RISING UP: ACTIONS AS LOUD AS WORDS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
MARION ROSAS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Department of Digital Arts  
and the Robert D. Clark Honors College  
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  
Bachelor of Fine Arts 
 
June 2016 
 
An Abstract of the Thesis of 
Marion Rosas for the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts 
in Digital Arts from the School of Architecture and Allied Arts to be taken June 2016 
Title: Rising Up: Actions as Loud as Words 
Colin Ives 
This dissertation organizes my discoveries of how motions and actions of the 
body complement the conscious mind and serves as an innate mode for communicating 
the human experience. The first chapter of this document provides an analysis of the 
nature of consciousness, introduces the mind-body debate, and argues that verbal 
language has been an inefficient method for conveying the complexity of the human 
experience. It evaluates a number of accounts that have attributed the comprehension of 
experience to the motion involved in body language, and concludes with an analysis of 
the ways in which film mimics the body in order to convey this experience. The second 
chapter serves in this thesis document to describe my process in creating Rising Up, and 
to assess the ways in which my research and inspirations influence the animation's 
major scenes. 
ii 
  
iii  
 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
I would like to thank professors Colin Ives, Ying Tan, Roxann Prazniak, and 
Craig Hickman of the University of Oregon, for their guidance, patience, and feedback 
throughout this thesis process, for their careful review of this thesis document, and for 
their participation at the thesis defense. I would also like to thank my family for their 
support, in particular my parents for providing me with the opportunity to attend the 
BFA Digital Arts program at the University of Oregon, and for continuously believing 
in me even in the moments when I did not believe in myself. We do not thank our 
parents enough for all of the sacrifices that we know that they make for us and for all of 
the ones that they make even without our knowing. Finally, I dedicate this thesis project 
to my grandparents—Olivia y Ramiro, Rory y David—for the purity of their hearts and 
for believing, unconditionally, in the best of me.  
  
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Table of Contents 
Chapter 1: The Enigma of Consciousness 1 The Mind-Body Debate in The Invention of Morel 1 Consciousness in Motion 3 Motion in Language 5 William Kentridge on the Mental ‘Nebula’ 5 Corporeal Associations 6 Our Psychological Reaction to Motion 9 Intention in Motion 9 Interpretation of Motion 10 Motion Language in Cinema 11 
Chapter 2: The Thesis Project 16 A Personal Motivation 16 Statement of Intention 17 Thesis Argument 18 Major Inspirations 18 
Millennium Actress 18 
Anomalisa 19 
The Invention of Morel 20 
It’s Such a Beautiful Day 20 William Kentridge 21 Amy Cuddy 22 
Chapter 3: Materials and Process 23 Description of Materials 23 A Screenplay without Dialogue 24 A Storyboard 24 The Creation Process 26 Experimentation with Modes of Animation 26 
  
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Animating Larger Scenes 26 Compiling the Scenes 27 A Question of Audio 27 
Chapter 4: An Analysis of Rising Up 29 The Living Room Scene 29 The Bathroom Scene 30 Self-Reflection: Consciousness in Action 30 Hyperventilation 30 The Memory Scenes 31 Lost in the Crowd 31 Anxiety Hands 32 The Tunnel Scenes 33 The Final Scene 34 Silent Screaming 34 The Distant Figure 34 
Conclusion 37 Figures 38 Tables 42 
Bibliography 44 
 
  
  
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List of Accompanying Materials  
1. Rising Up: The Storyboard (digital): http://www.marionrosas.com/new-
index-2/#/new-gallery-2/ 
2. The Animation: http://www.marionrosas.com/new-index-2/#/new-
gallery-4/ 
 
 
 
  
  
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List of Figures  
Figure 1: Materials Used 38 
Figure 2: The Process of Creating Rising Up 38 
Figure 3: Shots from The Living Room Scene 39 
Figure 4: Shots from The Bathroom Scene 39 
Figure 5: Shots from The Memory Scenes, Lost in the Crowd 39 
Figure 6: Shots from The Memory Scenes, Anxiety Hands 39 
Figure 7: Shots from The Tunnel Scenes 39 
Figure 8: Shots from The Final Scene 40 
Figure 9: Millennium Actress 40 
Figure 10: The Invention of Morel 40 
Figure 11: Anomalisa 40 
Figure 12: It’s Such A Beautiful Day 41 
Figure 13: William Kentridge 41 
Figure 14: Amy Cuddy speaking at her TED Talk 41 
 
 
 
 
  
  
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List of Tables  
Table 1: The UP and DOWN Orientational Metaphors 42 
Table 2: The Basic Techniques for Animating My Hand Drawings 43 
 
 
 
  
 
Chapter 1: The Enigma of Consciousness 
The Mind-Body Debate in The Invention of Morel 
 The Invention of Morel, by the Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares, is a 
novel about a fugitive’s experience on an island populated by ghosts—or rather 
projections of the island’s previous visitors—and his interactions with these images. 
When the fugitive begins to see other people on the island, he cannot help but study 
them from afar even though he fears that they are part of a conspiracy organized to 
capture him and take him back to Venezuela. These people fascinate him despite their 
potential danger. The fugitive—whose name we never learn—falls in love with the 
projection of a woman, Faustine, and observes her movements until he gathers enough 
courage to speak to her. When he finally does, she ignores him, never even turning an 
eye toward him. While he strives to attract her attention, he does not know that she is 
merely a projection of a woman that used to exist on the island. She cannot hear him 
because of the parallel dimension in which she exists. In response to the capricious 
appearances of these ghosts, the man writes to himself, “[…] there are no hallucinations 
or imaginings here: I know these people are real—at least as real as I am”1. As the 
mystery unfolds, the reader learns that the character is truly alone on the island, and has 
always been alone, but the power that these projections have to mimic real life cause the 
fugitive to feel as though he is not. He trusts that they exist as much as he trusts the 
reality of his own existence because their actions resemble his own.  
 Morel—the leader of this vacation party that came to spend a week on the island 
long ago—invented a machine that would record all of the actions that his friends made  
1 Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 11.  
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throughout the week. It then created a projection of their actions to replay on the island 
forever, even after his friends had died from the radiation that the machine discharged. 
The fugitive learns the secret of this immortality machine, and submits himself to it in 
an attempt to unite with Faustine—to enter the dimension of her awareness. He knows 
his plan may fail because he belongs to a different era. Understanding this risk, he asks 
in his final journal entry, “To the person who reads this diary and then invents a 
machine that can assemble disjoined presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and 
me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety”1. The 
Invention of Morel explores the nature of consciousness by examining what it means to 
be conscious. It questions the aspects of the mind that sets mankind apart from the 
levels of consciousness exhibited in other creatures. What sets the fugitive apart from 
these ghosts that react to each other and emote like he does? How does his life differ 
from the lives of these artificially generated projections? 
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s The Primacy of Movement examines the 
phenomenological ties comparing the evolutionary development of movement in 
species and its relation to language. She asks the question, “How does consciousness 
arise in matter?”2. The projected inhabitants of the island are arguably not conscious—
they are just replicas of real people that once existed, ghosts without tangible bodies—
yet they emote like real people, they move freely and independently like real people, 
they exhibit a self-awareness like real people, and interact with one another in the same 
ways that real people do. So what element of mankind makes him conscious? Is it the  
 
 
1 Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 103.  
2 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing 
Company, 2011), 37.  
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mind or is it the body? 
In considering man’s attachment to the body, the fugitive writes, “I believe we 
lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep 
insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. 
We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness”1. 
Consciousness is the element of our minds that forms our perceptions of the world and 
of ourselves. It is the most essential component in comparison with the rest of the body 
in determining our identities—and thus, it is the part that the fugitive argues is worth 
preserving. I argue that, while our capacity for conscious thought, and the ability to self-
reflect, sets us apart from other species, the mind is a product of the body—its 
comprehension of the world is derived from the body’s interactions with the world—
and therefore, the mind, without the body, would be lost. 
Consciousness in Motion 
The development of language and its original form is a topic that has been 
debated for several centuries. Full behavioral modernity—behavior that is most 
representative of humans today—had developed by the beginning of the Upper 
Paleolithic period approximately fifty thousand years ago. Homo sapiens of this period 
exhibited “[…] blade and microlithic technology, bone tools, increased geographic 
range, specialized hunting, the use of aquatic resources, long distance trade, systematic 
process and use of pigment, and art and decoration”2 among other aspects. These 
cognitive traits demonstrated a capability for conscious thought: the ability to wonder  
about the world. These traits did not arise out of the blue, however. The Primacy of 
 
1 Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 14.  
2 Sally McBreaty, et. al., “The Revolution That Wasn’t,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453. 
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Movement addresses the significance of self-movement in animate forms and the 
phenomenology involved in kinesthesia from the perspectives of evolutionary biology 
and metaphysics. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone—the author and a courtesy professor at the 
University of Oregon’s Department of Philosophy—rationalizes that, “[…] there is 
every reason to question that such forms arose de novo, that they have no evolutionary 
ties, thus that language, for example, sprang full-blown from the mouths of waiting 
hominids, and that present-day humans are on that account thoroughly unique products 
of evolution”1. In fact, she suggests that direct investigation into the development of 
verbal language without careful consideration of its prevenient forms “[…] deflects us 
from a recognition and understanding of a phylogenetically and ontogenetically more 
basic phenomenon, the phenomenon of movement”2. She suggests that verbal language 
evolved due to a fundamental need to communicate the phenomenon of consciousness, 
but that consciousness developed as a result of the foregoing evolution of animate 
bodies. She explains that “[…] the very invention of language defines a situation in 
which […] ‘there is work for consciousness to do,’ not a deus ex machina 
consciousness capable of immaculate linguistic conceptions, but an already discerning 
and creative consciousness knowledgeably attuned to itself and to the ways of the 
world”3. In other words, the conscious mind had already been able to interpret its 
surrounding environment from some other method of comprehension, and verbal 
language developed as a secondary method for expressing the mind’s discoveries of the  
 
1 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing 
Company, 2011), 4.  
2 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing 
Company, 2011), 4.  
3 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing 
Company, 2011), 349.  
 5 
 
world. The most innate method of communication was not verbal—not even guttural—
but rather, existed in the form of somatic interaction. Early hominids utilized what they 
had—their bodies—before the advancement of verbal language because it was the 
vessel through which they—like every other moving thing—had come to know the 
world. As the conscious mind developed—and thus a certain awareness of self—these 
corporeal gestures that hominids had made instinctually as simple physical reactions to 
their environments began to hold greater psychological significance. 
Motion in Language 
William Kentridge on the Mental ‘Nebula’ 
Animator and filmmaker William Kentridge explores the nature of human 
subjectivity in his work, reflecting on how perception constitutes our fundamental 
understanding of the world. In his conversations with Rosalind C. Morris, professor of 
anthropology at Columbia University, in That Which is Not Drawn, Kentridge describes 
consciousness as the ‘nebula’ that exists in our minds before the creation of an idea. He 
explains: 
“When one speaks, one is aware that one is doing a massive edit from all 
the different thoughts that are going through one’s head in order to 
generate a single line of speech or text. So one says, ‘All right, that is the 
sense I want to make.’ But there is a huge, unspoken part which is 
different from, say, the unconscious part. Even after the unconscious 
part, there is a choice between all the different things that might have 
been said. Then, one says one thing only”1. 
Kentridge explains that before an idea is communicated verbally, it exists as a thought, 
but even before the creation of a thought, it exists in a nebulous state—as a slew of  
emotion, feeling, memory, color, and light—for which no definition exists in the 
 
1 William Kentridge, et. al., That Which Is Not Drawn (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 8.  
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English dictionary. We aim to simplify—to communicate a concise summary of our 
experiences—when we communicate verbally, but we do not express the entire mental 
context surrounding an experience when we speak in words. Although verbal language 
serves as a successful tool under other circumstances, it is an insufficient medium for 
communicating the human experience. In contrast, motion language—such as body 
language, facial expression, translational movement, and oriented direction in 
movement—has the potential to show the emotions that comprise this nebulous state by 
eliciting memories of corporeal experience. 
Corporeal Associations 
George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, a 
liberal arts and sciences professor at the University of Oregon, discuss the corporeal 
associations woven into the structure of our verbal language in their book Metaphors 
We Live By. They explain how we pay such an innate attention to body language that 
we use it as an underlying basis in our verbal language without realizing it. They claim 
that we classify our mental experiences as having a particular orientation or directional 
movement because this correlates to our bodies’ relationships to our environments. We 
understand the world around us better by utilizing metaphors that reference the body. 
For example, metaphors pertaining to an upward or downward movement communicate 
physical and emotional states that we perceive as positive or negative, respectively. The 
authors convey that HAPPY IS UP and SAD IS DOWN in phrases like, “I’m feeling 
up. That boosted my spirits. My spirits rose. You’re in high spirits. Thinking about her 
always gives me a lift. I’m feeling down. I’m depressed. He’s really low these days. I  
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fell into a depression. My spirits sank”1. Further examples are listed in Table 1. Lakoff 
and Johnson attribute this tendency that we have to revert back to our corporeal 
understanding to the notion that “[w]e are physical beings, bounded and set off from the 
rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as 
outside us”2. The authors explain that we view the world in reference to our own bodies 
because that is what we know best. We assign corporeal metaphors to our verbal 
language out of a need for a language that better communicates the experience of being 
human. 
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy discusses the fascination that we have with our 
peers’ ‘nonverbals’ in her TED talk “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” She 
asks her audience, “We know that our minds change our bodies. Is it also true that our 
bodies change our minds?”3. Cuddy describes an experiment that she performed to test 
this question in which participants took on high and low-power poses for two minutes at 
a time. Their testosterone and cortisol levels were collected before and after the two 
minutes. Results yielded that participants in high-power poses experienced an increase 
in their testosterone levels—the ‘dominance’ hormone—and that participants in low-
power poses experienced an increase in cortisol levels—the ‘stress’ hormone. Cuddy 
claims that “power poses can change your lives in very meaningful ways”4 because they 
influence the perceptions that we hold of ourselves. Our body language has the capacity 
to impact not only emotions of short-term experience, but also how we identify as 
people, altering the outcomes of our lives in the long run. 
 
1 George Lakoff, et. al., Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 15.  
2 George Lakoff, et. al., Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 29.  
3 Amy Cuddy, “Your Body language Shapes Who You Are” (presentation, TEDGlobal, October 2012).  
4 Amy Cuddy, “Your Body language Shapes Who You Are” (presentation, TEDGlobal, October 2012).  
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Susan Kozel—professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at 
Simon Fraser University—studies how integrating digital technologies—specifically 
motion capture, telematics, responsive architecture, and wearable computing—into 
dance helps to further our understanding of lived experience. She reveals the strong 
effect that motion language as a communicative device can have as we become more 
connected to each other through our advancing technologies. The human experience is 
best communicated through motion because “[…] instead of a self-contained entity or 
agent, beingness is a changeable, dynamic construct, chiasmically connected to other 
beings and the flesh of the world. My very being contains the traces of my bodily 
encounters with others. The ways I see, touch, and move with others are in my very 
fabric, memories and histories integrated and transformed”1. The body serves as a 
vessel for comprehending direct experience, and as such, has the capacity to remind us 
of our own experiences when we view other bodies as well. Kozel uses this concept of a 
motion language in corporeality—captured through dance performance and reinforced 
with digital technologies—as a way of imbuing empathy into her audiences. In doing 
so, she conveys the significance of the animation of the body; it provides a tool to 
express our mental states. She understands that this is possible through the phenomenon 
of consciousness, which allows us to perceive these movements in our own unique 
ways: “[…] perception is more than just the neurophysiological mechanisms by which I 
apprehend the world. Perception is constitutive of who and what I am, perception is 
ontological […]”2. In that, Kozel conveys how the physical interactions that we  
experience begin to coalesce with a greater psychological significance under the 
 
1 Susan Kozel, Closer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 240.  
2 Susan Kozel, Closer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 239. 
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influence of a conscious mind. 
Our Psychological Reaction to Motion 
Intention in Motion 
The physical reactions that we have to our surroundings—such as the ways in 
which we orient our bodies or the facial expressions that we make—have a more 
intricate psychological attachment. Humans “[…] generally are not simply moving 
capriciously, unwittingly, or nonsensically through a kinetic form of one sort or another. 
On the contrary, in moving as they do, they are creating a certain dynamic that moves 
meaningfully through them”1. Sheets-Johnstone suggests that movement, although often 
made instinctually, requires a level of intention. This is not to say that we purposefully 
decide on every movement that we make, but rather that people naturally communicate 
their psychologies through their movements without recognizing this tendency most of 
the time. 
Tropisms, by the Dutch architect Ton Verstegen, analyzes this concept of 
intention in motion as it relates to the directional movements exhibited in various 
biological organisms and in dynamic, responsive architecture. Verstegen illustrates the 
example of how a moth flying toward a light “[…] is a compulsive movement—the 
moth cannot help flying towards the light, even though it means its death—and at the 
same time a directional movement, as if based on a motive”2. There will never be a 
decisive way of knowing what it is like for a moth to be a moth, and thus, we will never  
 
1 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing 
Company, 2011), 505.  
2 Ton Verstegen, Tropisms (Rotterdam: The NAi Publishers, 2001), 9. 
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know to what degree the moth moves as a result of conscious decision or as a result of 
involuntary instinct. Nevertheless, we perceive that the motion of other animate 
organisms “[…] is not just clearly present to them, but just as clearly interests, excites, 
or disturbs them to move in some way”1. We associate the moth’s directional movement 
with a capacity for conscious thought because our consciousness, and the capacity for 
intention that it causes, motivates the directional movements that we make. We 
personify this moth because it appears to have made a choice, modeling the same 
awareness that we hold of ourselves and of our surroundings, whether or not it actually 
is conscious. This is an example of how motion is such an innate method of 
comprehension for us that we use it to explain other phenomena. We view the world in 
reference to our own bodies and minds. 
Interpretation of Motion 
Consciousness is present in every one of our movements, and so our actions are 
the visual representation of the core beliefs and opinions that make each of us unique. 
As conveyed in Amy Cuddy’s TED talk, our actions shape our identities. In his book 
Existentialist Cinema, William C. Pamerleau—an associate professor of philosophy at 
the University of Pittsburgh—analyzes the elements that make film an ideal medium for 
communicating the human experience. He references the Sartrean notion that “‘There is 
no reality except in action. […] Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the 
extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, 
nothing else than his life’”2. Pamerleau articulates the greater significance that our  
1 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing 
Company, 2011), 502. 
2 William C. Pamerleau, Existentialist Cinema (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 28. 
 
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actions embody: we are the sum of our actions; they define us. The psychological 
attachment that we hold to our actions correlates to the belief that we are ultimately 
directed toward an individualized purpose—that we all hold a special relationship to 
this world. Every movement that we advance, every action that we take, every decision 
that we make is an effort directed toward the achievement of the personas that we want 
to be and the destinies for which we believe we exist. Everything that we have done in 
our lives up to the present makes us the people that we are today. 
Motion Language in Cinema 
In The Tactile Eye, Jennifer M. Barker—a Ph.D. in Critical Media Studies—
assesses how film mimics the ways that our bodies move in order to communicate 
emotion. She explains that body language is ever-present in film in the sense that “[…] 
we and the film have a muscular empathy for one another, which is derived from 
similarities in the ways the human body and the film’s body express their relation to the 
world through bodily comportment […]”1. This visual communication between the 
audience and the film is possible because the human body and the film both utilize a 
motion language. The camera moves to reflect human emotion in such a way that, 
“[…] love is lived as specific inflections of a general ‘towardness,’ hate 
as an ‘againstness,’ fear as an ‘aboutness,’ disgust as recoil away from 
something or someone. The figures of the loved, the hated, the feared, 
and the disgusting do not in themselves possess qualities that make them 
the objects of these emotions; instead, they are shaped in and by these 
very movements toward, against, about, and away from them”2.  
This idea relates to the concepts that Lakoff and Johnson express in Metaphors We Live 
By. Film is structured in reference to the body because the body is our most basic  
 
1 Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 73.  
2 Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 15.  
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mechanism for comprehension. Cinema uses the same metaphorical directions that are 
outlined in Metaphors We Live By to communicate the human experience. Barker 
explains that,  
“Our bodies’ muscular empathy with the film’s body emerges partly 
from experience. When the film swivels suddenly with a whip pan, or 
moves slowly with a long take or a tracking shot, or stretches itself out in 
widescreen to take in a vast landscape, we feel those movements in our 
muscles because our bodies have made similar movements: we have 
whipped our heads from side to side, moved slowly and stealthily, and 
stretched out our bodies in ways that are distinctly human but inspired by 
attitudes like those that inspire the film’s movements. When the film 
‘ducks’ or ‘swerves’ or ‘races’ or ‘stalks’ its subjects or ‘crashes’ into 
something, we can relate, having performed many of these basic gestures 
ourselves, in our own way”1. 
These gestures and directions are just motions, but these motions signify more to us 
because we associate them with mental experiences that we have felt before. The film 
reminds us of the emotions that are engrained into a similar experience of motion. 
The Philosophy of Motion Pictures elucidates the motion language of film as 
one that communicates a message even in the moments when there is no verbal dialogue 
between characters. The author Noël Carroll explains, “Shots may signify, but they are 
typically nothing like words. There is no vocabulary of cinema; no finite dictionary of 
motion pictures. There are as many motion pictures as there are things and 
combinations thereof to photograph from an indefinitely large number of camera 
positions”2. Images—particularly moving images—convey the human experience much 
better than words do because experience is not something that can be structured; it is 
not explicable in simplified terms, but rather it is something that can be understood only 
by triggering our own memories of it. 
1 Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 25.  
2 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 118.  
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Similarly, the effect that animation has in portraying the human experience is 
different than that of static images—even if those static images are strung into a 
narrative like a comic. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud dictates, 
“[…] the basic difference is that animation is sequential in time but not spatially 
juxtaposed as comics are. Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the 
same space—the screen—while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. 
Space does for comics what time does for film”1. A comic has the ability to convey an 
experience, but it does not illustrate change in the same way that an animation does. In 
an animation, the audience can see the entirety of the experience—relive the moment 
with the character—and feel the weight of time as the animation changes before their 
eyes. Comics communicate time in what McCloud calls “the gutter”2, or the space in 
between each panel. A comic exhibits fragments of an experience—fragments that are 
intentionally chosen to convey the experience—but still aims to simplify the experience 
in order to highlight the most climactic moments. The advantage of an animation, same 
as a film, is that it takes the audience through all of the motions and allows for the 
viewer to experience the same emotional shifts and situational impacts as the character 
does. The audience endures the experience in synchronization with the character and at 
the same rate as real life. 
Suzanne Buchan, professor of Animation Aesthetics at Middlesex University in 
London, studies the rising prominence of animation as a communicative device in our 
contemporary culture. In Animated ‘Worlds’, she discusses how animation, specifically, 
communicates these gestural movements that our bodies make. She views our bodies as  
1 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 7.  
2 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 66.  
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animations in themselves, forms which—through the positing of our mental states onto 
them—we have brought to life. Buchan suggests that “[…] animation provides a 
particularly useful paradigm for exploring the complex relationships between bodies 
and the uncanny gestures that animate them”1. We do not own these ‘uncanny bodies’ 
even though we perceive them to be ours. We control them to a certain extent. For 
example, I can run if I decide that I am going to miss my bus, but the manner in which I 
run is influenced more so by the structure of this body that I was born into and less so 
by the way in which I would like to run. I can only alter the way that I run so much. 
These vessels through which we communicate our emotions—these fleshy bodies that 
are the result of thousands of years of evolution—could have existed in a different form 
had evolution taken a different turn, and thus would have manifested a set of gestures 
completely different than the ones that incidentally collate our body language today. 
Motion language is a manifestation of the body—a form that is similar among all 
humans—and so, it is a language that is naturally universal. Every individual already 
understands motion language through his or her own experience of being. It is only 
rational that the language that we use to communicate the human experience be the one 
that is already built into our very fabric. 
We do not have complete control over these bodies or of the world around us. In 
The Existentialist Revolt, Kurt F. Reinhardt discusses that, “Man is thus a being 
suspended between nothingness and the plenitude of being […] never at the goal, but 
always on the way: he may, to use Goethe’s words, ‘become what he is,’ or he may fall 
away from his authentic self”2. This ambivalent condition is due to the paradox that we  
1 Suzanne Buchan, Animated ‘Worlds’ (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), 51.  
2 Kurt F. Reinhardt, The Existentialist Revolt (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960), 15.  
 15 
 
live in; we have control of our choices, but not of what might happen to us or what will 
happen as a result of our choices. We live with the fear of knowing that if we fail, then 
we are responsible for this failure, and this is the root of our anxieties concerning the 
meaning of life. We are the sum of our actions. We can hold onto our morals, have our 
opinions, feel the emotions that we do, but nothing is real without action. Nothing is 
tangible unless we make it so. Everything that we become in this world depends on how 
we embody our beliefs—how we drive ourselves to change, to adapt, to move, or even 
to maintain resilience—because that is the only way that we can make a difference. 
Pamerleau agrees that “[t]his is why freedom simultaneously empowers us and makes 
us anxious: the meaning of our lives is ultimately up to us”1. Freewill is both a blessing 
and a curse that the conscious mind brings us. Consciousness causes us to question our 
existence. Animation has the capacity to mirror the uncertainty of our lives in the sense 
that “[m]ovement feels like life because it springs forth in a manner that is not 
predictable or containable”2. Animation provides a mechanism for understanding and 
expressing the uncertainty of the human experience. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 William C. Pamerleau, Existentialist Cinema (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 13.  
2 Suzanne Buchan, Pervasive Animation (New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013), 119.  
  
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Chapter 2: The Thesis Project 
A Personal Motivation 
Rising Up, an animation that began as a simple ten-second gif project, stems 
from a place in my heart that is very personal to me. Depression occupied a great 
majority of my thoughts, and naturally flowed into my work at the time of the project’s 
original conception. It had been difficult for me to express to the people that I care 
about what it was that I was going through. The last thing that I wanted to do was to let 
myself cry or to be unhappy when I was trying every day to feel better. The grief is not 
always visible when a person is depressed. I would get up in the morning, eat breakfast, 
get dressed, brush my teeth, and pack up to leave for work. Those were the easy parts. 
Those were the habits that I had engrained into my system. Life became a process of 
going through motions—but I felt disconnected from these motions. While I knew that 
the people that loved me cared—they did not want me to be depressed—I also knew 
that, for the most part, they were not able to help me because they could not see. It was 
hard for them to reach a level of true empathy because the verbal language through 
which we attempt to communicate our emotions does not do these feelings justice. 
 Depression is a static state of mind and this stagnation is debilitating, but there is 
a power in the human ability to change, to move, and to adapt. There is expression in 
movement, which enables us to palpably be the people that we want to be. For me, this 
thesis project has been a way to visualize breaking habitual motions, to see myself in a 
different light, and to understand what it could be like to move on past this. 
 
 
17 
 
I analyzed the original ten-second gif. What was the significance of the girl 
climbing through the tunnel and pulling herself out? Where had she come from and 
where was she going? How did this gif succeed in interpreting my own internal 
struggle? This movement upward and out of the tunnel—the obvious way in which the 
character propelled herself forward—signified that there was something precious at the 
end that she needed to reach. This realization began my research into the study of 
motion language. 
Statement of Intention 
William Kentridge explains that much of his work consists of deciding how to 
communicate the human experience to his audience; he explains the responsibility of an 
artist and how a great deal of his inspiration during the creation process arises from a 
place that is innately human. His motivation is simply to express—as is human nature—
rather than to preach, and to encourage others to ask questions. He believes that “[…] 
the activity of being an artist rather than, say, a philosopher, consists in trying to 
maintain a place—which one does as a matter of survival, not as a matter of theoretical 
argument—where it should be possible to find meaning […]”1. I do not aim to provide 
answers to these impossible questions—this is not an investigation into the meaning of 
life—but I attempt to understand our persistent need to find answers, and to understand 
the reasons why animation, as a form of expression, helps me to communicate my own 
existential dilemmas. I am not a medical doctor or a licensed psychologist or even a 
philosopher. However, I am a human that wonders about the world, and I believe that it 
is my responsibility as an artist to express the nature of being human. I hope that is  
1 William Kentridge, et. al., That Which is Not Drawn (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 19.  
 
 
18 
 
thesis project can speak to the anxiety that accompanies the freedom we have in 
choosing our lives. I hope that it provides a sense of direction or a change of 
perspective.  
Thesis Argument 
Rising Up is an animation that experiments with the concept of movement as it 
relates to the ‘moving image’ and to our human existence. In this project, ‘movement’ 
becomes a tool for communication. I experiment with different methods of animating 
my hand drawings in order to communicate a message. It is about a pain that eats away 
at the mind, anxiety, the desire that humans feel to make something of themselves and 
the anxiety that arises when it appears as though we are getting nowhere, when time 
passes so slowly that it appears as though we are suspended in motion. In these 
moments, it is hard to see the progress of our efforts over time. Animation has the 
potential to communicate the existential struggle involved in the human experience 
through the use of movement.  
Major Inspirations 
Millennium Actress 
The Satoshi Kon film Millennium Actress (2001) poses a good example of an 
animation that communicates the character’s existential struggle through the 
conveyance of a forward movement. The film begins with the closure of a film studio 
and a journalist’s interview with the studio’s most proclaimed actress, Chiyoko 
Fujiwara, who retired thirty years prior. Chiyoko takes the reporter back to her youth 
when she fell in love with a revolutionary whom she helped to escape from the law. Her 
 
 
19 
 
internal struggle to reunite with the object of her affection becomes the major 
inspiration for her acting career; every character that she portrays expresses the same 
feelings of desperation and anxiety to achieve a goal that she feels toward this man. The 
film displays this struggle by breaking the boundaries between reality and the 
imagination that is necessary when acting. Millennium Actress communicates through 
motion language as we see the protagonist’s internal struggle on her face, on the 
orientation of her body and the directionality of movements, and in the quick transitions 
from one scene to the next that make it appear as if she is running throughout the 
entirety of the film. The audience does not know when the actress is recalling a memory 
of an event that really happened to her or if she is remembering a scene from a film that 
she was in. This obscurity of the past brings to front a more significant characteristic of 
the animated film; it makes the motion of the animation more apparent because the 
motion is the consistent factor used to narrate the story. 
Anomalisa 
The film Anomalisa (2015) is a stop-motion animation that uses puppets to 
illustrate the protagonist Michael Stone’s dissatisfaction with life. These puppets look 
amazingly like humans, apart from the seam lines below their eyes and along their jaws. 
Although the puppets look a great deal like we do, it is not until they begin to move that 
we are lost in their reenactment of life. This film inspires me because it utilizes the 
motions of inanimate objects to convey the very realistic experiences of depression and 
confusion that many of us have also faced. In fact, certain scenes in which the audience 
remembers that Anomalisa is not a film about real humans are very disturbing because 
of how much we relate to the protagonist. In one example, the protagonist loses his jaw 
 
 
20 
 
as he frantically runs down the hall in the hotel, revealing the mechanics inside of his 
head. Refer to Figure 11 (left). In addition, the self-reflection scene in the mirror has a 
similar effect as Michael begins to pull away the mask from his face for a brief moment. 
Refer to Figure 11 (middle). We begin to develop a psychological attachment to the 
protagonist of this film; so much so, that it disturbs us when he exhibits characteristics 
that remind us that he is a puppet. 
The Invention of Morel 
The fugitive in The Invention of Morel develops an obsession for the projections 
because their motions mimic real life. This novel expresses the power that animation 
has to bring the unconscious to life because these projections are essentially animations. 
Although our obsession with movement is not as literal as the fugitive’s, this story 
sparked my investigation into the analysis of mankind’s fascination with movement.  
It’s Such a Beautiful Day 
Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) successfully communicates a 
protagonist’s struggle with the anxiety that he feels surrounding the mundanity of life. 
The protagonist—Bill—loses sight of his purpose and feels an anxiety toward having no 
direction, which results in his insanity. In my opinion, much of the dialogue in the film 
serves to communicate confusion—much of what the protagonist says does not make 
sense contextually because he speaks in a slew of random thoughts—but this anxiety is 
evident in the way in which Hertzfeldt animates the film. He animates experiences that 
people tend to notice when the world has slowed down to the point in which it is 
difficult to see the larger picture. In one scene, a ray of light streaming in through the 
 
 
21 
 
window falls into Bill’s vision and captivates him. He observes the sparkling particles 
of dust that float in the light, and feels a moment of serenity amid the anxiety that the 
mundanity of life brings him. Refer to Figure 13 (left). Hertzfeldt succeeds in slowing 
the world down—not to a static, inanimate point—but to the point in which the intense 
slowness of the overall pace of the film plays a very significant role in communicating 
the experiences of the character’s anxiety and depression. Hertzfeldt also often uses a 
method that is very similar to William Kentridge’s method of animating in many of his 
scenes. Figure 13 (right) displays a scene in which Hertzfeldt has left a history of 
erasures in his pencil markings to animate Bill’s mental confusion. 
William Kentridge 
One of the major inspirations for the methods and style in which I animated this 
thesis project were the animations created by William Kentridge. These animations 
included The History of the Main Complaint (1996) and Felix in Exile (1994). 
Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and then erases and redraws certain pieces 
of the drawings—photographing these changes and repeating the process again—so that 
the history of his erasures appears in the animation. He works without a storyboard, 
continuously expressing until he feels as though he has created enough. Many of his 
works are featured in theater productions in South Africa. I use his method of animating 
in many of my scenes to visualize how animation can represent the idea that we are sum 
of our actions. After all, that is what comprises an animation—layers upon layers of 
actions. 
 
 
22 
 
Amy Cuddy 
Amy Cuddy’s personal anecdote at the end of her TED talk is one of the most 
compelling aspects of “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” She speaks about 
how she used her body language to tackle her own internal struggle, stating that we can 
be anything that we want to be as long as we continue to act on it. She encourages her 
audience not to “[…] fake it ‘til you make it. Fake it ‘til you become it”1. Her decision 
to utilize this notion to change her own life inspired me to make Rising Up about 
myself. Refer to Figure 15. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 Amy Cuddy, “Your Body language Shapes Who You Are” (presentation, TEDGlobal, October 2012).  
 
 
 
23 
 
Chapter 3: Materials and Process 
Description of Materials 
I used Derwent 8B graphite pencils for the entire animation because graphite is 
the medium that I am the most adept at using and it does not contain color. I wanted to 
limit the extraneous variables that would influence the audience’s emotion in the 
animation, and felt as though color has psychological connotations. I used standard 
letter size paper (8.5 by 11 inches) because it was the most economic way of producing 
a large amount of frames, and this size accommodated the scanner that I used as well. I 
used an Epson Perfection scanner, model V370, and covered the screen with a 
transparency sheet, which I frequently changed to avoid graphite residue that could 
appear in the animation. I utilized the Art-O-Graph LightPad 930 whenever I needed to 
trace a frame from a preexisting one, and used drafting, masking, and painter’s tape to 
hold the frames in place while drawing. I carried a drawing board with me whenever I 
worked, especially when working away from my studio. I learned that it was important 
to draw every frame in the same scene on the same surface—whether it was on the 
drawing board, the light tablet, or above a stack of papers. A change in the drawing 
surface could easily cause inconsistencies in pencil strokes. Therefore, I did my best to 
complete all of the frames in one scene on the same day to avoid inconsistencies. 
Inconsistency is a characteristic that makes stop-motion animation unique in 
comparison to other forms of animation, but can distracting in the final product if 
poorly maintained. 
 
 
24 
 
A Screenplay without Dialogue 
After several attempts to draw a storyboard, I decided that a screenplay was 
necessary to provide structure to the storyboard. I utilized the screenplay to create an 
outline for a loose narrative that would be communicated primarily through the use of 
motion language. It was interesting writing a screenplay without dialogue. I instantly 
noticed that writing a screenplay without dialogue caused me use actions and camera 
movements to describe emotion. 
A Storyboard 
I realized from the onset of this project that I would not be able to animate the 
entire screenplay because I had written a screenplay for a feature-length film. I decided 
to continue with this screenplay, however, because the experimentation that I did for 
this thesis project was not about the narrative. It was about the power of movement as a 
communicative device and how the motions in Rising Up communicated an emotional 
mental state. Suzanne Buchan explains how animation conveys through motion rather 
than narrative: “Animation film, I would argue, is less concerned with what is shown 
than how it is shown. More important than plot is imitation of human movement and 
behavior”1. I wanted to create a plot that would communicate through movement rather 
than narrative, or if anything, would communicate a narrative through movement. 
Likewise, William Kentridge conveys that animation seems like magic because we are 
“[...] enchanted by the narrative but the metamorphoses exceed the narrative”2. I 
decided that this thesis project would serve best to establish a stylistic and technical  
 
1 Suzanne Buchan, Animated ‘Worlds’ (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), 42.  
2 William Kentridge, et. al., That Which Is Not Drawn (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 22.  
 
 
25 
 
foundation for animation process in the future full-length film. The short film that I 
have produced for this thesis project will serve as a preliminary study of the material 
usage, style, and technique that will later contribute to the full-length film. I 
storyboarded Scenes 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the screenplay in order to have enough material to 
experiment with. 
I learned a large amount from drawing the storyboard about the ways in which I 
express emotion. Many of the corporeal gestures that I illustrated in the storyboard 
involve the hands, legs, and the face—particularly, the eyes and the mouth. This makes 
a great deal of sense because these are the body parts that we utilize the most to 
experience the world around us. 
The storyline in Millennium Actress served as a great inspiration for a loose 
narrative involving movement. This film utilized motion as a consistent factor to unify a 
stream-of-consciousness narrative. One of the most successful aspects of Millennium 
Actress in conveying narrative is the way in which the film transitions between scenes 
that emphasizes a continuous movement forward. I oriented the protagonist’s 
movements toward the right side of the screen for many of the scenes in order for the 
audience to associate that side with the end goal. The future is to the right and the past 
is behind her to the left. In doing this, I created a protagonist that is constantly in 
motion—constantly moving—because she is constantly searching for a goal. The 
protagonist in Rising Up became a prime example of how every individual is the sum of 
his or her parts. 
 
 
26 
 
The Creation Process 
Experimentation with Modes of Animation 
In the beginning stages of the animation process, I experimented with different 
techniques of animating. This was to establish a style with which I would deliver the 
rest of the creation processes for the short and feature-length films. I initially chose to 
utilize charcoal for animating, but I soon realized that I should use graphite because that 
is what I knew best. I wanted to express as I naturally would to see if I would utilize 
body language as an innate way of expressing, so I needed to find a style that was 
natural to me. There was a reason why I had drawn The Original Rising Up gif in 
graphite. This medium would take much longer than charcoal would but it would allow 
me to deliver a more genuine product. 
The basic techniques that I used to animate my hand drawings can be found in 
Table 2. I typically utilized the light tablet to create outlines for each frame in the scene, 
laying the first frame of the scene under the frame that I was working on for reference. I 
often used the scanner to create frames from the same page in the way that William 
Kentridge does. 
Animating Larger Scenes 
Combinations of the basic techniques of animation outlined in Table 2 were 
often utilized to create larger scenes. For example, I began creating The Living Room 
Scene by first producing “rough drafts” of the protagonist’s motions and testing these 
motions by scanning them and organizing the frames in Photoshop. Once I had outlined 
the general motion of the scene, I finalized these rough drafts. Once finalized, these 
 
 
27 
 
drafts served as templates for the frames that would create the lighting effect in the 
scene. I scanned and made a copy of each ‘template’ frame. I then completed the scene 
by drawing in the shadows that would create the effect of a flashing light coming from 
the TV screen on each ‘template’ frame, and scanned every alteration that I made. I 
created approximately four new shadow gradients for each ‘template’ frame. Table 2(C) 
describes this particular method that I used to animate The Living Room Scene. 
In some of the larger scenes, all of the frames were created individually by hand. 
The Original Rising Up scene was done completely by hand on the light tablet, 
scanning each drawing after they were all complete. Every frame in The Tunnel Scenes, 
including the frames for The Original Rising Up, was produced using this method as 
well. Table 2(B) describes this technique. 
Compiling the Scenes 
I compiled the scenes in Photoshop whenever I wanted to quickly test how the 
frames looked as whole. I did this when drawing the scenes that incorporated a greater 
change in the protagonist’s actions, such as the scenes in the tunnel, in order to make 
sure that her motions were fluid before finalizing the entire scene. 
I utilized Adobe Premiere when I compiled scenes in final compilations. I 
utilized simple effects in Premiere, such as changes in opacity and changes in frame 
rate, in order to create scene transitions. 
A Question of Audio 
I considered integrating sound at first, but I decided against it in the end. 
Initially, I wanted to only use audio that helped to empathize a motion, but that did not 
 
 
28 
 
speak for the motion itself. I thought about using sounds that were comparable with the 
sounds that we hear everyday—white noise, almost—that would contribute more to 
establishing the setting rather than illustrating the experience. I did not want to use any 
music because I felt as though music could heavily influence emotion, and wanted to 
minimize extraneous variables that could do this to analyze how motion language does 
this on its own. After some debate, I decided not to use audio because I wanted the 
movements to speak purely for themselves, and that the only way to do this would be to 
not use sound. 
 
 
 
 
 
29 
 
Chapter 4: An Analysis of Rising Up 
The section aims to communicate the significance of each scene that I created, 
and to describe how these scenes resulted in contributing to the overarching themes of 
the nature of consciousness, existence, and the human experience in this thesis project. 
The Living Room Scene 
After turning off the television, the protagonist stands up and moves toward the 
bathroom in darkness. This movement within the darkness communicates the 
experience that we have all felt when just a small amount of light lingers in our eyes 
after the light is turned off in a room, and how we can still sense movement in the room 
with this lingering light. This scene communicates a sensory experience that can only be 
understood having experienced this phenomenon before. 
The glowing spot on the couch next to her was made possible by the quality of 
the ‘moving image’. The importance of this empty spot on the couch could not be 
communicated with just an image of the seat illuminated or of it darkened, but when it 
is illuminated and darkened repeatedly, that’s when we begin to understand its 
significance. The directionality of her movements in sighing, shifting her eyes to look 
over at the couch, turning her head to glance over at the couch. These movements in 
reference to the couch give the couch an aura of significance—almost as if it becomes 
another entity—because we are viewing it through the protagonist’s relationship to it. 
 
 
30 
 
The Bathroom Scene 
Self-Reflection: Consciousness in Action 
One of the major aspects of depression is self-blame. In explaining the decline 
into depression, Søren Kierkegaard states that, “[…] only through his own fault does a 
person become depressed”1. The protagonist imbues a similar mentality as she gazes at 
her reflection. As the protagonist looks in the mirror, she gains an awareness of the 
current state that she lives in and ashamed of it and blames herself. Her perspective is 
narrow as she gazes directly ahead at her reflection. She can only see where she stands 
in the moment and not the larger context. As she looks at her reflection, we experience 
how her initial calm disposition toward it morphs into panic as she, and the audience, 
becomes aware of the mental state that she is in. This relates to Scott McCall’s concept 
of “the gutter” from Understanding Comics; the difference between animation and a 
comic strip is that animation shows every change that occurs in a scene. Animation 
illustrates even the portions of the experience that are lost in the gutter, allowing the 
audience to experience with the protagonist, to feel the weight of time on the mind, to 
feel the emotion that affects the animation and drives it to change. 
Hyperventilation 
The protagonist falls into hyperventilation. This scene embodies Lakoff and 
Johnson’s orientational metaphor of a downward motion in Metaphors We Live By. This 
is an action that is natural when the body is overcome with grief, that it will fall because 
it is too weak to support itself. However, we attribute this action of falling to a weaker  
 
1 Gordon Marino, The Quotable Kierkegaard (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 70.  
 
 
31 
 
state of mind because, most often than not, we experience the action of falling or of 
moving to a lower position if we feel inferior or weak. The motion of her falling 
illustrates her decline into depression.  
The transition from this scene to The Tunnel Scenes is a prime example of how 
movement functions as the narrative for this short film as it works to convey a passage 
of time.  
The Memory Scenes 
The Memory Scenes are an expression of the mental ‘nebula’ that William 
Kentridge describes. They are not concrete in form—exhibiting the nature of a stream 
of consciousness—but the emotion in them is extremely evident. These scenes were 
inspired by the narrative style in Millennium Actress. 
Lost in the Crowd 
Pamerleau conveys Friedrich Nietzsche’s beliefs in the role of the individual and 
the importance of choice when he writes, “First and foremost, the free spirit is 
contrasted with the ‘herd’, that is, the large majority of human beings guided by the 
comfort of conformity”1. At first, the protagonist in Rising Up not only follows the rest 
of the crowd—an act that would assume that she has at least chosen to conform to the 
majority—she allows for someone else to lead her through it. Until the point in which 
she loses hold of that person’s hand, she is not aware of her own freewill. There is a 
moment of anxiety, which is captured in the movement of her eyes darting from side to 
side as well as in her static position as the rest of the crowd speeds past her. Then there  
 
1 William C. Pamerleau, Existentialist Cinema (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 20.  
 
 
32 
 
is a transformation: in the act of looking up and furrowing her brow, we understand her 
ability to self-reflect. We have furrowed our brow and looked up in realization before, 
and so we can understand through a shared experience that she has gained a sense of 
awareness. In the act of turning to face the crowd’s movement, the protagonist 
demonstrates her ability to choose the direction of her life. This scene symbolizes the 
experience of losing one’s way. This experience, while unfortunate at first, pushes the 
protagonist to decide for herself, and to establish a sense of identity in her movement 
against the crowd. Her actions, and her movement toward a chosen decision, redefine 
the nature of her existence. 
Anxiety Hands 
I realized that hands play a major role in communicating emotion and intention 
while creating the storyboard. On many accounts, the hand is moving away, shaking 
vigorously, clenching into a fist, waving goodbye, reaching out, and so on. Hands 
became an incidental motif for conveying fear, anxiety, and loneliness in their motions. 
This makes plenty of sense because hands are the part of the body that we use the most 
to achieve daily tasks, and to control the objects around us. We use hands to eat, to open 
doors, to write or draw, to scratch an itch, to play sports, to greet, and so many other 
activities. Hands help us achieve the things that we want, and thus, indicate the objects 
of our desire. 
The movements in these scenes convey anxiety. The timing of these 
movements—resulting in their varying speeds—each illustrates a different kind of 
emotion. The hand shaking the doorknob very quickly differs from the motion of the 
hand slowly moving away from the other hand. 
 
 
33 
 
The Tunnel Scenes 
The tunnel in the animation represents loneliness, and the anxiety that arises in 
human condition of living on a daily basis without actually being able to see the end 
result. In this case, the light at the end of the tunnel that the protagonist climbs toward 
symbolizes this ‘end goal’. She only sees the darkness on a daily basis and she has 
trouble viewing the bigger picture. This tunnel represents loneliness, being alone, self-
centeredness, and only being able to see inwardly or to her immediate surroundings but 
not towards the bigger picture where other people and happiness exist. Reinhardt 
expresses a similar state of mind in The Existentialist Revolt:  
“But once contingency and finiteness become the exclusive frame of 
reference in human existence, man’s interest and preoccupation center in 
increasing measure in his own individual predicaments and uncertainties. 
In such a self-centered state of mind he is prone to become oblivious to 
the social components and needs of human nature and, burrowing deeply 
in the mysterious grounds of his own self, he starts on a dangerous 
journey of subterranean adventures”1.   
This characterizes the condition of only being able to see inwardly and to only 
be able to see our immediate surroundings rather than the bigger picture, and how this 
makes us lonely. Other people keep us grounded because they help us to see the bigger 
picture—we can use them as points of reference. However, when we worry about the 
meaning behind our own existence, our thoughts turn inward and we begin to obsess 
over our own existential predicaments. Our vision becomes narrow to the point in which 
it is hard to see anything else. The Tunnel Scenes represent this dilemma of falling 
victim to our own ‘subterranean adventures’. In the tunnel, the protagonist is 
surrounded by darkness and can only see darkness ahead; she has no frame of reference  
 
1 Kurt F. Reinhardt, The Existentialist Revolt (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960), 14-15.  
 
 
34 
 
to time or place, and—most of all—she is alone. 
The Final Scene 
Silent Screaming 
This scene consists of many ‘still’ moments in which nothing appears to be 
happening. However, the reason why this scene maintains the audience’s attention is 
because there is something happening. There is motion in the few frames that vibrate 
together to create one image. This is representative of real life in which nothing is ever 
completely inert because entropy exists in everything. In addition, these vibrating 
frames are particularly important to this scene because they not only signify that 
something is still happening; they signify that something could happen and create a 
sense of anticipation. 
Silent Screaming displays the significance of how a scream can be heard even 
without audio and how the silent scream symbolizes not being heard at the same time. 
The protagonist’s silent screaming can still be heard because of her movements. The 
audience mentally associates the changes in her facial expression when she screams 
with their own experiences of screaming. 
The Distant Figure  
The anxiety depicted in The Distant Figure scene relates to the fugitive’s efforts 
to draw Faustine’s attention in The Invention of Morel. The fugitive writes,  
“After several more minutes of silence, I insisted, I implored, in what 
was surely a repulsive manner. And finally I became ridiculous. 
Trembling, almost shouting, I begged her to insult me, to inform against 
me even, if only she would break the terrible silence. It was not as if she 
 
 
35 
 
had not heard me, as if she had not seen me; rather it seemed that her 
ears were not used for hearing, that her eyes could not see”1.  
The fugitive’s efforts are futile because Faustine, quite literally, exists on 
another level of consciousness. The protagonist’s silent screaming and the orientation of 
the figure’s body away from the protagonist in The Distant Figure communicates this 
same inability to be seen or to be heard that the fugitive experiences. These scenes 
pertain to real life because they illustrate the experience of attempting to enter another 
person’s perspective and to bring them into our own in order to convey to them what it 
is like to experience feelings the way that we do.  
In the creation of The Distant Figure, I found that motion does not have to be 
fast or excessive in order to be significant. In Pervasive Animation, Suzanne Buchan 
compares the interplay between stillness and movement in film, and how these two 
aspects work together to convey real life. She states: 
“This movement between stillness and movement is especially pertinent 
for animation. The question that animation poses again and again, and 
answers in its various ways is: how does a concocted substance or thing 
that is apparently inert begin to move, become restless? How does 
something immobile and partial transform into the complexity and chaos 
of physical phenomena—something that moves in a plausible world? 
Things that once moved, but over time are stilled into stoniness, become 
petrified. In animation, the process is reversed: things that never moved 
by themselves are mobilized into movement. An originary petrification is 
jiggled into unrest”2.  
I found that it is important to have at least two frames even in the still moments of an 
animation to avoid this ‘petrification’ of the scene. The power of an animation comes in 
its movement, because this movement mirrors the entropy that exists in real life. 
Nothing is ever completely motionless. To petrify a scene by lingering on just one  
 
1 Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 28.  
2 Suzanne Buchan, Pervasive Animation (New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013), 76.  
 
 
36 
 
frame would cause the animation to lose its credibility, and thus its life. The Distant 
Figure most notably conveys this concept. Three frames vibrate between each other to 
illustrate a kind of potential energy in the figure’s position, and create a sense of 
anticipation. 
 
 
37 
 
Conclusion 
The human mind has undergone the phenomenon of consciousness: the idea that 
we are aware of our own existence and have the capacity to wonder about it as a result. 
This capacity to wonder propels us toward a purpose, and our constant progression 
toward this purpose is best communicated using the motion language of animation. 
Animation becomes a useful mechanism for expressing and comprehending these 
aspects of human experience. In addition, we understand each other’s sentiments, 
hardships, and happiness because our shared capacity for conscious thought allows us to 
analyze our own experiences and then empathize with the experiences of others. 
Animation is a medium that communicates primarily through dynamic visual 
language—conveying through facial expression, physical gesture, body orientation, and 
directional movement—as opposed to verbal language, which aims to simplify the 
human experience into a set of words. Thus, we understand that animation serves as a 
useful tool for expressing and comprehending the human experience because it presents 
us with the innate language of motion. Inspired by my own personal existential struggle, 
Rising Up explores the nature of consciousness and utilizes motion language to 
communicate a very emotional human experience. 
 
 
38 
 
Figures 
 
Figure 1: Materials Used 
 
Figure 2: The Process of Creating Rising Up 
 
 
39 
 
 
Figure 3: Shots from The Living Room Scene 
 
Figure 4: Shots from The Bathroom Scene 
 
Figure 5: Shots from The Memory Scenes, Lost in the Crowd 
 
Figure 6: Shots from The Memory Scenes, Anxiety Hands 
 
Figure 7: Shots from The Tunnel Scenes, including The Original Rising Up (middle) 
 
 
40 
 
 
Figure 8: Shots from The Final Scene, Silent Screaming (left) and The Distant Figure 
(middle, right) 
 
Figure 9: Millennium Actress 
 
Figure 10: The Invention of Morel 
 
Figure 11: Anomalisa 
 
 
41 
 
 
Figure 12: It’s Such A Beautiful Day 
 
Figure 13: William Kentridge in his studio (left), The History of the Main Complaint 
(middle), Felix in Exile (right) 
 
Figure 14: Amy Cuddy speaking at her TED Talk    
 
 
42 
 
Tables 
UP DOWN EXAMPLE 
Happy Sad My spirits rose. He’s 
depressed. 
Health Sickness He’s in top shape. He fell 
ill. 
Life Death He rose from the dead. He 
dropped dead. 
Conscious Unconscious He rises early in the 
morning. He sank into a 
coma. 
Control Subjection to Control I have control over her. He 
is low man on the totem 
pole. 
More Less His draft number is high. 
His income fell last year. 
High status Low status He’s climbing the ladder. 
He’s at the bottom of the 
social hierarchy. 
Good Bad He does high-quality 
work. Things are at an all-
time low. 
Rational Emotional Do not succumb to your 
emotions. Build your 
strength of mind. 
Future Past What’s coming up this 
week? We have overcome 
that struggle. 
Virtue Depravity She is an upstanding 
citizen. That would be 
beneath me. 
Table 1: The UP and DOWN Orientational Metaphors, adapted from Metaphors We 
Live By1  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 George Lakoff, et. al., Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 15-17.  
 
 
43 
 
 
 STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 Example 
Scenes 
A DRAW 
on one 
page 
SCAN 
page 
ERASE 
elements 
of the 
drawing 
REDRAW 
changes 
SCAN 
and 
REPEAT 
The 
Distant 
Figure, A 
Tunnel 
Scene 
B DRAW 
on first 
page 
TRACE 
on second 
page with 
light table 
DRAW 
changes 
on 
second 
page 
TRACE 
on third 
page with 
light table 
DRAW 
changes 
on third 
page and 
REPEAT 
The 
Original 
Rising Up, 
Lost in the 
Crowd 
C START 
with 
method 
B 
PRINT 
COPIES 
of all the 
frames 
DRAW 
on top 
of each 
frame 
SCAN the 
frames 
after every 
edit 
 The Living 
Room 
Scene 
D DRAW 
on one 
page 
SCAN 
first frame 
DRAW 
on top 
of the 
same 
page 
SCAN 
second 
frame 
REPEAT The 
Bathroom 
Scene 
(Light 
bulb), The 
Living 
Room 
Scene 
E DRAW 
on first 
page 
SCAN 
first frame 
TRACE 
outline 
on a 
second 
page for 
the 
second 
frame 
DRAW 
the same 
image as 
first frame 
onto the 
second 
page 
SCAN 
second 
frame 
and 
REPEAT 
The 
Bathroom 
Scene 
(Self-
Reflection)
, Silent 
Screaming 
F DRAW 
on first 
page 
OUTLINE 
the next 
frames 
with the 
light table, 
using first 
frame as 
reference 
DRAW 
the rest 
of the 
frames 
SCAN all 
of the 
frames 
 The Tunnel 
Scenes 
(crawling 
motions) 
Table 2: The Basic Techniques for Animating My Hand Drawings 
 
  
44 
 
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