Enough with the dead butterflies (2017)
emilydamstra.com
emilydamstra.com
Butterflies loom weirdly large in my life, at one point many years ago my grandmother decided that butterflies were my wife's "thing" (they aren't, we're not sure how this happened), and so for many years we got butterfly-themed gifts from her. It was merely odd, so we just rolled with it, but now we have various butterfly tchochkes around, all of which, a brief survey reveals, are in the dead pose.
This is a wild shot in the dark but do you:
1. Live near Westminster, Colorado 2. Have had your grandmother visit you several times 3. And each time your wife took her to visit the butterfly pavilion?
- Entomologist rates ant emojis: https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/
- Which emoji scissors close: https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html
- A thread of rating every horse emoji: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832
- Ranking the "Ringed Planet" emojis: https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817
- Reviewing Steam Loco Emojis: https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790
- Talk about Telescope emojis: https://twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607819267
- Snake emoji review: https://anothertiredmonster.tumblr.com/post/156610510939/sna...
- Would you survive a skydive with an emoji parachute? (my own post): https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/
For example, Depth of field, lens flares, chromatic aberration without wearing glasses, etc.
Not in in the dumb way games do it: You don't need to turn your entire head to make something come into focus, or aim it with with a gun.
If VR with eye tracking takes off maybe we'll get more realistic depth of field in games.
The answer is compression, equalization, all those tricks. And yes, that lowers fidelity, and yes, you will have to make choices as to what’s more important to focus perceptive attention.
Similarly with video: many fidelity-lowering tricks serve a purpose. Film grain, aside from conveying a mood, can mask excess detail in shadows and highlights, the detail that would detract from the story you’re telling. A headlight flare can bring attention to the coming car; if your hero or villain is in that car, that’s useful. Panning over a fleeting sun flare, you momentarily focus on the environment and can use it to bridge attention between subjects or scenes.
It’s all a complicated dance, and it all exists in time, inseparably from both the immediately preceding material and the larger current cultural context.
If you're Christopher Nolan, you just release it that way, and let your audience smash the volume-up and volume-down keys over and over throughout the movie.
The look furthers your creative goals—conveys a mood or a feeling, focuses observer’s attention on what you consider important, etc. Here, fidelity works against you. All the figurative flare—be it compressing dynamic range, selecting your color palette, artificially lowering the frame rate, adding motion blur, film grain, lens artifacts and literal flares, etc.—lowers it selectively.
That particular kind of flare can absolutely be misplaced, sure. For example, cartoon animation styles is an example of another extreme but quite well-established look, and arguably incompatible (the fidelity is already very selective from the get-go). Less extreme is 3D animation, where lens flare and the like can sometimes look uncanny.
The case of dead butterflies, similarly, exists in cultural context. In some (most?) cultures, the symbol of the butterfly would represent something very far from death. However, once the awareness of the difference between a dead and alive butterfly is widespread enough, then one simply must adapt and adopt that new context because you are risking the dead butterfly to be interpreted as an intentional statement.
[0] Which is not going to be technically possible for some time, and likely not at all even in theory due to the good old map-territory conflict.
A bit of a nirvana fallacy there. This isn't about limitations in technology, nor (directly) about artistic choices to set a mood.
What I'm annoyed at is the combination of (A) things which are not technological limitations that are deliberately simulated and (B) how I've seen them tie into factually false beliefs about "realism" among the audience.
Consider: "Oh, I got one of those new e-books, and it's about Romeo and Juliet. Some of the text contains ink that is blotted or runny, which makes their relationship extra-realistic."
First, even with your book example, which I do agree is cheesy, still—this is part of the message. I’d not be surprised if such an ebook existed, though it definitely wouldn’t be for me (even if I liked the genre).
Second, part of my point was that simulating technological limitations has its uses. If you want to convey a mood, obscure unnecessary detail, etc., you have such tools at your disposal that will not look weird to the audience[0] and that resonate with the larger cultural context—which none of us exist outside of.
[0] Unless someone else like yourself is in said audience, I suppose :)
Much of the moviegoing audience is so confused that they somehow think increasing frame rate from a paltry 24fps makes things look worse.
You may be wrong in thinking they are confused. To paraphrase, the audience is always right. If they are confused, then you’ve failed.
As I wrote above, what we see is anchored to our previous experience and cultural context. The ways it is broken inevitably attract attention to themselves and detract from the story, at least in the beginning, so you have to do it carefully and generally avoid breaking expectations unless that serves to achieve the desired effect. Otherwise you’d just be self-gratifying and compromise the message, making it subordinate to the medium.
By the way, breaking these expectations can go both ways. You can go higher fps just as well as you can go lower. Once you veer off the default, which way you go is not automatically better than the other; it all depends on what your creative goals are.
For whatever reason, we've come to think of butterflies as looking the way they do in insect collections, and I don't think even knowledge of what the dead and alive specimens look like would make me want to draw it any other way. A 'dead' one just looks more butterflyish!
I also have a feeling that it has something to do with the (more cultural than biological) distinction between moths and butterflies. For some reason, the latter are considered examples of exquisite beauty and the former usually an ugly (even fear-inducing) nuisance. Drawing butterflies in the classic 'butterfly' shape is a way to make this difference clearer — even if it's entirely inaccurate.
For instance heart becoming ♡ is fine I think because we otherwise don't deal with raw hearts and they're only part of whole.
It would be another issue if used the equivalent of the zombie emoji for "human" or a steak image for "cow"
I guess it comes down to how much we care about butterflies, how often we see them, and how much we don't want them dead. I can see why people looking more at butterflies in their daily lives could be bothered, and also how that's probably a lost cause as 10x more people massively never leave cities.
I think a better analogy is Vetruvian Man [1]. In fact, I think it's a pretty good analogy because it shows a human splayed out in almost exactly the same unnatural way that canonical dead butterflies are. Personally, I don't find either one particularly disturbing. Each serves a purpose IMHO.
For me it comes down to how much we care about reality, vs. catering to our fantasy conception of what reality is.
Fantasy in general is awesome - if you are aware that is is fantasy. But too many people mixed both concepts and this is bothering me, not particular butterflies.
I think nobody thinks, a real heart looks like ♡. But people do think, butterflies look in real life, like when they are dead. It is a quite trivial thing here, but the same happens with much more important things as well.
For context, some people probably don't really have an image of how a heart is shaped. There was half of a joke about city kids who thought cows were purple because of the chocolate brand [0], and they probably never saw a cow in actual life nor really registered the colors in the books. And IMHO the best solution would be for them to see cows, and the pigs, and so many more animals everywhere.
I kinda see the butterfly in the same way. The common icon being dead isn't great, but if we look at it as a symptom of a greater issue (I think we agree on this point) getting people to care more about butterflies in general would also solve the icon problem -- I'd actually want to see butterflies in the middle of cities. There would need so many things to change, but it would be for the better. Otherwise it becomes an endless battle as new icons are created everyday.
[0] https://chocolatemarketaudit.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/the-st...
PS; this also reminds me of the wheelchair icon and the fight to have it rolling instead of static. And I was moved by the pitch for this idea, while also thinking "there's so few people in contact with wheelchair people in everyday life, will that message ever get a wide enough audience ?"
Check out triadic semiotics.
"triadic semiotics"
But I learned a new concept, so thanks for that.
Even heavily abstracted symbols may need to communicate a specific physical disposition. Consider the door-open indicator on a car. It's not a physically accurate-- it doesn't need to portray anything except "this is a car, this door is open"-- and it would probably be less effective if it tried to be. But since the physical disposition of the door is important and you're not just evoking the idea of a car, it must be included.
For illustrating stories about a butterfly, or using a photo to reference a butterfly doing something specific, or trying to illustrate something else about the physicality of butterflies, then sure... that physical accuracy is important. But the author doesn't make, or even seem to understand that distinction.
Yeah, semiotics is a pretty neat topic even if the available literature skews dense. How well a designer wields those concepts to solve communication problems without words is one of the things that distinguish novices from juniors, and juniors from art directors.
But it seems implied to me that it shows a living butterfly, if the butterfly seems realistic otherwise. I don't want a picture of a dead butterfly on my pillow, if I know only a dead butterfly looks like this. Most people don't know, so they are not bothered. That's why this symbol works the way it is - it would not work, if everyone recognizes it as "dead butterfly".
Yes-- symbol meanings are even more malleable and imprecise than English words, and on top of that, each of us interprets it through our distorted lenses formed by life experiences, cultures, priorities, successes, traumas, etc. Without being able to design for individual people, you can only try to design for specific groups or communities, and you always risk alienating people for whom the message lands differently. To get a little more info about some more involved communities' usage of these symbols, I did a quick google image search for some related terms, like "Lepidopterist Symposium" and "Butterfly Expert," and got these references:
This person holding up the hand-painted sign for their monarch butterfly preserve: https://www.sonomanews.com/article/entertainment/return-of-t...
This proudly displayed Lepidopterist society T-shirt: http://ucanr.edu/blogs/bugsquad//blogfiles/62301_original.jp...
The signage for this Lepidopterist conference: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5...
I didn't see anything indicating the people in these photographs were unrepresentative. In this situation, I'm pretty confident that very few people see "dead butterflies" when they see a butterfly symbol that references one-- even people that absolutely know the difference.
Taking the article, again, perhaps too seriously: Just because a symbol has gained cultural currency doesn't mean we need to accept it as is. We can change. We can fight our immediate symbol associations. Personally I think we should.
My understanding is it depicts the leaves of the plant Silphium, which in the ancient world was used as birth control.
Just gotta think lower down
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the underground high school newspaper i wrote for was called 'the crucified butterfly'
It's sense (2) here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adopt .
Anything where the image we associate with X is not the real X for some historical reason.
Or more generally it could extend to prose, art etc.
everything you have been taught is a lie
literally nothing is the way you think it is, because only extreme oversimplifications of reality fit in our heads
Maybe it's about more symmetry and balance so not just conditioning.
Although maybe that is the point, insects are gross so humans maybe prefer the non animal like picture of it. Many don't like the actual body of a butterfly, they just want the colorful wings so drawing it in a way that makes you not see it as an animal could be better for that reason.
Did you think that before you learned about this pinning convention? I didn't, and don't.
I never felt butterfly images looked particularly good, just looked like pasted in stills. Until I read this article several years ago I didn't know why all the butterfly images looked bad, but now I do. When I look at videos of butterflies they do look like animals that move around, they don't have perfect angles and wings flaps around in different directions so you don't always have symmetry etc, it is a massive difference.
Note, the difference isn't that the particular pose is "dead pose" or whatever they say in the article. The problem is that they use the exact same pose for every butterfly all the time with a perfect angle, that makes your brain identify them as fake stills. You don't need any particular skills for your brain to see that, you just aren't really aware of it. When I see drawings of other animals and insects I don't see the same thing, they are drawn in all sorts of poses and positions and the artists make sure the angles aren't perfect to make them feel natural, but apparently artists don't treat butterflies like they treat other animals instead they seem to be drawn and animated like falling leaves.
Speaking personally, it just strikes me as very pedantic point with not much substance behind it. I do get why this post is "ackchyually" bait though.
His birthright identity was the central theme of the story.
In the butterfly lifecycle, the caterpillar lives its own life, but then at its end shrouds and digests itself, to the point where only the rudiments of the nervous system persist. Then the butterfly itself grows out of this reduction of self to an egg.
In the face of this astonishing life-death-life-cycle, we're complaining that butterfly wings should be depicted in their natural orientation?
Butterflies are awe-inspiring, frightening and amazing. But not mainly for their pretty wings.
Every living thing dies - yes, even us. But perhaps these words will persist in the internet archive, as dead wings sit in dusty drawers, to one day inspire :)
That only dead butterflies have their wings in the orientation most commonly represented is a fun piece of trivia, but IMO not worth caring about beyond that.
So for these butterfly images they would look a ton better just by not having perfectly angled T-pose wings. Just varying that a bit and never having perfect angles would get you almost the same pictures but looking much more natural.
> the heart symbol doesn't look like a real heart,
As a fun trivia fact, it might not look like the organ but it does look like an acient form of contraception (Silphium) which seems more symbolically correct anyways.
If you manage to find that species in the standard work to consult, the eighteen-volume Moths of Borneo[1], you'll only see images of a pinned-out specimen, which makes it look like all the others. The motivation for this was to provide a standardized format for the formal visual depiction moth and butterfly anatomy, principally for taxonomists who will be working with dead specimens, and where the actual delimitation and description of taxa is done mostly using microscopic characters. But how moths hold their wings gives very valuable diagnostic information for both field ID and broader questions of classification, that would be very useful to see in a standard reference. This is increasingly recognized and I know of several recent large monographs and ongoing surveys that emphasize including photographs or illustrations of the in situ appearance.
Mostly seems to be when they're trying to land on a flower such as in this one: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b9bf6c9266c07...
See this for example, they drew the butterfly as a bunch of T-posing sequences, it doesn't look like that when flying at all, it T-posing in one image would make sense but they do it for every image usually which is really off:
https://media.istockphoto.com/id/185302115/photo/monarch-but...