Possible Research Areas

Here's a couple of ideas that we could look into:

1. The psychology of gesture - in animation, we work a lot from reference footage and learn how exaggerate certain gestures, but there's not much time devoted to what certain movements and gestures mean on a psychological level i.e. do gestures made with the palm facing up have a certain embedded meaning? If the answer is yes, then this information could potentially be useful to animators.

2. Performance capture - when it works, when it doesn't. Why are keyframe animators able to express emotion so succinctly when we are still struggling to duplicate the same using capture technologies? Does the answer lie in more technology, more cameras and more sensors, or are we missing something entirely? Scott McCloud's work on comics as a graphic art might potentially be relevant here.

3. Gesture and culture - are there gestures that transcend cultures - sort of a universal language? There have been studies that demonstrate that humans do exhibit certain innate tendencies towards language - could the same principle possibly apply to gesture as well?

Any other ideas about what could be interesting for us to research?

We're up and running!

Welcome to the USC DADA Character Animation & Performance, Kinetics, and Dance Physiology Research Team blog! This is a space for our thoughts on character animation on an artistic, scientific, and academic level.

Also, on October 3rd, we will be moderating the seminar presentation featuring Margot Apostolos, Maks Naporowski and Andreas Dejas.