet (pdf)

You will take your “Animal Object” character, and flip the script by investigating the subjective point of view of the animal you chose.

What is it like being inside this animal? What is its view point? How does it see– or experience –its environment? What – or how – is he/she reacting to the events surrounding him/her? How do those events appear, in terms of scale, form, size, sharpness, color, time?

Drawing on the writings of Üexkull (the idea of umwelt), and the readings on research into animal minds, and / or projected first-person narration (Haskell’s short story, Coe’s “Pitt’s Letter”), you may chose to be anthropomorphic, or you may NOT be, as you see fit.

The purpose of this assignment, coupled with the last one, is to explore how character is made from different points of view, and how your crafting of that character expresses your point of view.

Format:
First-person point of view (the “I” form)
Format can be comic, drawings, video, sound, etc.

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent lots of time learning about cloning and reading about how like Missy Mira is. When it comes down to it, though, Mira is still just a dog; she couldn’t care less that she’s a clone.

Postmortem:

I showed the video in class, and got a few laughs. I agree with Marina’s critique, though: I got my point point across, and Mira’s subjectivity comes across (especially in oposition to the object piece), but the movie plays a little flatly. We brainstormed on ways to vary the levels of the video, and I gathered a few ideas of how to improve it. Part of the problem is the quality of the original video– if it were a little clearer and the audio were a little less muffled the subtitles might pop a bit more. A closer analysis of the human language, and a closer look into Mira’s body language could help, too. The most successful moment in the video is the exclamation and recognition when Mira’s name is mentioned– I’d like to bring that even further forward. We talked about the idea of adding extra audio or cutting in other footage, but what I like about the piece is its simplicity. The deadpan delivery of the plain subtitles is the video’s strength, but maybe if I framed the movie with more genre-specific credits the contrast between the cloning talk and the dog language would be a bit more intense.