Paper 1 The Nonexistent Fairy

Ever since I was a kid, my parents would tell me if I were to ever put one of my fallen teeth underneath my pillow and then go to sleep, the TOOTH FAIRY would come and give me money while I sleep. At first, I was in disbelief of the existence of the tooth fairy but after witnessing money somehow appear underneath my pillow multiple times when putting my tiny teeth under my pillow, I started to believe. But oh boy, was I in for a surprise after believing the tooth fairy was real for many years.

Let’s start from the beginning. The first time I ever heard of the tooth fairy was in the second grade and we had to read a book about this fairy. Looking at the cartoonish drawing of the tooth fairy from that book made me think that it wasn’t actually real but as I got up to look at my other classmates, I was surprised to see the astonished and amazed faces of my classmates as they started believing in the existence of this fairy. In doubt if the tooth fairy was really real, I proceeded to question my parents if it was or not in fact real. To my surprise, they too also told me they believe that the tooth fairy was real. My parents then told me how the tooth fairy would come to my bed every time I put one of my fallen teeth underneath my pillow in my sleep and put money in it. At first I was skeptical. I kept telling myself that I would be crazy if I started to believe it was real too but after putting one of my teeth that fell off underneath my fluffy Star Wars pillow one night, what came underneath my pillow shocked me. There was actually money underneath the pillow! Seeing this happen for the first time gave me mixed emotions as I was confused about how the money appeared underneath my pillow and being so happy that the money actually appeared. Then from that day, I started seeing the same thing happen many more times and I too eventually became a believer in the existence of the tooth fairy.

As days and then months eventually went by, I would be so excited everytime my teeth would fall off. Seeing my teeth not only meant that I would be getting money, the tooth fairy would also be visiting me as I slept. But at one point, I decided that I wanted to meet the tooth fairy in person and thank them for all the money I received because I wasted it all on ice cream. But I had one problem, how was I going to meet and talk to the tooth fairy if I was asleep? After pondering for a bit, I then thought of one solution to this problem… I will not be sleeping at all the day my tooth falls. The plan itself sounds easy but as a second grader that has to go to school every weekday morning until the afternoon, this meant that if the plan failed, it was all for nothing. But with the resolve to meet the tooth fairy, I decided that missing a night’s worth of sleep would be incomparable to the tooth fairy so I went forward with my plan. After making this plan, I then came up with other ideas such as taking multiple naps before I pretended to sleep or drink a lot of sugary drinks to help me meet the fairy. I eventually decided to stick with taking multiple naps and then came D-Day. 

The day my tooth fell off I realized that today was the day I got to meet the tooth fairy. Just the thought of this encounter got me so excited as I started to jump around my room in celebration of my fallen tooth. After calming down, I came into a thought that what if the tooth fairy looked as scary as the boogeyman other kids in my class would talk of recently. Just the thought alone of imagining a creepy looking fairy scared me so I stopped thinking about what it would look like. A couple hours later, after witnessing my tooth coming off, I finally arrived home from a long and boring day of school. As soon as I arrived home, I completed all my homework that would be due the next day and I immediately went to take a nap many times that one day. Throughout those multiple naps, it felt like I was time traveling as I woke up to look at the sky go instantly from a bright blue to an orangish, a mixture of red and pink and then finally pitch black with stars becoming more visible after every nap. After the final nap, I became restless realizing that the time had almost come to meet the tooth fairy. Then after eating with my family for dinner and talking to them about my day, I proceeded to go to my room and came to a realization that it was now or never.

Now that it was around the time everyone was asleep. I silently got up and moved around my room to find my flashlight that I took from the garage and brought it back to my bed with me. The first couple minutes felt like hours as I was bored just laying on my bed just waiting for the tooth fairy to arrive but I persisted. As hours passed, I started to become unhappy to think that the tooth fairy wouldn’t ever come because it knows that I’m awake but then suddenly, my door started to fidget and then finally open. Seeing this, I immediately pretended that I was dead asleep as I was holding my flashlight underneath my blanket. As the creaks from walking around my room got louder, my hand started to shake. Slowly opening my eyes in the pitch darkness of my room, I could barely make out who was putting the money underneath my pillow but as my eyes started to adjust to the dark, I flashed the light to the tooth fairy that was in my room. I discovered that the one putting the money underneath my pillow this entire time was my PARENTS!

I was speechless. I felt betrayed and lied to after all this time that the tooth fairy wasn’t real! At that moment, I bursted into tears screaming that the tooth fairy was never real on my bed as my parents were caught trying to put the money under my pillow. After that night, my parents tried to come up with an excuse as to why they were there that night and that the tooth fairy was just busy. However, I then stopped believing that this tooth fairy was real.

This is the first assignment I chose to showcase because this was the first paper that was assigned to the class and I learned how to develop strategies for drafting, collaborating, revising and editing. This can be said due to us being required to do peer reviews twice with our classmates so we can further improve on our papers.

Paper 2 Animal Rights Movement 

Example 1 (They want to live):

Rhetorical Situation

There have been countless cruel animal testing practices that are still currently being used today and is the main reason as to why the animal rights march occurred in London. The march would include locations such as the world headquarters of Unilever where animal cruelty practices get signed off and then eventually the London HQ of Cargill where they’re responsible to animal cruelty in their slaughter houses and factories.

Rhetorical Triangle

From this picture, the speaker would be the protester that is attending the london animal rights march. They’re presenting themselves as a individual who is against animal cruelty and is attending the march in hopes of change for animal rights. Because of this peaceful protest, the speaker can be seen using the rhetorical device euphemism on their protest sign. This can be said due to the fact that the speaker could’ve written that “They don’t want to die” but instead wrote “They want to live” to make their message less offensive. The intended audience would be the world headquarters of Unilever and other major industries that are involved with animal cruelty.

Rhetorical Strategy 

The rhetorical strategy used for this speaker can be Aristotle’s 3 appeals. Aristotle’s 3 appeals can be depicted here because Ethos can be seen when the speaker included euphemism to their message making it more appropriate for their audience to view and understand. Logos can be seen when the protest sign shows a drawing a sign of a cow with blood all over it showing that the speaker is against animal cruelty primarily due to the ways cows are being treated at the slaughter house. Pathos can also be seen by the drawing of the cow. The speaker wants the audience to feel sad and enraged at industries that continue to mistreat animals such as cows in their slaughter houses.

Effective Or Not Effective

For this example, I feel like it is an effective use of rhetoric because when using euphemism and Aristotle’s 3 appeals on a protest, it makes their protest sign an eye catching and can get the audience to feel the same way as the speaker towards this topic, animal cruelty.

Example 2 (Fishes are friend, not food):

Rhetorical Situation

The picture shown for this example is a picture of a protest sign taken at the same animal rights movement march. Not only do they go to the other two previous locations stated in the previous rhetorical situation, they also proceed to go to the offices of Marine Stewardship Council to hold them accountable for their repetitive actions of brutal fishing that in turn damages the ocean.

Rhetorical Triangle

The speaker for this example would be the individual protesting against the cruelty towards fishes. The argument that they’re making would be to stop cruelty to the fishes that are being caught. The speaker uses personification showing that fishes can also be like a human when humans make friends with each other by saying that fishes can be friends. The intended audience is also similar to the first example as they both target large industries that take advantage of animals which eventually lead up to animal cruelty.

Rhetorical Strategy 

The rhetorical strategy seen being used for this example would be Burke’s ideas about identification. To further develop on this matter, the speaker can be seen trying to persuade their audience that the fishes aren’t supposed to be eaten, but instead become friends just like how humans are with friends.

Effective Or Not Effective

This example is somewhat effective in my opinion. The reason for this is because the speaker could have drawn a human next to the fishes to show that they can live with each other and not get consumed by the other. With that additional piece of drawing, the use of personification and Burke’s ideas about identification could be better used and become more effective 

This is the second assignment I chose to showcase because I learned how to compose texts that uses strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation and how to analyze different rhetorical situations.

Stop Motion Animation

From Motion Graphics to 3D Animation, it can be observed that there are many styles of animation that can be filmed, however one of the styles of animation that I have chosen to research about will be stop motion animation.

 Now what is stop motion animation? This is a style of animation used to create the illusion of movements or performances that is recorded over multiple exposed frames of film. To do this, one would usually use their hands to manipulate the object or puppet in the vision of the film many times. In other words, stop motion animators would create a moving performance between frames without ever being seen on film, this would create the illusion of independent continuous movement. Not only do stop motion animators have to create these moving performances between frames, they would also have to remember the previous frame and overall scene while the characters play their role. Since films run 24 frames a second, making a short 40 minute film would require over 50,000 frames. The animators would also have to check if the objects or puppets are firmly positioned, the lighting is correct and if the camera angle is also correct because one little mistake can ruin the animation. Stop motion animation is a very slow and laborious process as it takes a huge amount of resources and many hours to even make a short film which requires animators to have a ton of patience yet to this day, stop motion animation is still in use.

After scouring through the internet, I discovered that dating back to almost the 1890’s, stop motion made its first appearance with the short film, The Humpty Dumpty Circus by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith. However, the discovery of how the technique was discovered is still unknown to this day. The Humpty Dumpty Circus is “a short film made using dolls with jointed limbs to simulate the movements of circus acrobats. Sadly, this is a lost film, and no verified stills or parts of the film have been recovered” (3). Though it may be unrecoverable, it was acknowledged to be the first since its commercial release being the first of its kind. From this I also found out that since the release of the first short film of The Humpty Dumpty Circus, J. Stuart Blackton created another film titled The Haunted Hotel. The release of that film became a huge hit as “it showed moving furniture and demonstrated the basic technique of object animation” (5). By showcasing the idea of moving furniture in object animation, it inspired other animators to do the same thing as there was an increase in films producing stop motion as a film making technique.

Ever since stop motion animation first appeared, there have been major changes and developments to this style of animation. And one of these first changes was using puppets instead of objects.

The idea of using puppets for stop motion would’ve never appeared until 1910 when Wladyslaw Starewicz created his first short film Lucanus Cervus with insects as puppets. The use of puppets was considerably difficult because “The creative team must organize their daily work with the technical and visual requirements of the film. If you are unsatisfied with it, the whole crew has to reshoot from the start. Remember that puppets are moved frame by frame, so you can only see your final result on screen when filming is completed” (4) . However, with these struggles came a reward which was being able to bring out expressive humanlike movements and actions out of stiff and soulless puppets for this type of film. This new idea of using puppets instead of objects in 1910 led the way for many puppet animation films such as the film Kubo and the Two Strings. 

Another notable person who contributed to the development of stop motion animation would be Willis O’Brien. His production of King Kong in 1933 influenced many aspiring stop motion animators such as Ray Harryhausen who would then produce visual effects for many films which were considered to be some of the best stop motion animated work in the world to this day. Looking back to the first appearance of stop motion, it can be said that it developed and improved over time with a variety of techniques.

Aside from object motion animation and puppet animation, there has been development of new techniques since the appearance of stop motion animation. Some of these techniques are clay animation, cutout motion and silhouette animation.

“Will Vinton, the creator of famous 1980s TV show California Raisins, pioneered modern day stop-motion and claymation techniques” (6). Clay animation is one of the most difficult stop motion techniques due to it requiring the stop motion animator to be able to resculpt between frames rather than repositioning the object. To produce a clay animation film, one would need to first create their character that is made out of clay. Once that is done, creating a storyboard or a shot list is the second step due to the amount of time required in order to film. Doing this will make it easier to plan and move the characters to tell the narrative. The third step would be to gather tools required to film the animation and extra clay just in case something happens to the model. The fourth step would be setting up the scene. The fifth step would be to start the shoot. The sixth step would then be to begin shooting frame by frame. The last step would be to stitch the film together making sure every film is correct. This is extremely difficult as the animator needs to be competent in their clay making skills to be able to create many objects consistently just for a single frame such as the character’s body and the faces and actions they would perform. However with this long and difficult process, the animator is then rewarded by being able to showcase a more realistic stop motion film as they can manipulate how the body moves and the facial expressions of the characters in the film.

Cutout Animation is another technique used to make stop motion and it can be said that it’s the easiest technique to use in order to produce a film. This can be said because of this technique being the most basic and time effective. Being time effective is what separates cutout animation from the rest since the animator doesn’t need to have a lot of resources for paper cutout animation because they can always reuse the cutouts. Quirino Cristiani was the first person to create a cutout animation which was titled El Apóstol, however the film was lost after a fire destroyed Cristiani’s studio in 1926. One of the most popular cutout animation films is South Park.

Out of the many techniques of stop motion animation, the last technique that will be discussed will be silhouette animation. The animator who created this technique is Lotte Reiniger during the 1920s. The Adventures of Prince Achmed was one of Reiniger’s most influential works when it came to the development of silhouette animations. Just like clay animation, the steps to producing a silhouette animation are similar. This technique is also similar to the cutout animation as they both are 2D. Just like cutout animations, silhouette animations were also somewhat easy to use to produce a stop motion animation due to the animator only needing paper cutouts and lighting. The main difference between these two techniques would be that for silhouette animations, the characters are backlit and only visible as silhouettes.  

Nowadays, there are many ways stop motion animation can be used for. Some uses can range from conveying a story to even teaching people.

Conveying a story is one of the most popular ways for stop motion to be used since there’s a bunch of films such as Coraline, The Boxtrolls, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Shaun the Sheep, Frankenweenie and many more. These films not only conveyed a story that the animator wanted to tell, it also entertained the viewers. Children were not the only ones to be entertained by these types of films but adults were as well, making stop motion animation films to be a hit.

The second way stop motion animation can be used is to teach people. However compared to entertaining and conveying a story, this method of use isn’t as popular. Though it may be unpopular, there was an experiment of this when used in class, “Children were given the choice of the topic and this opened up possibilities. Moreover, as the scenario building was a collaborative effort it gave them the opportunity to incorporate different ideas into creating an innovative, for them, storyline. Further, they had to use their imagination with intention to find their way around a problem; how to communicate their idea, how to make sure others could understand what they wanted to say, how to imply something without really showing it, and so on. When children were asked to say what they learnt during this project, drafting and experimenting in multiple ways were frequently mentioned” (2). From this, letting children develop their own stop motion animation helped them develop their imagination and taught them how to be creative since this assignment let them decide what kind of story they wanted to tell and how they would want to tell it while working with their classmates.

There was another event where there was a case study done to help students develop mechanistic reasoning with the use of stop motion animation. It was then explained that “Ten ninth-grade students used stop-motion software to create an animation of projectile motion. Retrospective think-aloud interviews were conducted to investigate how the construction of a stop-motion animation induced the students’ mechanistic reasoning” (1). With the assignment given to the ten ninth-grade students and the interviews, it was later shown that after being able to complete the assignment, the “students eventually exhibited mechanistic reasoning including abstract concepts, e.g., not directly observable agents. Students who reached the highest level of mechanistic reasoning, i.e., chaining, demonstrated deeper conceptual understanding of content” (1). This shows that with the use of stop motion animation, it could help teach students mechanistic reasoning or provide a deeper understanding of it for some individuals.

All in all, with the invention of stop motion animation, it has provided many things for those influenced by it. For example, it could help with creativity in children and maybe even teach students a topic they couldn’t understand. Some types of stop motion animation can be clay animation, objection motion animation, cutout animation, silhouette animation and puppet animation. After learning about the many types of techniques of stop motion animation and what it could provide for people, I learned that this is only a portion as to what stop motion is and what it can be used for.

Intentional Rhetorical Choices

1. Rhetorical Questioning: I asked the question “Now what is stop motion animation?” in order to start off the paper and I don’t expect people to answer this question in the beginning because this is what my paper is about. (Used one time)
2. Simile: I stated that “Just like clay animation, the steps to producing a silhouette animation are similar.” to show that the process of making silhouette animation and clay animation are similar. I also stated that “Just like cutout animations, silhouette animations were also somewhat easy to use to produce a stop motion animation due to the animator only needing paper cutouts and lighting”. I said this to also show that silhouette animations aren’t only similar to one other type of animation but multiple kinds.

 (Used twice)

3. Metaphor: I said that “However, with these struggles came a reward which was being able to bring out expressive humanlike movements and actions out of stiff and soulless puppets for this type of film” to show that puppets can also move like humans if done properly when filming a stop motion animation. (Used one time)
4. Climax: From the very beginning, I wrote that “From Motion Graphics to 3D Animation, it can be observed that there are many styles of animation that can be filmed, however one of the styles of animation that I have chosen to research about will be stop motion animation”. This introduction builds up to what my topic will be about. (Used one time)

Ethos: I used Ethos to make my paper come off as more reliable and objective by gathering both academic and non-academic sources for this paper.

Logos: I used Logos to prove my point in some cases such as writing that stop motion animation can help teach students about mechanistic reasoning and then I brought up the results by citing some results.

Pathos: I used pathos when I wrote “However with this long and difficult process, the animator is then rewarded by being able to showcase a more realistic stop motion film as they can manipulate how the body moves and the facial expressions of the characters in the film” to help show that the struggling efforts of the animator will eventually pay off.

References
(1) Bachtiar, Rayendra Wahyu, et al. “Stimulating Mechanistic Reasoning in Physics Using Student-Constructed Stop-Motion Animations.” Journal of Science Education and Technology, vol. 30, no. 6, Dec. 2021, pp. 777+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A714980397/AONE?u=cuny_ccny&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=73e96939. Accessed 4 Dec. 2022.

(2) Pavlou, Victoria. “Art Technology Integration: Digital Storytellying as a Transformative Pedagogy in Primary Education.” International Journal of Art & Design Education, vol. 39, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. 195–210. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.1111/jade.12254.

(3) John September 28, & John. (n.d.). Stop motion animation: A brief history. Central Rappahannock Regional Library. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.librarypoint.org/blogs/post/stop-motion-history/#:~:text=The%20very%20first%20stop%20motion,the%20movements%20of%20circus%20acrobats. 

(4) Ank, S., Sophiea AnkView All PostsSophiea Ank is an animator, & Posts, V. A. (2022, December 1). 9 interesting facts about puppet animation and its history. BuzzFlick. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://buzzflick.com/puppet-animation/ 

(5) Stopmo. (2016, June 4). The history of stop motion – in a Nutshell. Stop Motion Magazine. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://stopmotionmagazine.com/history-stop-motion-nutshell/ 

(6) What is claymation? how clay animation works | adobe. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/animation/discover/claymation.html

This is the third assignment I decided to showcase because I learned how to use citation conventions, locate sources in the library’s databases/archives and on the Internet while being able to check their credibility, accuracy, timelines and bias. Just like the other papers, I was also able to develop strategies for revising and editing this paper as there was 2 peer reviews when forming this paper.