Category: Design For Animation

Addition of the video presentation

Over the first term of classes, we learned how to create our research topic and got shown many different examples of 3D animation over. For the last class, we got introduced to The video presentation we have to do to give an audio-visual presentation of our critical report that we did over the last few weeks. for the audio visual presentation we need to create a visual presentation of all the important parts we talked about during our critical report. After we created our visual presentation you have to point out the parts u want to talk about in your presentation and make a short speech.

First of all, I will present my critical report below:

For my audio visual presentation I added images and text of the parts I want to talk about in this presentation. I tried to make it around 5 minutes so it is not too much information and the viewer will understand what i will be talking about in my research. I talked about a few topics in the video, these small topics are about what the uncanny valley is, a few examples of animation and film where you can see the uncanny valley effect happening, and how the movie fast and the furious goes down in history for doing a great job on a digital double. This all together concludes everything in short for my critical research.

For this week I did a little bit of research on the Uncanny Valley effect, what is this effect? when does this effect take place? what are prominent features for this effect? The Uncanny Valley effect is an unpleasant feeling that people get when they see a realistic humanoid robot. This effect can also work with things like masks, dolls or 3D characters in movies (etc).

While researching about this effect I came across one of the most talked about Animated movies that has this uncanny valley effect. This Animated movie is The polar express. In the movie the polar express they had the actors use Motion capture to get digital copies of them. After the movie came out they had many different reviews that go from ‘creepy’ to being praised.

Bibliography:

Seyama, J. and Nagayama, R.S. (2007). The Uncanny Valley: Effect of Realism on the Impression of Artificial Human Faces. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 16(4), pp.337–351. doi:10.1162/pres.16.4.337.

Geller, T. (2008). Overcoming the Uncanny Valley. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 28(4), pp.11–17. doi:10.1109/mcg.2008.79.

Collins, J. and Jervis, J. (2008). Document: ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906): Ernst Jentsch. Uncanny Modernity, pp.216–228. doi:10.1057/9780230582828_12.

For this week lecture we look at how we can structure our thesis. This is very useful as sometimes I struggle to make a good structure in an essay. So this will give me the opportunity to write a good script for the thesis.

The structure:

• Title (Subtitle)
• Acknowledgement (optional)
• Abstract
• Key words
• Content page
• Introduction
• Literature review
• Main body of text
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Image List

After getting this systematic structure I started with preparing my paper. With the question being: How is CGI/facial motion capture used without it being Uncanny valley?

Introduction:

CGI and motion capture has been around for a few years and are used on different ways. It is used for example for animations, films and deepfake. but it goes many different directions. We can use these techniques to get very close to what the reality is suppose to be, with it being an unreal creature that mimics the movements of a human being or to replicate a real life human used in a movie. If we take a look at the movie ‘Fast and the Furious 7’ The FX department had to create Paul Walker due to his unforeseen death.

This is a start to my introduction of my research. I still want to add some quote or referencing and some more detail to the research. Also I feel like It is in a wrong order for someone to read it. So ill have to come back to this and take a good look at it.

For this weeks class we were set up into small groups to talk about our research topics. As for my topic I’ve had a difficult time to refine my topic so it was good to discuss this in our groups. as for my topic so far was: how we show emotions through animation.

This is still a very broad subject and I wanted to narrow it down to a specific source. So I thought about different techniques I found interesting in the industries. 3 things came to mind

• uncanny valley
• Facial motion capture
• Deep fake

This was in a little bit of a different direction from when I started but it made me think of Paul Walker from the fast and the furious movie (specifically movie 7). As he died during the making and the FX crew had to use CGI him for the rest of the movie. I want to research how they been able to do this with the different techniques and why they choose to ‘animate’ him. And how they made it to where it has a feel of realism to it.

The studio did not want any mistakes they worked hard to get the digital copy to look as close to real as possible.

‘Even a small mistake could cause the audience to feel like an “ominous valley”, and they could not allow it.’

(Filatov, A. (n.d.))

They made it as convincing as possible even though it was imperfect. The movie went down in the history books as the first film where they had a digitally made computer double working as a lead role.

Reference:

Filatov, A. (n.d.). Digital Immortality. [online] Available at: https://rep.bntu.by/bitstream/handle/data/112722/101-104.pdf?sequence=1.

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For this weeks lecture we focused on how to structure a critical report. where we ask different questions like, hot to reference, how to use citations and so on. For this class we learnt a way of academic writing like paraphrasing.

Of course when we do our research we use different sentences/quotes from different articles or books etc. When paraphrasing we use the Harvard referencing system at the end of our research page. For this class we got given a Quote to paraphrase.

The Quote: The authenticity of a documentary is ‘deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images are linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality’

Horness Roe. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

My Paraphrase: Horness Roe. A. states that a documentary shows that images have to give us an understanding of the reality that is stated by facts. documentaries rely on the evidence of the event that occurred.

For this week we discussed about politics in animation and about animated documentaries. We were showed a few different animated documentaries. Where I want to use one for an example of this weeks question, Is it possible for animation to be a documentary?

the animated documentary that really caught my attention was the one called Ryan

This is an Animated short by Chris Landreth and is based on the life of Ryan Larkin. Ryan made a very famous animated piece for his time but unfortunately got caught up in a very bad addiction. to where he lives on the streets asking for money to support his addiction.

The animated short is a documentary about how Ryans life went from an animation artist to living for his addiction. As for the way it has been animated. you can really feel how life has been difficult for him and eating him alive through the animated short Chris made. You as a viewer feel the blurriness of the animation as how Ryan has been living his life as an addict. As far as for the question, my answer would be yes animation can be a documentary. Animation can give a documentary based on facts a shape. so that the viewer can really understand how life is for Ryan. As far as I think a documentary has to be based on facts and realism. But that just means that the story has to be real not necessarily what you see on the screen.

Qouted from Annabelle Honess Roe ‘The long history, however, of the hybridisation of animation and documentary, one that stretches back to the earliest days of the moving image, would suggest that, as in many things in life, opposites can attract in a meaningful way.’ Saying that it would be able to go hand in hand.

In this class we learned about different kinds of abstract animation and conceptual animation. As for the abstract animation it has the question: what kind of story tells the animation or film? The old abstract animations we looked at during the class were all quite different from each other. for example there were a lot that were made on to old film and where they tried to ‘play’ with different shapes on the film, layer for layer. But also a different method used was with stop motion.

At the end of the class we were told to choose an abstract animation that we know or found and tell something about the animation. As for me I choose one that also has a little bit direction towards my thesis subject.

I choose the Video mapping project Ollo done by content creator Mr.Beam this project was shown on the Brussel light festival in 2015

Ollo is a Video mapping project created by Mr.Beam. It tells a story about 2 blobs (called Ol and Lo) who ‘wake up’ in a new environment, first wakes up 1 of the two and then follows the other. They discover the surroundings that have been given to them and play around. When the’ve seen everything they try to go out of their boundaries and try to adventure even further. But this causes for trouble and delivers them many obstacles. They work together as friends to escape these threads.

As for the Animation self: it has been video mapped onto a building where you can see they played with the different edges the building gives us. The blobs have to crawl around the windows to discover new areas. This is one of the reasons I’ve chosen this as my abstract animation. It shows a playful method of animation and gives you as creater a more fun canvas to play with.

Also for my animation thesis I want to do my subject about how animation includes empathy for the audience in many different ways. I think the animation Ollo uses a very good way of showing these emotions of the blobs while they discover the area. The small movements of looking around when they see something pulls you in as the audience. as well as when he gets stuck into the ‘glue’, as a viewer it makes you worried about how they will be able to escape.

For this assessment I choose the movie: Accepted

Story Arc

1. You -> the protagonist: The protagonist of the story is Bartleby Gaines
2. Need -> Something isn’t right: The protagonist Bartleby did not get in to any collage
3. GO! -> Crossing the threshold: Since he did not get accepted at any collage he decided to make his own collage acceptance form where he got accepted to S.H.I.T collage
4. Search -> Road of trials: A lot of people applied and got accepted to his ‘fake’ school. So he had to design a program of learning for these students of his school, this is different then a normal collage, here the students got to pick what they want to learn and Bartleby’s school started to look like a real school (but in a chaos way)
5. Find -> Meeting the goddess: As time goes by he finds a way to make his school work without teachers and without specific classes. He went to the real collage next door to get inspiration but did not like how the educational structure was designed
6. Take -> Meeting your maker: Since S.H.I.T is not a real school an other school was complaining about this and called the police, therefore they had to go into trail to see if they could become a new school.
7. Return -> Bringing it home: After the trail he got a year of trial to see if his school would work out.
8. Change -> Master of both worlds: After the trial you see that a lot of the chaos that the school was before became more of the order, so a little bit of both worlds.

Archtypes

• Bartleby: Protagonist therefore the hero
• Sherman: The Ruler, Controle: He provides structure [makes the school website, only one that really got accepted to a ‘real’ collage and provides an appointment with the school board for the trial.]
• Rory: explorer, freedom: Exploring what she wants to add to the system they created.
• Monica: Lover, intimacy
• Abernathy: Jester, pleasure: He connects everyone by having ADHD and saying everything he thinks

Timeline before the story

Before the story were his years in high school. During his high school years he got into a club. In this club they already did illegal things. he made these fake ID’s for everyone with the group members of his club where they had a photographer and someone doing finances etc. He was the one getting all the costumers to the club place and designed the whole idea. Therefore they made quite some money during their high school life. His grades where average and just enough to make his years.

The start point of the small thesis assignment:

How empathy is created in animation and how much realism you need for it

Keywords:

Motion capture – Empathy – Sad – Facial – Voice actors

Introduction:
For this research I want to dive into how emotions have been portrayed in animations. There are different techniques for creating emotions in an animation. You can think of motion capture, But also you can animate a bag of beans that looks sad. It all creates empathy for the audience. In this paper I want first want to look into different categories that can provoke different emotions (such as, sound, different angles, coloring, lighting).

In the first week at the end of the class we sat down with a group of people to discuss an idea of the topic we are going to work on for our thesis. We were in a group with 6 people and we all discussed a little about what kind of ideas we have. these are the points we discussed

• How actors have to play a role in animation by using motion capture
• How old animation style tools are used in modern day software
• Problems in visual effects, such as technical or skilful
• Visual effects in space opera genres and how it reinforces animation
• Live action comparison in postproduction and visual effects
• The interrogation of film action visual effects