This lecture was looking at the differences and similatiries between American and Japanese animation.
Disney made a breakthrough with Bambi when they introduced the 'moving background' by having 2 or 3 layers of animation to give the cartoons a sense of 3 dimension. Something that was picked up on and used by Japanese animation afterwards with anime such as My Neighbour Totoro.
After that more innovations were made in the field of animation, such as the 'tear drop body' shape in early Pixar cartoons allowing more natural and flexible movements, and motion blur. However despite these innovations, animations as a medium did not 'improve'. Stories, characters, and popularity were not effected, just because these things were new does not mean they are neccessarily better.
What made animation better was the way they used these products to help make the characters realistic in different ways, now animators could bring objects to life a lot easier than before and translate tough emotions into them. Without these breakthroughs Pixar could not have made this:

This was a continuation on the uncanny valley. This time we looked at movement and how that fits into the sliding scale of uncanny-ness. Movement is one of the codes that go with character, ie how a character moves dictates how the audience relate to it and what they expect out of it.
On the iconic end of the scale, naturalistic movement lies, things that do that would be animals and humans. On the arbitrary side you have random movement and stillness. Examples would be an android perhaps malfunctioning and making random movements, and obviously death.
As with everything to do with the uncanny valley, it is diffucult to overcome. Modern androids are still firmly in the uncanny valley because even though they move more natually than ever before,  they lack the biological twitches and movements that animals have.

Therefore in order to cross the uncanny valley on the movement axis, there must be some sort of indexical movement in the creature or the audience will always find it creepy and disturbing.

This lecture was about screen violence and how it acts as a genre marker. Genre markers are anything that has been repeated over and over again that it is a tell tale sign of a specific genre. Violence is not a genre marker of one genre, but many because of the way it is portrayed. If we take 4 genres; sci-fi, spy, western and pantomime, we can distinguish each specific way violence is used, and by using that find how it acts as a genre marker.
I'll use daggers to illustrate the point, a panto villains dagger would be rusted and jagged with jewels in the hilt. This is because the panto villain nebver succeeds in stabbing someone so they choose a dagger design that looks as evil as possible while still being over the top and sillyy. A cowboys dagger on the other hand would be very clean and practical with a simple but perhaps personalised hilt. When an audience sees a dagger like either of these in a film they instantly know what sort of film they are watching.
The sort of scene the cowboy knife would be in would go something like this, an Indian breaks into his ranch and attacks him and his innocent family, the knife is used as an absolute last resort to either kill or pin the red indian against the wall by his clothes.

This lecture was about spectacle in media. The theory is that spectacle is a base form of our culture, as in a lot of the things we do are based apon how much spectacle we want to convey. For instance a king or a noble would put on a grand and costly event just to show how powerful he is, or in the modern world a person may buy a very big TV to show off about.
Spectacle in media terms acts like genre markers. The audience recognises the amount of spectacle each genre has, and by seeing this they know what they are watching. An example is in explosions in media. In war films striving for realism the explosions have little flame and large amounts of earth thrown in the air, explosions in an action movie are made entirely from flame.

The audience are willing to allow these genre markers to influence the way cinema works because they want to be seduced by the film and have a good time watching it. Genre markers are there to put the audience in that state of mind

Alan's seminar was on a different than normal way to write essays. First he went over the basics, ie don't write a biography, everything must be relevant and to the point. Structure is also very important for an essay.
The main idea is to start with the conclusion. This means you know exactly where you are headed in the essay and can structure each paragraph to get there. This differs from the traditional approach because you don't start with the introduction. Afterall it is easier to change bits in the conclusion than it is to change bits in the introduction.
The imap fits into this by collecting all the information you need for the essay onto 1 or 2 pieces of paper. Now this is done when you write the essay you can easily find any quotes and arguments that are needed.

Structuralism is the structure in which we understand and make meaing to everything. From Jacques Deride working witbh structuralism, we get binary opposites or binary opposition. These are a very useful tool to make a rough understanding of the human mind., because as humans we like to make catogories for most, or all, things. Binary opposites are complete opposites, such as light and dark, good and evil. We use these catogories to create stories by creating the structure that the story follows. There is nearly always a good character and a bad character in stories. However the most inportant part of binary opposites is the zone of anomaly. This is everything between the binary opposites, what appears here is everything that isn't exactly like the opposites. An example of this would be the Terminator. He is neither human nor machine, he is a mix of the two, a cyborg. In film and TV terms, a creature which exist in the zone of anomaly is far scarier than something which doesn't.

The binary opposites in Terminator 2 are quite easy to spot. The Terminator played by Arnie is usually shown in a blue-tinted shot, the opposite is the liquid Terminator that is shown in an orange-tinted shot. These colours are used because they reflect human emotions, orange being close to red which goes hand in hand with anger. Blue is reflective with sadness mostly, but in this case it is reflected as caring or good. Other examples would be orange symbolising fire and therefore melting, blue being ice and solid materials. The use of these opposites are put in deliberatly to give the film a more in depth feeling, by that I mean the audience feels more part of the film. It also makes it seem more proffessional.

Everything from TV to models have intertextuality in them at some level, sometimes this a anecdotal lines from other movies with that actor or references to other media or film. It's used so the audience has something extra that they can laugh along to, by making them feel witty for understanding the link. An obvious example of intertextuality is the use of the band Kiss, in the film Role Models, when the characters dress up as the members of Kiss in the final scene. Although one of the characters keeps going on about Kiss throughout the film, some less musically inclined members of the audience still would not see the connection between their facepaint and the band. Also in the obvious region of intertextuality, in the Expendables, Stallone makes a comment about Schwartzenegger wanting to run for president. This is obviously a reference to Arnie's job as governer of California in real life.

These examples are obviously deliberatly put in my the writers, though most cases of intertextuality are done without the writer's knowledge. Infact every single story contains intertextuality because it uses bits of other stories to help mould it, and in some cases, to help create the plot. I'm not going too far to say that most Hollywood films follow the same sort of rough storyline that must have originated by one or two films to begin with. The same thing can be said for models. A model is a model of something and therefore is rife with intertextuality, a model is infact the perfect tool to use when describing what intertextuality is because it is itself intertextuality.