Blog Assignement Seven: Animation Deconstruction

For this post I will be comparing and contrasting stills from Paper Rad's found-footage based psychedelic art film Trash Talking and the animated music video created for Radiohead's "Paranoid Android". The stills are below:

          The two stills demonstrate the very contrasting uses of color between the two pieces. In the Paper Rad still all of the hues are bright and fluorescent. The only muted color is that of the bricks, and even that contains some brighter patches to keep it consistent. These bright colors are one of the many devices Paper Rad use in Trash Talking to give the viewer a feeling of sensory overload. They attempt to fill the screen almost entirely with the most bizarre detritus of modern culture in the most dizzying array of contrasting hues possible to make the viewing experience almost uncomfortable. In the Radiohead piece however nearly all the hues are pastels or otherwise saturated, with the exception of the couch which is nearly the same bright fluorescent red seen in the Paper Rad piece. The saturated colors in this piece are often used to make even commonplace objects seem disgusting some way. In fact, the primary goal of the “Paranoid Android” video is to disgust the viewer by showing them a cartoonized version of modern life portrayed in ugly hues like mustard yellow and puke green.

         The Paper Rad still displays much more movement than the Radiohead still. The protagonist is obviously walking across screen, which we can tell by the position of his legs, but also by the position of his arms which are doing the parallel movement to walking, an exaggerated swing. If one were to play this clip on they would see the overlapping movement of his walking in the bouncing of his lump like body up and down. This gives a notion of weight to his top-heavy frame, which often keeps bouncing after he stops walking in later scenes. The Radiohead frame on the other hand shows no motion at all, showing the apathy of the video’s protagonist who spends a considerable amount of time sitting around in the early parts of the piece. There are no parallel or overlapping movements here as there was no primary movement. His slumped position on the floor gives a feeling of weight to his frame, though it isn’t implied very strongly without an actual motion.