My extended essay is complete!

Wrapping up my contextual studies work


I have completely finished my contextual studies extended essay! I am really pleased that it is all finished now, alongside my CS blog, and now I don't have to worry about it any more. To be brutally honest I didn't really struggle with writing my research report this term, I actually found it quite easy and I got it done in good time. I think it's because I really like the topic I was writing about and have a personal interest in it so it didn't really feel tough to write, I actually quite enjoyed it. I just hope that that showed in my writing. I have made all the changes that my tutors had suggested to me and even got a little bit of extra feedback from Marie-Claire on the 18th after I emailed her which was fantastic so now everything is officially completed and I can now just get on with my studio work and mini briefs.

Final feedback on my extended essay

Making a couple of changes and finishing everything



On Wednesday the 16th I popped into university to speak to my tutor, Marie-Claire about my extended essay just to get some final feedback on what I have written before we break up for the Christmas holidays. I was expecting to get a lot of critical feedback about needing to change the actual written content of my essay but I was thrilled to hear that what I had written was apparently perfect and that the only changes that were given to me were things to do with the actual layout of my essay. It was honestly so nice to hear from my tutor that my essay was at a good quality and that all I needed to do was a little tweaking, it made my feel really confident about my work and that my essay was now essentially done and out of the way,  after I had completed my final edits of course. The few changes that both Marie-Claire and our new tutor Merlin have asked me to do I have listed below.

• Make images central 
• Add full chapter titles 
• Add figure numbers to the image text 
• Finish the bibliography 
• Try out different fonts 
• Fiddle about with spacing 
• Swap the Mario image out for an actual screenshot of the game 
• Read of my essay to find any spelling or grammar mistakes

So now that I have a list of changes that I need to complete before we go away for the winter break all I need to do is sort out the layout of my extended essay, get a few people to read over my essay for a few grammar and spelling checks and then everything will be finished which is great.

My table of illustrations

The images I put into my essay 



So now that my extended essay is completed for now I thought I should just post the images I used in my research report below along with my table of illustrations so that I have all my image sources in a blog post. As I have mentioned before the formatting goes incredibly strange when I try to transfer from word to blogger which is why the text is so big and the spaces look a little odd but it will have to do. So below are all the pictures I used to illustrate my essay along with were I found them.

• ·         Figure 1: ‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces’ (J. Stuart Blackton 2006) [Internet] Available at: <http://www.2020-movie-reviews.com/reviews-year/1906-movie-reviews/humorous-phases-funny-faces-1906-movie-review/>  [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 2: ‘The Adventures of Andre and Wally B’ (The Graphics Group and Lucasfilm 1984) [Internet] Available at: <http://blogs.disney.com/oh-my-disney/2013/10/21/what-your-favorite-pixar-short-says-about-you/> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 3: ‘Snow White and the seven dwarves’ (Walt Disney Animation Studios 1932) [Internet] Available at: <https://satinahall.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/disney-reviews-snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs-1937/> [Accessed December 2015]  

• ·         Figure 4:  ‘Toy Story’ (Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar 1995) [Internet] Available from: <https://animationfascination.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/a-fascinating-day-in-animation-history-pixars-toy-story-1995/> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 5: ‘Paperman’ (Walt Disney Animation Studios 2012) [Internet] Available from: < http://www.disneyanimation.com/projects/paperman> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 6: ‘The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius ( Paramount Pictures 2001) [Internet] Available from: <http://jimmyneutron.wikia.com/wiki/File:Cast-of-the-adventures-of-jimmy-neutron-boy-genius-5.jpg> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 7: ‘Code Lyoko’ (Tania Palumbo and Thomas Romain 2003) [Internet] Available from: <http://en.codelyoko.fr/revuepresse.cl> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 8: ‘Miraculous Ladybug’ (Thomas Astruc 2015) [Internet] Available from: <https://www.pinterest.com/birthdaycandel/the-miraculous-ladybug/> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 9: Photograph of Hayao Miyazaki [Internet] Available at: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10816014/Hayao-Miyazaki-interview-I-think-the-peaceful-time-that-we-are-living-in-is-coming-to-an-end.html> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 10: ‘Spirited Away’ (Studio Ghibli 2010) [Internet] Available from: <http://www.cineman.pl/filmy/Filmy,Kino-familijne,Anime/Spirited-Away-W-krainie-bogow> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 11: ‘Haikyuu!!’ (Production I.G 2014) [Internet] Available from: <http://myanimelist.net/anime/20583/Haikyuu!!> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 12: ‘Tennis for two’ (William Higinbotham 1958) [Internet] Available from:         < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two> [Accessed December 2015]      

• ·         Figure 12: ‘The Witcher 3’ (CD Projekt 2015) [Internet] Available from: <https://www.vg247.com/2015/04/30/new-the-witcher-3-screenshots-show-combat-exploration-and-general-carousing/> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 13: Image of ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ from 1991 to 2015 (SEGA) [Internet] Available from: http://itshelias94.deviantart.com/art/Sonic-The-Hedgehog-357474492> and <https://www.tes.com/lessons/m4CkpX8R-x4qxg/3rd-grade-roman-mosaic?redirect-bs=1> [Accessed December 2015] 

• ·         Figure 14: ‘Paper Mario’ (Nintendo 2000) [Internet] Available from: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Mario> [Accessed December 2015] 

Getting my extended essay finished

The final draft is complete and now pending feedback



After receiving some really helpful feedback from our new tutor Merlin about how my 1,000 word essay draft was looking so far and how I could possibly improve it, as well as completely all my necessary research, I decided that I should just dedicate a few days to my contextual studies and focus on getting my essay completed. I knew that we had drop session coming up on the 16th of December and I really wanted to get a little more feedback on my essay before we headed away for the Christmas break and I though, If I had it completely finished by then and handed it in a few days before hand, I could get some feedback on the whole thing, not just a extra few hundred words or so. So I decided just to knuckle down and get it written.

I am really happy to say that I managed to complete my essay this evening, bibliography and all, which is the set date that I wanted it done by so I am really proud that I was able to do that seeing as I have been quite stressed over getting my work done and was a little anxious that I wouldn't get it finished in time for feedback. But it is all complete, up to the standard I wanted it at with everything finished like the table of illustrations and layout and I was able to get all my quotes and points in that I wanted to talk about in so I am really pleased about that. Now all I need to do is wait for some feedback and see if I need to make any changes before I go away for Christmas. I still want my essay to be completely done and out of the way before the holidays as I have enough work to do when I am at home and I really don't want any more.

As I said before I would usually post my essay down below but as this is my final research report I think it is best not to put it out there on the internet so I have decided just to write about it instead which is why It doesn't look like there is much in this post. So now I just need to keep getting on with my mini briefs and studio work project until I get some proper feedback on the 16th.

More further research

Picking up some books from the Library 


After completing my internet research and I was starting to think about what I needed to write about next in my extended essay I decided that I should pop to the universities library in order to grab a few books which I could looks through for some research as I only have a couple of books on my bibliography so far and I felt like I needed a couple more. The library always has a really good selection of books to look at for research and I was tempted to grab a lot more than I did but I wouldn't of physically been able to carry them home so I decided to limit myself to a couple of animation and video game books which I could look at. I have put my completed bibliography of my book research for my research report, a couple of these are my own and the rest are from the library and all in all they were really useful to read through.




Bibliography of books

• Ashcraft, B., Snow, J., (2008) Arcade Mania! The turbo-charged world of Japan’s game centres. Japan: Kodansha International

• Beck, J., (2004) Animation Art. From pencil to pixel. The illustrated History or Cartoon, Anime, CGI. London: Flame Tree Publishing.

•  Donovan, T., (2010) Replay. The history of video games. East Sussex: Yellow Ant.

• Ferrari, D., Traini, L., (2011) Art and Videogames Neoludica. Italy: Skira Editore S.p.A.

• McCarthy, H., (1996) The anime movie guide. London: Titan Books.

• Melissinos, C., O’Rourke, P., (2012) The art of video games. From Pac-man to Mass Effect. New York: Welcome Books.

•  Oniki, Y., Sahara, H., Searleman, E., (2004) The art of Howl’s Moving Castle. Japan: Studio Ghibli Inc. 

• Thomas, B., (1991) Disney’s Art of Animation. From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast. New York: Welcome Enterprises.

Handing in a draft

1,000 word introduction and abstract completed


So over the past couple of weeks I have been working away at my studio work project along side the the mini briefs we have been given so I have been trying to balance everything to make sure I had enough free time to work on the research report draft that needs to be submitted. I do feel like we have been given a little too much extra work to do on top of all our proper course work which is a irritating as I am struggling a bit to try and get everything done but thankfully I managed to find enough time to get this draft done which is really important in comparison to everything else. Usually I would just post my research report draft below but now we are getting a little closer to when things need to start getting finalised I feel a little uncomfortable about posting my written work online so from this point on I will simply write about it instead so my blog posts won't have as much content as they usually do.

So for my draft I wanted to make sure I got at least 1,000 words written and completed up to a finished sort of standard of writing so that I would be able to get some good and helpful feedback that would hopefully guide me in the right direction. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find enough time to write as much as I had planned, however, I did get both my abstract and my introduction done which came to around 1,320 words which is a good amount of writing to get some feedback from. I was able to talk about development and increase of electronic technology and how that has influenced the animation industry as well as adding in a couple of the quotes I found. Hopefully this should be a good start for me and once I get my feedback from my tutor I will be able to go ahead and write some more but at the moment I just have to play the waiting game.

Doing some more research for my essay

Picking out some usable quotes



Now that I have completed my internet research and written up a more up to date draft I decided it would be a good idea for me to go through the websites and videos I had looked at to find all the quotes that I think would work well in my essay and that I would like to use. This took me a little while as there were an awful lot I could choose from but obviously I did manage to narrow it down to the selection I have posted below. I feel pleased that I now have a good selection that I can choose from when I actually get down to writing my research report properly as some of them are pretty strong statements that I think will work well with what I am investigating. I have tried to get a few that relate to each of my chapters so that they are spread easily throughout my report and then I will just need to choose a handful that overall come under 750 words which I am confident I will be able to do.

On a side note due to their being editing issues when I try and important in text from Microsoft word I have simply decided to just stick to the method of screenshotting the pages and dropping them like I have previously as it is so much simpler then trying to fix the multitude or errors that copying and pasting causes.