Computer Animation

This is a book primarily for professionals and lovers of animation, but it can also be employed as a textbook for other fields of audiovisual media. Pikkov is a director of animated films who, in addition to creating animated films, teaches in the Department of Animation of the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Animasophy analyses the interrelations of the history, theoretical essence and practical expression of the animated film.

REVIEW: http://www.awn.com/blogs/10till6/review-animasophy-theoretical-writings-animated-film

Home on the Range (Will Finn and John Sanford, 2004) concluded what had been, for Disney, a stylistically progressive sequence of theatrically released features defined in this article as the Neo-Disney period that broke with the hyperrealist conventions most commonly associated with the studio's output. It is this critically neglected sequence of films, comprising Fantasia 2000 (James Algar et al., 1999), The Emperor's New Groove (Mark Dindal, 2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 2001), Lilo and Stitch (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2002), Treasure Planet (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2002), Brother Bear (Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, 2003) and Home on the Range, which provide the focus of this article. By analysing the artistic and narratological composition of these films, this article seeks to demonstrate that the studio's feature animation is more heterogeneous and progressive than received notions of Disney allow for.

Since 1990 the DRA Speech Research Unit has conducted research into applications of speech recognition technology to speech and language development for young children. This has been done in collaboration wirh Hereford and Worcester County Council Education ...

this paper we introduce ourinteractive movie system by focusing on how weachieved an integration of narrative-based and spontaneousinteractions. Also, there is the important question:what is the objective of creating interactive animatedagents? Although the technological aspects ofsuch agents have been studied and discussed in detail,this critical question has rarely been discussed. In thelatter part of this paper, we will discuss what

The field of 3d animation has addressed design processes and work practices in the design disciplines for in recent years. There are good reasons for considering the development of systematic design processes for the development of 3d animation and it's teaching. Design ...

Stimuli that resemble humans, but are not perfectly human-like, are disliked compared to distinctly human and non-human stimuli. Accounts of this "Uncanny Valley" effect often focus on how changes in human resemblance can evoke different emotional responses. We present an alternate account based on the novel hypothesis that the Uncanny Valley is not directly related to 'human-likeness' per se, but instead reflects a more general form of stimulus devaluation that occurs when inhibition is triggered to resolve conflict between competing stimulus-related representations. We consider existing support for this inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and further assess its feasibility through tests of two corresponding predictions that arise from the link between conflict-resolving inhibition and aversive response: (1) that the pronounced disliking of Uncanny-type stimuli will occur for any image that strongly activates multiple competing stimulus representations, even in the ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is usually associated with assisting humans with tasks that are either ordinary or can be done better with automation. Since then technology grew, representation of AI and Robotics also evolved in films, especially the robots, which has given surplus roles from the antagonist, protagonist, the romantic, to a deadly weapon capable of machine learning. With the advent of CGI in the 2000s, an AI flareup took place in the world of cinema and came up with worthy concepts of AI-based movies. Today, the AI system can robotically deliver advanced visual effects which makes it easier for performers to act their alternative characters and creatures. Data Analytics and AI technology have already made their debut in films and are going to play a bigger role in the filmmaking process. Till now, films were made on AI. In the future, AI will be writing films, robots will perform, and animation will be done by a deep learning algorithm process. The study aimed to observ...

Real-time crowd simulation for virtual environment applications requires not only navigation and locomotion in large environments while avoiding obstacles and agents, but also rendering high quality 3D fully articulated figures to enhance realism. In this paper, we present a framework for real-time simulation of crowds. The framework is composed of a Hardware Accelerated Character Animation Library (HALCA), a crowd simulation system that can handle large crowds with high densities (HiDAC), and an Animation Planning Mediator (APM) that bridges the gap between the global position of the agents given by HiDAC and the correct skeletal state so that each agent is rendered with natural locomotion in real-time. The main goal of this framework is to allow high quality visualization and animation of several hundred realistic looking characters (about 5000 polygons each) navigating virtual environments on a single display PC, a HMD (Head Mounted Display), or a CAVE system. Results of several ...

Although the use of animated visuals is both common and popular among CBI designers, the theoretical and empirical foundations for their use have not been firmly established. Animated visuals represent a subset of instructional visuals; for this reason, general conclusions ...

Impression effects of videotaped dyadic interactions were compared with 3D-computer animations based on movement transcripts of the same interactions to determine whether similar effects could be obtained. One minute sequences of movement behavior taken from three different dyadic interactions were transcribed using the Bernese Coding System (BCS). Descriptive data were converted into animation scripts for professional animation software. Original video documents and computer animations were shown to separate groups of observers and their socio-emotional impressions were assessed on a standard adjective checklist. Only marginal differences were found between the two presentation modes. On the contrary, the data point to remarkable similarities in the impression ratings in both conditions, indicating that most of the relevant social information available to observers in the video recordings was also conveyed by computer animations. Overall, the data suggest that the systematic use of computer animation techniques in nonverbal research deserves further scientific attention.

For more than a decade researchers have tried to create intuitive computer interfaces by blending reality and virtual reality. The goal is for people to interact with the digital domain as easily as with the real world. Various approaches help us achieve this—in the area of tangible ...

Summary Virtual humans are the computer representation of real humans in virtual worlds. Human representation in virtual worlds is vital as people are central elements of the real and virtual worlds. Animating virtual humans remains a challenging task due to the large number of degrees of freedom in the human skeleton, the ability of human observers to detect unnatural movements, and the complexity of realistic appearance and behaviour. The difficulty of the problem has resulted in research into many subproblems of human ...

A criação de personagens virtuais para cinema de animação implica com frequência a necessidade de adaptação gráfica das personagens de forma a dotá-las de maior expressividade ou de maior capacidade de criar empatia no espetador. Consoante o conceito do projeto e consoante a estória e a visão do autor que a conta, essas adaptações passam por vezes pela antropomorfização das personagens, ou seja, pela adaptação das personagens para que se assemelhem a seres humanos. O processo de antropomorfização de uma personagem passa, antes da construção da própria, pela seleção dos elementos humanos a incluir nesse processo. Dependendo do projeto, podem ser aplicadas diferentes abordagens à antropomorfização das personagens. As conclusões a retirar deste projeto serão posteriormente aplicadas na criação das personagens da série Too Snail to Talk em desenvolvimento pelos autores.

A participatory art project - a growing series of Flash animations with many authors. Every animation shows a relation, a connection, an interaction between two (or more) countries.

Each animation starts with a flag and ends with a different one. The flags are transformed, their shapes and meanings are morphed into other symbols and figures. Each contributing artist creates an animation with flags of his/her own choice and expresses a relation between two (or more) countries in his/her own way.

Flag Metamorphoses is an exploration into the meaning of imagery on flags, aiming to create interrelated associations through questioning, reassessing, fluidizing and re-mixing diverse national iconographies. This project encourages you to think in images, to understand and express cultural and historical processes and relations without words. Symbols of identities turn into elements of dialogues.

http://www.flag-metamorphoses.net

https://vimeo.com/133330245

This course is a historical survey of international animation from the earliest days of cinema up to recent digital animation, with special foci on Disney, anime, experimental, and political animation techniques and forms. Not only will students be introduced to film animation as a rich and complex art form, but they will also study its primary practitioners over the past 100 years. The course does not presume familiarity with animation or film studies, and as such, will introduce students to key principles and concepts of both during the course of the semester.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the representation of gender and gender imbalance within Pixar Animation Studios’ feature films, focusing in particular on the analysis of Brave (Andrews and Chapman, 2012), in terms of marketing strategies and critical reception.

Since the release of Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995) 18 years ago, Pixar Animation Studios has become renowned for creating films that are both commercially successful and critically acclaimed. The studio has received numerous awards and has been at the forefront of cutting edge computer animation, developing software that is now an industry standard for CG animation and visual effects in live action filmmaking. However, the studio has recently been criticised for its lack of female presence and female perspective. Pixar has produced 14 feature films to-date, only one of which features a female protagonist. Not only are the remaining 13 told from a male point-of-view, they also feature a predominately male cast with female characters that serve merely as love interests or mother-figures for their male counterparts. Although Pixar presents strong-willed and determined female characters, in a range of roles, they are generally outnumbered by male characters at a ratio of 3:1 (Decker, 2010, 64).

Although Pixar has been commended in the past for subverting traditional Hollywood practices, this paper will suggest that, in this case, the studio clearly adheres to the industry standard where only 3% of animated films concern female-centred narratives (Gilsdorf, 2012). My paper will engage with Brave, which features Pixar’s first lead female character. As part of the Disney Princess Franchise, the Pixar princess will be compared with other Disney princesses in terms of critical reception, marketing and merchandise, in order to analyse the representation of gender in Pixar Animation Studios’ feature films.

References
Decker, Jonathan. The Portrayal of Gender in Disney-Pixar’s Animated Films: A Content Analysis of Gender-Role Variables in Pixar’s Ten Feature-Length Films from Toy Story (1995) to Up (2009). LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010.

Gilsdorf, Ethan. ‘Pixar’s new Brave is fuelled by girl power’. The Boston Globe. 2012.

While an actor's performance in a stage play may be seen as a continuous and unmediated form of acting, an actor's performance in a film is constructed through shot framing, editing, effects work, and other cinematic apparatuses. With the advent of digital filmmaking, constructed performances have become more complex and nuanced, especially through the use of motion capture. This research explores how we frame acting within a motion capture context-and specifically, how this affects our larger understanding of what is acting and how acting can be constructed. What does acting become when the product of acting starts as data and finishes as computer-generated images that may only tangentially resemble the actor's "original" performance? Is the source actor solely responsible for the performance we see on screen, or should other people within the production pipeline receive credit for their creative contributions to the finished acting result? How do we understand the act of acting in motion capture? Through consolidating and linking theoretical and practical considerations of acting in motion capture, this paper proposes a number of ways to conceive of acting and presence within a virtual acting context.