Animated Ancient China II

This is part of my submission for the "Social Computing in 2020" - Bluesky Innovation Competition.

This short, simple animation is meant to represent the possibilities of animated, non-lingual knowledge transmission. The subject matter is bronze metallurgy in Western Zhou-era China, along with some reference to environmental conditions and social hierarchies. It was created using Inkscape and GAP. I'm no professional animator, I know that, but I think that it does a decent job of expressing complex processes to an audience regardless of native language.

Some notes on the animation:
* The blue box that pops up before zooming in on the river is a mock-up representing Ecosystems Services, in this case the availability of good soil, water, fish and forests.
* The peasant is panning for tin, which might have been one way that early Bronze-Age cultures acquired this precious metal.
* The "Early Shang Bronze Foundry" and text represents an unmade part of the animation. Presumably, users would contribute their own animations and could insert new ones in the way we currently insert new articles in Wikipedia. Ultimately, you could have an entire animated Wikipedia that describes complex processes and interrelations without reference to written language.
* The polearm is a 'Ge' dagger-axe in use at the time.
* That's a bronze mirror.
* The replacement of the small bowl with a large tripod visible to a mass of people represents Jessica Rawson's 'Ritual Revolution'.
* One of the guards has had his foot cut off, based on a well-known bronze vessel depicting a gate guard with his foot cut off. This was a form of punishment in the Western Zhou legal system.
* The various info boxes that pop up at the end represent other possible animations for the viewer to follow that intersect with the final scene.

The idea here is to focus not on individual persons or structures, but on processes, such as acquiring resources necessary for bronze metallurgy and developing complex social hierarchies.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Bronze
• Age
• Digital
• Humanities
• Computing
• Commons
• Based
• Peer
• Collaboration
• Ancient
• China
• animation
• cartoon
• arts
• software
• technology
• cartoons
• animation art

[mididoctors]

got some gentle sounds for you